CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“’DISCLOSE ACT’ STILL A MUST, HAS A CHANGE IN 2015”
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“’DISCLOSE ACT’ STILL A MUST, HAS A CHANGE IN 2015”
If there’s one main reason for the
distrust many Californians feel for government and elected officials at all
levels, it may be the way special interests regularly pour millions of dollars
into election campaigns while managing to mask or obscure their identities.
A major example last year was
Proposition 45, voted down by a 59-41 percent margin even though it led by
about that same amount in polls taken before the campaign began.
The measure aimed to regulate health
insurancepremiums just like car insurance and property coverage prices.It was
done in by a $55 million ad campaign whose TV commercials blared in large print
that the measure was opposed by the California Medical Assn., the American
Nurses Assn. of California and the California Hospital Assn.” The end of the
ads also contained fine print and sotto voce statements that they were paid for
by Kaiser Permanente, Blue Shield, the parent company of Anthem Blue Cross, and
HealthNet.
The result made it clear almost no one
got beyond the large print, which was enough to turn around about 1 million
voters.
The question: What if the insurance
company names had been in large print, present throughout the ad? Would voters
then have been more likely to disregard the insurance lobby’s message?
No one knows, but consumer advocates
and others who object to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision
allowing unlimited corporate money into politics think it might have.
Enter the “Disclose Act,” a proposed
California law first advanced more than four years ago by then-Assemblywoman
Julia Brownley of Ventura County, now a Democratic congresswoman. This would
require all political ads to show in large letters their top three actual
funders, rather than other groups that sometimes have misleading names.
Each year since Brownley first
sponsored it, the Disclose Act has come a bit closer to passage, losing only
narrowly last year. It will be back again in the new legislative session, even
though lawmakers took a slight step in the right direction last spring,
separately passing one small Disclose Act portion.
That one now requires disclosure of
large donations from nonprofits and other so-called multi-purpose organizations
and for the state Fair Political Practices Commission to post on the Internet
the names of the top 10 donors to any candidate or initiative campaign.
This measure was a reaction to the
influx of $15 million from Arizona-based conservative groups to fight the 2012
Proposition 30 and push for an anti-union measure on the same ballot. Prop. 30,
a tax measure, passed anyway has been a
lynchpin of Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to balance the state budget.
But the top ten lists are not enough.
For the most part, their information was already available to anyone who cared
enough to scroll through the California secretary of state’s website and do a
little addition. Merely putting the information online also doesn’t mean many
voters will see it. How many will take the time and energy to look?
All this makes it high time for the
Legislature to do something major about the deception that commonly accompanies
huge donations in California politics. Using large print at the start of ads to
disclose their key funders, rather than small print at the end, would surely be
more effective in warning voters about bias in commercials. Similar rules would
also benefit print, radio, Internet and billboard ads.
That’s because the need for
transparency allowing voters to peer through the veil of anonymity many
campaign donors try to hide behind is more pressing today than ever, thanks to
the huge quantities of cash corporations can now employ with little chance of
garnering bad publicity.
This makes the Disclose Act the single
most important piece of legislation of 2015, for nothing so sullies politics as
the way big money is consistently deployed and masked.
Other
open government bills will surely be on the new session’s docket, but if this
one passes, California voters could become the best informed in the nation. And
it if happens here, count on it being imitated widely, just like other
California laws from the Proposition 13 tax cuts to the Proposition 15
loosening of marijuana prohibitions.
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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com
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