Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today!
After the Supreme Court’s democracy-mugging decree that let corporations dump unlimited amounts of money into our elections, a guy named Larry sent me an email that perfectly summed it all up: “Big money has plucked our eagle!”
Thanks to the court’s freakish Citizens United ruling, the Koch brothers have already amassed an unprecedented $900-million electioneering fund for the 2016 cycle, making them the godfathers of tea party Republicanism.
Thus, such presidential wannabes as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker are shamelessly scurrying to kiss the Koch ring and pledge fealty to the brotherhood’s extremist plutocratic agenda.
But big money isn’t only corrupting candidates. It’s also greatly diminishing voter participation in what has become a made-for-TV farce.
The biggest chunk of cash spent by Koch, Inc. will go right into a mind-numbing squall of nauseatingly negative ads. They won’t explain why we should vote for so and so, but instead will trash the candidates the Koch syndicate opposes.
Worse, voters won’t even be informed that the Kochs paid for this garbage, since the Supreme Court says they can run secret campaigns, laundering their money through front groups to keep voters from knowing what special interests are really behind the attacks.
We saw the impact of secret, unrestricted corporate money in last year’s midterm elections. It produced a blight of negativity and a failure to address people’s real needs.
All that made for an upchuck factor that kept nearly two-thirds of the people from voting. Worst of all, it gave us a Congress owned by corporate elites.
The Koch machine spent about $300 million to get those results. This time, they’ll spend three times more.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.