Secret Money Threatens Security, Says Johnson
It’s a statement that didn’t receive a great deal of attention among news media companies that accept money for political advertisements, and perhaps that’s telling. Here at That’s My Congress, however, we refuse all offers by advertisers, so we have no financial interest to share with the comments made by U.S. Senate candidate Jesse Johnson about the Citizens United judgment made earlier this year by the Supreme Court.
Johnson, who has the nomination of the Mountain Party, asserted that the lack of disclosure requirements for the donors behind organizations that use independent expenditures to influence congressional elections is a security threat, given the opportunity it provides to multinational corporations to control American politics.
Johnson said, in a debate this week: “I believe that the negativity that all people across the nation, as well as the people in West Virginia, are experiencing is the result of our real lack of fairness in our electoral process today. We’re faced with a great need for media reform, and taking the money out of that. We’re faced with the tremendous need for the public financing of our elections, so that we have a level playing field, and everyone has the same amount of money to proffer their points of view for the confluence of ideas to the American public. I believe that this is crucial for our national security, frankly, facing what we’ve experienced last January with the Citizens United act, has put us in a very precarious situation for intervention from multinational corporations abroad, and I believe that one of the key things that I want to focus on in the Senate is the passage of the Disclosure Act as a jumping off point, but there really needs to be the public financing of elections as we see it working very well in Arizona and Maine.”
[...] morning, as I read the comments of West Virginia U.S. Senate candidate Jesse Johnson about the threat to national security from independent expenditures, a more troubling thought comes to [...]