#He looks like Tom nook if the IRS found him

[bountyofbeads]

Plutocrats, Please Stop Running These Selfish, Stupid, Quixotic Presidential Campaigns

By Max Burns | Published Nov. 18, 2019 4:52 AM ET | Daily Beast Inside | Posted November 18, 2019 |

At least on paper, Democrats talk tough about the importance of protecting the democratic process from a flood of billionaire bucks. “Big money is drowning out the voices of everyday Americans,” the 2016 Democratic Party Platform reads. “We must have the necessary tools to fight back and safeguard our electoral and political integrity.”

This isn’t a new development; campaign finance reform played a major role in every Democratic presidential platform since 1992. Last month, dual-frontrunners Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren released their own campaign finance reform proposals. Bernie Sanders put forward a bold plan that would mandate public financing laws for all federal elections.

And then there’s Democratic megadonor and billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer is most prominent for claiming the title of “single largest donor in American politics” on several occasions. Whether you think that honorific is worthy of praise depends largely on whether or not your name is Tom Steyer.

“I was watching how this campaign was going, and in my opinion, the overriding issue today is that the politics of our country, the government, has been taken over by corporate dollars,” Steyer told The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere. Steyer seems to view the corporate capture of American politics more as a challenge than a warning – and it prompted him to launch a quixotic campaign for the presidency.

Steyer’s campaign makes a mockery of Democratic calls for limitations on the corrosive influence of money in politics. It is a campaign devoid of any coherent message beyond ankle-deep platitudes about impeaching Donald Trump and saving the environment. The campaign exists almost entirely on the airwaves, and is bereft of actual donors or ground support.

Yet Steyer will be on the stage at November’s Democratic debate while credible public servants like Secretary Julian Castro will not. Call it the billionaire’s bluff.

Between July 1 and Sept. 30, Steyer spent a staggering $47.6 million of his $1.6 billion fortune to secure a spot on the October debate stage. Despite polling at or below 1 percent nationally since announcing his candidacy, Steyer made clear his plan to loan his campaign at least $60 million more.

Steyer has barely scraped together the 165,000 small-dollar donors required by the Democratic Party to qualify for participation in official debates. That’s thanks in large part to Steyer’s fortune, which enables him to run a sweeping national ad campaign designed to pull donors from every nook and cranny of the republic. And his strategy is (barely) working—but at what ethical cost?

A growing list of Democratic Senate challengers are running neck-and-neck with increasingly unpopular Republican incumbents Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Martha McSally in Arizona. Winning races like these will be essential if Democratic presidential contenders hope to deliver on any of their lofty campaign pledges.

A figure like $47 million could have been game-changing when spread across tight races—especially when Democrats have the rare opportunity to flip the Senate and break a decade of Republican obstruction. But instead of strengthening the party as a whole, Steyer chose to spend that money on—himself.

Without the privilege of his boundless wealth, most voters wouldn’t even know Steyer’s name. His campaign exists not because of any popular call for his candidacy or particular policy expertise, but because Steyer has pockets deep enough to thrust his face in front of every single Democratic voter with a television, radio, computer or mailbox.

That isn’t an exaggeration. Fully 67 percent of all spending on television ads across the entire Democratic primary has come from Steyer’s bank account. When flooding the zone with money is your only strategy, every problem starts to look like a money problem. Maybe that’s why Steyer’s campaign thinks democracy is for sale.

Just last week, Steyer’s Iowa operation faced a scandal when state director Pat Murphy resigned after offering elected officials cash in exchange for endorsing Steyer. The perception of attempted quid pro quo arrangements by the Democratic race’s largest self-funder should leave a bad taste in the mouth of any voter who looks at Donald Trump’s current impeachment woes with disappointment and disgust.

“By purchasing a larger voice than any other presidential contender, Bloomberg hopes to shock-and-awe Democratic voters into supporting his platform of – well, it’s not really clear, actually.”

Clearly, DNC debate requirements must be strengthened. In the future, the DNC should consider not only the raw number of donors a candidate must generate—currently 165,000—but also the proportion of campaign funds coming from grassroots donors compared to the total raised. In Steyer’s case, despite raising nearly $50 million, only 4 percent came from actual voters.

More worrisome is the message Steyer’s campaign sends to other deep-pocketed, misguided billionaires looking for a new hobby. Former New York City Mayor and current multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg recently floated his own entry into the Democratic primary.

