How The Left Bought "Reform" Through McCain-Feingold

A "mass movement" in America was faked to push campaign finance reform that would (supposedly) help Democrats win elections by handicapping the GOP's ability to out-raise them in campaign contributions.

As Ryan Sager of The New York Post discovered recently, the efforts that led to McCain-Feingold, Campaign Finance Reform was funded by Left-wing special interest groups. But worse than that, the funding went into setting up fake pro-reform groups, with Orwellian names you may have heard in the press: the Center for Public Integrity, the William J. Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy 21 and so on. Sager writes:

CAMPAIGN-FINANCE reform has been an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a "mass movement."

But don't take my word for it. One of the chief scammers, Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, confesses it all in an astonishing videotape I obtained earlier this week.

In the video tape, reglia admits that he can tell the story of how the American Left duped the country into passing Campaign Finance Reform because he no longer works for Pew research:

That story in brief:

Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

He went on to explain that almost $140 million was spent to lobby for changes to our country's campaign-finance laws.

But this money didn't come from little old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total came from just eight liberal foundations.

These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).

The Left-Wing of America tried to wrap up elections in campaign finance reform that benefited them. What they did not count on was groups like The Swiftboat Veterans For Truth that were able to off-set the limits posed on the election camapigns and use the money for to buy Kerry-busting political ads that contributed to a Bush re-election, all thanks to McCain-Feingold, Campaign Finance Reform.

Digg this Add to del.icio.us Stumble It! Mixx It! Sphinn It!