by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
In the October 2014 issue this column explored some of the ways in which big money is being used to try and shape public policy in the way preferred by those who have the money to spend.
Among other things, that column mentioned the role of modern robber barons such as billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Paul Allen in funding the confiscatory I-594 campaign in Washington state on Nov. 4. However, I neglected to mention that big money also were helped fund the required number of signatures to qualify the question for the ballot in the first place.
While the idea of popularly petitioned ballot initiatives and referendums sounds like great First Amendment stuff, the fly in the ointment is that rather than being a people up process money makes it a top down process. Thus anyone with enough money can put any issue they want before the voters in a general election provided they have the money to pay workers to go out and solicit enough signatures from people on the street, in shopping mall parking lots and any public place where crowds of people are available.
Of course, the hook has to be something that sounds good, even if it isn’t when you check the details—just like many Evergreen Staters have discovered is the case with I-594. Even most police are against it.
My point is that such initiatives are another way that big money shapes public policy.
Another can be the exploitation of existing regulations to target people who were never intended as targets when the regulations were adopted.
A case in point is President Obama’s “Operation Choke Point.”
You probably heard about Choke Point in the past year. That’s where the government targets otherwise legal businesses through regulations originally formulated to deprive drug dealers, the mobsters, and various other criminal operations normal access to the financial industry. In the case of Choke Point, the Obama Administration decided to push financial institution controls to the legitimate gun industry just because it doesn’t like guns, gunowners, gunmakers and gun sellers.
Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, an old political ally of both Obama and Bill Clinton, also was making headlines several months back by urging major banks to deny normal business relationships for the gun industry.
The idea is frighteningly simple. People can’t make, import, sell or buy guns if their banks won’t lend them money or even process their credit cards.
Gun manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and even we consumers are the targets of “Choke Point”—a scheme to bleed the gun community by denying normal banking relationships. However, enough noise has been raised about Choke Point in Congress and elsewhere that it’s on the back burner right now. A congressional investigation is anticipated after the new Congress is sworn in.
Meanwhile, the campaign to strangle the gun community financially is far from over. It really got creative new impetus right after the Sandy Hook massacre when some of the biggest public employee pension funds—led by California’s teacher and New York’s public employee pension funds—demanded that private equity firms, like Cerberus, which controlled many firearms brands under the Freedom Group label, get the heck out of the gun business, and get out fast.
The two pension funds had well over $250 million invested in Cerberus, which had and has other holdings than firearms.
At about the same time, New Jersey and New York politicians began pushing a broader campaign of disinvestment in gun manufacturing companies. Their object was the same as Choke Point: To dry up financing for the firearms and ammunition industry so they couldn’t make guns and ammo to sell to you and me.
That financial strategy has even more heads than Cerberus.
Not being content to attack the financial side of the industry the big money crowd wants to cut off any industry support for pro-gun groups and pro-gun politicians. They see this as a way of muzzling the grassroots, the average men and women who work hard in many ways—and hopefully vote religiously—to preserve the right to keep and bear arms.
Among the other ways that big money is being used against the people’s right to keep and bear arms is by forcing publicly owned gun companies like Ruger, Smith and Wesson, ATK Sporting Group and Olin Corporation, which manufactures Winchester ammunition, to disclose for any possible public bashing these companies’ political expenditures and support for pro-gun organizations and foundations.
This scheme is a brother to the same anti-gun strategy that launched the lawsuits against the gun industry back in 1998. It’s intended to win the battle for the hearts and minds of all Americans to support anti-gun politicians and anti-gun legislation at the federal, state and local levels and fuel media reports that would shape public policy on firearms ownership.
The latest such effort in this type of public shame campaign to hobble publicly owned gun corporations was evident in the stockholder resolution which was introduced for the Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation’s annual meeting in September.
The real people behind it are not your average small investor, as you might have guessed. The stockholders submitting the resolution were disguised as the Amalgamated Bank’s Long View Broad Market Index Fund.
This Fund owns 54,636 shares of Smith & Wesson’s common stock, worth over half a million dollars on today’s market. Keep in mind, the Fund is really a front for like-minded individual and institutional investors. Who ordered the fund to advance the resolution is a mystery. The investors remain faceless.
So everyone can understand what was at stake, the resolution called for corporate management to make public
- Any monetary or non-monetary business expenses connected to influencing legislation,
- Participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office,
- And attempting to influence the general public, or segments thereof, with respect to elections, legislative matters, or referenda.
From a later report by an individual stockholder who attended the meeting, the question was rendered moot when the company arranged to have all such issues handled by an outside contractor.
This is just another example of how big money and the world of finance are being used to foster a public policy agenda approved by those with the necessary money and influence. This battle will continue.
