Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

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A compelling and very readable story of the ongoing corruption of our government and therefore ourselves' Anthony Barnett Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it. Democracy for Sale is an on-the-ground account of Indonesian democracy, analyzing its election campaigns and behind-the-scenes machinations. Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot assess the informal networks and political strategies that shape access to power and privilege in the messy political environment of contemporary Indonesia. Sunderland was one of the first places to declare on referendum night. Over 60% voted to leave the European Union. It was a result that set the tone for a stunning political upset. Through the night, pollsters struggled to explain a vote that defied their predictive models. The next morning, markets nose-dived. The resignation of the prime minister, David Cameron, was only the third item on many news bulletins. The ensuing years of chaos laid bare the fault lines of modern Britain and have changed Europe forever.

And the thing that’s terrifying is that while Cambridge has been disbanded, the same actors are out there. And there’s nothing has been — nothing has changed to allow us to start putting in place legislation to say there is something called information crimes. In this era of information warfare, in this era of information economies, what is an information crime? What does it look like? Who determines it? And yet, without that, we are still living in this unfiltered, unregulated space, where places like Facebook are continuing to choose profit over the protection of the republic. And I think that’s what’s so outrageous. BRITTANY KAISER: Actually, a lot of it started to come when I saw some of Carole’s reporting, because there were a lot of conspiracy theories over what was going on, and I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that we definitely did work in the Brexit campaign, “we” as in when I was at Cambridge Analytica, because I was one of the people working on the campaign. And we obviously played a large role in not just the Trump campaign itself, but Trump super PACs and a lot of other conservative advocacy groups, 501(c)(3)s, (4)s, that were the infrastructure that allowed for the building of the movement that pushed Donald Trump into the White House. The way we choose our leaders and national direction is in trouble; anyone paying close attention to online politics can see that. For the past five years, the democratic landscape has changed dramatically. Misinformation problems in internet forums are enormous, voter data is harvested and interrogated for unethical ends and huge amounts of dark money flow in and out of political discourse. Over this timeframe, investigative journalists have worked to reveal these dark secrets; one of the most thorough researchers, Peter Geoghegan of OpenDemocracy lays all of it bare in Democracy For Sale.

Projects

The willingness to accept anonymous funding makes think tanks the ideal vehicle for companies and business interests to quietly influence government policy. So, Steve made the introductions to make sure that we would still get a commercial contract out of this political campaign, and both to Vote Leave and Leave.EU. Cambridge Analytica took Leave.EU, and AIQ, which was Cambridge Analytica’s essentially digital partner, before Cambridge Analytica could run our own digital campaigns, they were running the Vote Leave side, both funded by the Mercers, both with the same access to this giant database on American voters. British politics is comparatively low-spending, especially when set
against the United States, but there is plenty of evidence that the American model of hidden finance and clandestine influence has traversed the pond. Britain, as the London-based American political analyst Anne Applebaum notes, ‘has become a place where untransparent money, from unknown sources, is widely accepted with a complacent shrug’. The relatively small sums involved can make it even easier to get access to the top table of British politics.

A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. Everyone should read it' Anne ApplebaumThe genesis of my book took place somewhere less obvious: Seaburn metro station on the outskirts of Sunderland, on June 21, 2016. Two days before the UK voted to leave the European Union, my editor had sent me to report on what voters thought in Sunderland. It was a warm summer’s morning and there were only a handful of people on the open-air platform. Geoghegan clearly despises anyone with any religious association. This bigotry can be seen in his description of the DUP presbyterians (p.77) and of Steve Baker, a born-again Christian (p.110). Even though not relevant to the story at hand, he insists on negatively abusing a person's religious affiliation (Catholic) in an attempt to taint the reader's view (pps. 155, 159, 225). Where corporate-funded think tanks once provided the ideas for a conservative revolution, now they often appears as one side in a ful-scale assault on an increasingly hyperbolic culture war. US donors might be expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a single election cycle. But for 50 grand pretty much anyone can get a seat with the British prime minister at a lavish Conservative Leader’s Group dinner where discussions are kept strictly private, even if they touch on government policy.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about people coming forward and not coming forward. I wanted to turn to former Cambridge Analytica COO, the chief operating officer, Julian Wheatland, speaking on the podcast Recode Decode. A compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics... Remarkable' Observer, Book of the WeekBy the time he gets to his out-and-out Trump-bashing (pps.323-332) the reader knows to expect the usual leftist prattle. Geoghegan lets it be known that he believes the US was all above-aboard and wonderfully legal (no dark money to see here! Unless it's, umm, on the "right" of course!) I wonder if he read the Times article where they admit they interfered in the due process, using dirty politics and dark money so they could "fortify" the election. AMY GOODMAN: And then it becomes Cambridge Analytica, for Cambridge University, right? Where Kogan got this information that he culled from Facebook. This book is written by the far-left, for the far-left, to ensure the far-left can now justify usurping the power from the people and "fixing" all that they see as being "wrong" with "democracy". This book will appeal to the far-left, liberal loons who hate everything and everyone. BRITTANY KAISER: Yes, for a while I actually split the keys to what is Steve’s house, with Alexander Nix, because we used his house as our office. His house is also used as a Breitbart office in the basement. It’s called the “Breitbart Embassy” on Capitol Hill. And that’s where I would go for meetings.