Of Course Jim Davis is the Issue (and so is Andrew Balson, Reed Hastings, Jim Walton)

One sign that wealthy donor Jim Davis is an issue in the Boston mayor’s race is that Annissa Essaibi George, who was backed in the preliminary by a SuperPAC funded by Davis, keeps explaining to the Boston Globe, Jon Keller of WBZ, and as she told the Dorchester Reporter “This isn’t about Jim Davis.”

So of course it is.

The full quote from the Dorchester Reporter went

“This isn’t about Jim Davis,” Essaibi George said Tuesday. “This is about the very direct relationship between this super PAC and Donald Trump.”

The Real Progress Boston Super PAC used a contractor that did work for Trump, and so Essaibi George would like to focus on that, not Davis, who provided $495,000 for the consultants to weave their magic. That’s a deflection, especially since Essabai George was one of the candidates who auditioned for Davis. As Shirley Leung recently wrote in the Globe, Davis “is a prolific donor to the GOP” who “has contributed close to $7.5 million to Republicans over the last three decades” . . . “and donated $396,500 to Trump Victory, a political action committee that raised money for Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee.”

The issue isn’t the Republican consulting firm because it’s just a contractor. Follow the money. And the money is Davis’s. So he’s the issue.

And the Citizens United case is the issue. It’s that decision that opened up this ugly display of oligarchic power in our professed democracy. The bone that case tossed us lowly citizens was to uphold disclosure laws. And then, following the dark money bacchanalia of 2016, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance killed off the dark money dodge that could have protected Davis and others from public exposure.

That includes Andrew Balson, who donated $250,000 to the Better Boston SuperPAC that supported Councilor Andrea Campbell in the primary. It’s quite likely he’d have taken advantage of the dark money loophole if OCPF had left it open, because he donated $500,000 in dark money backing the charter schools ballot question in 2016. Hastings also donated $250,000 to the Better Boston SuperPAC, and a number of other rich folk who have sustained past charter campaigns donated as well.

But, you say, charters got slaughtered in Boston in 2016, the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot campaign won only 15 of 254 precincts in the city, most of them in the richer and whiter sections. Charters lost in Boston by 61%-39% and should have been deader than Kelsey’s nuts. So as the Globe asked two days before the prelim, how is this even an issue? It’s an issue because a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people chose it. Not because it has public support, not because citizens are clamoring for privatization. Agenda setting is a huge advantage oligarchs have. As Anand Giridharadas puts it: “What wealthy people do is rig the discourse.”

Here’s another advantage that almost assures this idea, repeatedly rejected by voters, will resurface. Balson, Jim Walton, et al. have been at this for years. Their money supply is inexhaustible. Pols understand this. They know that the money is there for an agreeable candidate. It’s a path.

So all the better that Jim Davis is the issue. He, Balson, Walton, Hastings, etc, are the issue.

My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, will be published in October and is available for pre-order here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”–Jimmy Carter

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” –Louis Brandeis

Full disclosure: as a (retired!) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about money, democracy, and oligarchy.