Remember, CU was not about corruption, it was about freedom. Wealthy donors in no way benefit or extract wealth from government.
According to the piece, one evening after the day’s activities at an annual hedge fund conference Scaramucci organizes in Las Vegas, he and 20 “financiers and politicians” enjoyed an eight course dinner of “blinis with caviar; a fennel, grapefruit, and pomegranate salad; cocoa-encrusted beef tenderloin; and blue-cheese panna cotta.”
The wealthiest guest was another hedge fund manager, billionaire Leon Cooperman. By that moment Cooperman had garnered attention for repeatedly comparing Obama’s 2008 election to the rise of Hitler. (Cooperman claimed he didn’t mean they were similar as people.)
Here’s what Scaramucci said about Citizens United, himself, and Cooperman:
Scaramucci, the organizer of the dinner, told me the next day that the guests had witnessed the “activation” of a “sleeper cell” of hedge-fund managers against Obama. “That’s what you see happening in the hedge-fund community, because they now have the power, because of Citizens United, to aggregate capital into political-action committees and to influence the debate,” he said. “The president has a philosophy of disdain toward wealth creation. That’s just obvious, O.K.? We talked about it all night.” He later said, “If there’s a pope of this movement, it’s Lee Cooperman.”
By contrast, here’s what the conservative Supreme Court majority proclaimed in the Citizens United decision:
[W]e now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.
- Spoiler: show
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/21/ant ... -managers/