Yesterday, I had the opportunity to interview New Yorker contributor Jane Mayer about her devastating new profile of Art Pope, a rumpled dollar store magnate who is spending his considerable family fortune to turn North Carolina politics to the far right.
In 2010, with Pope’s help, the GOP took control of both houses of the North Carolina state legislature for the first time since 1870.
In the interview, Mayer describes the many parallels between Pope and his much richer and more famous friends, the Koch Brothers.
In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, corporations can even write checks directly from their corporate treasuries to underwrite their political activities.
Citizens United has transformed state politics. State races are still cheap enough that an entire campaign can be outspent by independent donors. Mayer estimates that three quarters of all independent money spent in North Carolina’s 2010 election was linked to Art Pope, his family, and his organizations.
Like the Koch Brothers, Pope has invested heavily in ostensibly non-partisan, non-profit organizations. These groups accept money from Pope and his company and spend it on attack ads, push polling, and voter turnout analysis – but Pope can truthfully insist that he doesn’t own them, even when he sits on their boards and provides the lion’s share of their funding.
Even post-Citizens United there are limits on how far publicly-held corporations can wade into partisan politics. Shareholders could even sue if profit-making seemed to take a back seat to politicking. Whereas, if Art Pope wants to turn his father’s company into a political warchest with a dollar store sideline, nobody’s going to stop him.
“We tried to understand what they do, but they’re fairly black-hole-ish,” a retail industry analyst told Mayer about Pope’s firm.
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