Juan Cole: Anonymous Billionaires are Stealing Your Election with Attack Ads

Juan Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan.

It would be bad enough, as I reported last week, that 47 billionaires were responsible for the lion’s share of individual Super PAC contributions. It turns out that the Super PACs aren’t even the biggest players.

The biggest players are the dark money PACs, which do not have to reveal the sources of their funding.

If we just look at the television ads bankrolled by the top six sources of funding, we make a startling discovery, which Kim Barker reported on in these pages last week.

The ‘dark money’ PACs are outspending everyone else. Crossroads GPS, founded by Karl Rove and backed by anonymous big-money donors, has bought negative attack ads against President Obama to the tune of $52 million! The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity spent $20.6 million. The political parties and the Super PACs, which have to identify the source of their funds, are making a much smaller contribution....