We've had thirty years and still counting of union busting, stagnant wages, increasing gap between rich and poor, continued stripping of the social safety, off-shoring, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and on and on.
Bundling isn't about checking to see where folks work and adding up the donations under their companies name.
Bundling is a specific activity separate from regular individual small donations. It is the main way corporations funnel large sums of money to candidates.
It's amazing folks don't know what bundling is or why it happens, either that or they have very short memories. abramoff and ken lay ought to ring some bells.
Published on Monday, July 14, 2003 by the Washington Post
Bush 'Bundlers' Take Fundraising to New Level
by Thomas B. Edsall and Mike Allen
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0714-05.htmBarack Obama (D)
Bundlers
Bundlers are people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who's willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big "bundle."
Even though these donors direct more money to the candidates than anyone else, disclosure can be spotty, with Obama and McCain posting bundlers by ranges, indicated in this chart with the "max" and "min" columns, and with the top ranges being simply "$500,000 or more." Together, 536 elites have directed at least $75,750,000 to McCain, and 560 have gathered at least $76,500,000 for Obama.
http://www.opensecrets.org/PRES08/bundlers.php?id=N00009638Notice the use of the phrase "at least". Bundling is exempt from disclosure rules. We don't know the total amount given to Obama or any candidate nor from whom.
"Discussing the issue of campaign finance reform, Obama said, 'The argument is not that I'm pristine, because I'm swimming in the same muddy water, ... The argument is that I know it's muddy and I want to clean it up," Barack Obama said August 16, 2007, in Des Moines, Iowa.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Barack_Obama/Campaign_Financing#cite_note-3Except as with gay rights, the public option, offshore drilling, health ins. mandate, nafta etc. the change isn't happening.
Statement of Laura MacCleery,Director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division
We are all running in reverse when it comes to the role of big money donors in the 2008 presidential campaign. While bundlers are becoming more ubiquitous in campaigns, public information about donors and their contributions grows ever more elusive.
In 2004, George Bush, John Kerry and Howard Dean, in a voluntary but standard practice, disclosed bundlers’ names and provided basic data about how much money each raised, announcing when they exceeded thresholds such as $50,000 or $100,000.
In the current election, every major contender for the Democratic or Republican nomination is using bundlers. Yet the campaigns are being far less transparent about the bundlers than the 2004 field was. Anyone willing to be less transparent than George Bush should realize this is a problem.
Only one candidate, Barack Obama, has provided any insight into how much his bundlers have raised, and only one candidate – also Obama – currently publishes bundlers’ names on a readily accessible part of the campaign Web site. But even Obama comes up short because he does not identify bundlers’ employers or states of residence – information needed, for example, to cross-check the data with lobbying records or connect records to previous bundling activity.
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=2483Another Batch of Obama's Ambassador Picks Have Money-in-Politics Ties
President Obama's fifth consecutive week of naming new ambassadors brought with it five people with long histories of donating campaign cash, including two donors who also bundled more than half a million dollars each for the president's campaign war chest. As Capital Eye previously detailed, these choices often include people who contributed significant amounts to his committees — and bundled larger sums his direction.
By our count, Obama, to date, has nominated 50 individuals for ambassadorships. Of these, 19 have been career officers in the Foreign Service, 26 have given money to political candidates and five are not career diplomats but nor do they have known histories of campaign contributions.
http://209.190.229.100/news/2009/07/another-batch-of-obamas-ambass.htmlThat is just the president. When you look at congress the money numbers are staggering.
Top Five Lobbyist Bundlers Revealed; Four Worked Exclusively for Democrats
http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2048/As far as transparency, they talk a good talk but when it comes to the walk, it's a joke.
New Lobbyist Bundler Database Not Yet Searchable
The 2007 law requires that, “to the greatest extent practicable,” the FEC makes the lobbyist bundler disclosures “publicly available through the Commission website in a manner that is searchable, sortable, and downloadable.” However, the scanned forms are stored in non-searchable PDF formats, are in no way indexed by bundler name, and are, in some cases, barely legible or handwritten. There is no easy way to search or sort by an individual bundler’s name. Instead, each disclosure form is organized by campaign committee, requiring database users to spend hours examining the forms one by one. For the Center’s recent story listing the top five lobbyist bundlers, the FEC data had to be manually typed into a spreadsheet for analysis.
The statute also explicitly requires that the FEC link the database to the lobbying disclosure forms on the websites of the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of Representatives. Yet, while there are links on the FEC’s Lobbyist Bundling overview page, there is currently no linking to those or any other disclosure databases on the search page.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/data_mine/entry/2047/ I don't know where people got the idea that bundling was just matching small individual contributions to their respective workplaces. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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