If Bloomberg runs, he plans to implement an even bolder version of the Steyer Strategy. The Associated Press reports Bloomberg will pass on early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire in order to deploy his immense $52 billion fortune in a slew of pricey Super Tuesday media markets. By purchasing a larger voice than any other presidential contender, Bloomberg hopes to shock-and-awe Democratic voters into supporting his platform of—well, it’s not really clear, actually.

When campaign treasuries are independently generated, they cease to be reflective of a candidate’s actual popularity. In his decision to skip early states in favor of spending his way to prominence on Super Tuesday, Bloomberg is choosing his own voters.

Steyer and Bloomberg put the arrogance of plutocratic wealth on full display. Where traditional candidates are dependent on voters who contribute the money that becomes campaign advertising, both Steyer and Bloomberg are beholden to only one donor: themselves. In a nation where money has been declared equal to speech, the candidates who can funnel the most cash to themselves will inherently be more visible – and in the case of Democratic debate rules, just popular enough.

It is perverse that the Democratic Party, an organization so vocally in favor of regulating the sprawling power of plutocrats, has left itself open to such crude manipulation of our nomination process. It is on the party to make necessary changes that prevent this kind of blatant gaming of the system going forward.

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Tom Steyer Says He Can’t Disclose Hundreds of Millions in Financial Assets

By Lachlan Markay | Updated Sep. 18, 2019 3:39AM ET Published Sep. 17, 2019 9:56PM ET | Daily Beast | Posted November 18, 2019 |

Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer has insisted publicly that he is divested from his once-extensive fossil fuel interests. But he also has hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in assets that he will not or cannot disclose.

The California billionaire filed a new personal financial accounting last week giving a broad view of his extensive assets and sources of income. But he declined to go into detail about significant segments of his investment portfolio, citing confidentiality agreements that bar him from publicly disclosing the underlying assets in which he is invested.

Those assets are worth between $370 million and $742 million, according to a Daily Beast review of the filing, which only discloses the values in ranges. The total could actually be higher than that, as four of the assets, holdings in two hedge funds and two private equity funds, are valued at more than $50 million, without an upper range (The Daily Beast pegged their values at $50 million precisely for the purposes of this analysis). 

Steyer declined to fully detail his holdings in 43 different investment vehicles, including hedge funds managed by Farallon Capital Management, the firm Steyer founded more than 30 years ago.

“Underlying assets are not disclosed due to a preexisting confidentiality agreement,” Steyer repeatedly told the Office of Government Ethics in his financial disclosure filing. For all 43 line items, Steyer pledged that he “will divest this asset if elected.”

Steyer’s arrangement appears kosher legally.  Federal law allows political candidates to shield such specifics from public view if the asset at issue “is considered confidential as a result of a privileged [legal] relationship.”

Steyer stressed compliance in a statement to the Daily Beast. "His public release is consistent with Office of Government Ethics guidance with respect to not disclosing underlying assets of investment funds and general IRS guidance on requirements for entities that have to file public returns," his campaign said.

But his report will still likely draw additional scrutiny from federal ethics officials due to that lack of disclosure, according to Alex Baumgart, a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, which first obtained a copy of Steyer’s financial disclosure filing. 

“OGE is generally pretty stringent when it comes to this so we'll see what happens, I'd expect a bit of a back and forth at least before OGE certifies,” Baumgart said in an email.

“I think it's going to depend a lot on how the agency officials react to this and if they see it as valid,” he added. “The question that Steyer and the agency officials have to answer is ‘would disclosure actually violate his confidentiality agreements?’—which it may for these types of investments.”

His withholding of those details from his financial disclosure nevertheless obscures from public view significant information about his vast personal wealth, including information that would verify his claims that he has purged his portfolio of assets that conflict with his image as a strident environmentalist.

“I divested from all of that stuff,” Steyer said of his once-extensive fossil fuel holdings in an ABC interview in July. Steyer has made the same claim since 2014, when he says he instructed Farallon, which still manages much of his assets, to allocate them away from the firm’s oil and coal holdings.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Steyer’s campaign continued to stress that he was abiding by is pledge that he has divested from fossil fuel holdings, not just through his Farallon holdings but in every other investment fund in which he has a stake.  

"Tom has divested from Farallon's fossil fuel holdings and has provided all investment funds with a copy of his investment policy so that they can be screened clear of fossil fuel holdings," the campaign said. "If any investments don't meet Tom's screening, the proceeds from those investments are donated to charity."

But while Farallon and similar companies must disclose what assets they have under management, they do not have to disclose which funds actually hold which assets, and certainly not how those assets are distributed among their clients. That makes it virtually impossible to independently verify Steyer’s public statements about his holdings.

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