#tracking paybacks

General Resources

Tracking Big Donors part one 

In the heat of the 2012 campaign, NPR’s Mara Liasson interviewed Paul Begala for a story whose somewhat counterintuitive premise was that Democrats were having trouble attracting big money. Begala told her the reason why:

“…there’s no self-interest here…Jeffrey Katzenberg is our largest donor. He gave us $2 million. He’s not going to sell any more tickets to Kung Fu Panda 2 if Obama gets a second term. He’s just doing it because he believes in his country.”

Rule number one: there’s always self-interest. In Katzenberg’s case, it was an old WTO dispute with China over access that U.S. films had to the Chinese market. At a time when the United States had multiple trade issues with China—active International Trade Commission complaints from U.S. firms about unfair trading practices, a congressional investigation that found counterfeit (and flawed) Chinese parts were making their way into U.S. weapons systems, complaints of intellectual property theft by U.S. software developers and a congressional effort to penalize China for manipulating the value of its currency to increase its exports—resolving the film issue jumped to the top of America’s trade agenda. Vice President Joe Biden negotiated a resolution to the dispute; during the breaks, he checked with Katzenberg to make sure the terms he was seeking were acceptable. Katzenberg might not be able to sell more tickets to Kung Fu Panda 2 in the United States, but he will be able to sell more to Kung Fu Panda 3 in China.

The interests of the biggest individual donors can be more difficult to discern than those of corporate entities and labor unions. The late Bob J. Perry, for example, was a prolific donor at the state and federal level. In his home state of Texas, he supported efforts to limit damages in civil suits, but his company, Perry Homes, did not lobby the federal government. His company had a few federal entanglements--a couple of OSHA violations in the last five years totaling $2,500 (one, for $1,500, was reduced to $750) and a comment on a federal regulation--but nothing that quite comes close, on a cost benefit analysis, to justifying the tens of millions he put into politics.

That doesn't mean Perry does not have federal issues--he might prefer a lower tax rate or the preservation of a particular tax loophole, as a homebuilder he might prefer robust support of institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Recall that federal policies, including, as Gretchen Morgenson put it, "when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home," played an outsized role in the collapse. And though people often regard such speeches as so much rhetoric, remember President George W. Bush's acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention: 

Another priority for a new term is to build an ownership society, because ownership brings security and dignity and independence.

Thanks to our policies, home ownership in America is at an all- time high. 

Those policies helped home builders as much as they did the pols who made millions while running Fannie Mae into the ground and the Wall Street firms that repackaged all that toxic mortgage debt. 

Perry was also a big supporter of increasing the numbers of legal immigrants--his company employed a lot of foreign born workers.