The Greens are leading the campaign to reform electoral funding laws because we believe corporate donations taint the democratic process – they allow big business to buy a level of access to politicians that ordinary people can’t afford. History of the Democracy for Sale project

If the problem was just one of laws being broken, there would be a simple solution: tougher enforcement. Increase fines until the pips squeak. Introduce the threat of jail time. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen was given a three-year prison sentence in 2018 for violating campaign finance laws during the presidential campaign. If British political operatives faced similar risks, then bad behaviours might swiftly change. It is, as Geoghegan concludes, practically impossible to say how much Banks ultimately spent on the Brexit referendum – or indeed the provenance of that money. Banks has also alternately made light of, and angrily rejected, reports of his links to the Putin regime. What is certainly clear is that he was responsible for some of the most noxious campaign content – particularly focused on images of migrants and refugees – and was cavalier about legal distinctions between his insurance business and Leave.EU and the various other Brexit campaigns he funded. The book relies heavily on anecdotes to set the scene, perhaps a bit too much. While breaking down numerous meetings and events succeeds at setting the scene, it does become a bit samey over time. Outside of this though, Democracy For Sale is very effective at laying out modern issues. It concludes with several solution proposals and a further discussion on cronyism in the COVID-19 crisis. This is a brilliant addition to the base book that pushes Geoghegan’s research into recent topics. AMY GOODMAN: Brittany Kaiser, can you talk about the “Crooked Hillary” campaign and how it developed? And I didn’t spend a lot of time with Steve, but the time I did was incredibly insightful. Almost every time I saw him, he’d be showing me some new Hillary Clinton hit video that he had come out with, or announcing that he was about to throw a book launch party for Ann Coulter for ¡Adios, America!, which was something that he invited both me and Alexander to, and we promptly decided to leave the house before she arrived.Now, on that two-day-long debrief that I talked about — and if you want to know more, you can read about it in my book — they told us — STEPHEN BANNON: All Cambridge Analytica is the data scientists and the applied applications here in the United States. It has nothing to do with the international stuff. The Guardian actually tells you that, and The Observer tell you that, when you get down to the 10th paragraph, OK? When you get down to the 10th paragraph. And what Nix does overseas is what Nix does overseas. Right? It was a data — it was a data company. So, Steve made the introductions to make sure that we would still get a commercial contract out of this political campaign, and both to Vote Leave and Leave.EU. Cambridge Analytica took Leave.EU, and AIQ, which was Cambridge Analytica’s essentially digital partner, before Cambridge Analytica could run our own digital campaigns, they were running the Vote Leave side, both funded by the Mercers, both with the same access to this giant database on American voters. And the thing that’s terrifying is that while Cambridge has been disbanded, the same actors are out there. And there’s nothing has been — nothing has changed to allow us to start putting in place legislation to say there is something called information crimes. In this era of information warfare, in this era of information economies, what is an information crime? What does it look like? Who determines it? And yet, without that, we are still living in this unfiltered, unregulated space, where places like Facebook are continuing to choose profit over the protection of the republic. And I think that’s what’s so outrageous. BRITTANY KAISER: Once upon a time, I used to have a lot of respect for Julian Wheatland. I even thought we were friends. I thought we were building a billion-dollar company together that was going to allow me to do great things in the world. But, unfortunately, that’s a story that I told myself and a story he wanted me to believe that isn’t true at all.

UK's election commission concluded that British electoral law "is silent on whether or not money obtained from crime would make a political contribution unlawful". Dark money has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of digital disinformation. It is a truism that politics has been transformed in recent years. But it is not just the outcomes, the election of disruptive authoritarian populists, that have changed. Behind Brexit, Trump and a host of other unforeseen ruptures is a paradigm shift in the nature of political communication. The digital world offers voters the opportunity to live in echo chambers where their political prejudices are confirmed and reinforced daily. We can all choose a tribe now and decide not to hear any voices critical of our choice. The way we choose our leaders and national direction is in trouble; anyone paying close attention to online politics can see that. For the past five years, the democratic landscape has changed dramatically. Misinformation problems in internet forums are enormous, voter data is harvested and interrogated for unethical ends and huge amounts of dark money flow in and out of political discourse. Over this timeframe, investigative journalists have worked to reveal these dark secrets; one of the most thorough researchers, Peter Geoghegan of OpenDemocracy lays all of it bare in Democracy For Sale. As politics becomes increasingly voracious of time and occupies more and more space on digital media, the scope for hidden influence through spending outside of the narrow regulated window in the period before a vote is all too obvious.So in that sense I learned little that I had not already discovered. All the same it is important to place all this information in one place in an easily accessible format, and so this book does that nicely. Well, except maybe it does not uncover all that much - because reading it I found I already knew much of what it was telling me. The information is already out there about dodgy donations, about how the Brexit party avoided scrutiny in the way it solicited donations, how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to mobilise people on false premises etc. etc. It was, in fact, a depressing litany of the constituent parts that create the new British democratic deficit. Bang up to date, and with references and examples throughout, this book makes the case that British democracy has been deeply undermined by dark money, people playing fast and loose with the rules, and vested interests taking control of the political agenda. If course, much of that has been endemic for a long time, and one could say that it is only the actors that have changed (a little), but the book makes the case that changes in the social and technological landscape have also allowed a much deeper undermining of democracy. Targeted deceitful ads on Facebook are known to have affected the outcome of the EU referendum - and it is this ability to use much smaller amounts of dark money to influence political decisions that this book uncovers. AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it looks like Cambridge Analytica was heading to a billion-dollar corporation. This forensic and highly readable book shows how so many of our democratic processes have moved into the murky, unregulated spaces of globalisation and digital innovation' Peter Pomerantsev

How will you vote?’ I asked, falling into the only mode of conversation for a reporter in an unfamiliar place before a polling day. He wanted Brexit. He talked about pit closures and disinvestment, deindustrialisation and neglect. It was not hard to see why he felt politically abandoned. He had a particular worry about the EU: that Turkey would soon join. He talked about how millions of Turkish workers could soon be coming to the UK in search of jobs. I asked where he had heard about this. ‘Facebook,’ he said. In the new world of (digital) political campaigning, small sums of money can go a long way, while multi-million dollar government public relations exercises can prove practically worthless. If you're concerned about the health of British democracy, read this book – it is thorough, gripping and vitally important' Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland. KARIM AMER: And one thing that I think it’s important to remember here, because there’s been a lot of debate among some people about: Did this actually work? To what degree did it work? How do we know whether it worked or not? What Brittany is describing is a debrief meeting where Cambridge, as a company, is saying, “This is what we learned from our political experience. This is what actually worked.” OK? And they’re sharing it because they’re saying, “Now this is how we want to codify this and commoditize this to go into commercial business.” Right?In Britain, a nexus of corporate-funded libertarian think tanks and transatlantic media moguls turned a ‘no-deal’ Brexit from what was in 2016 an outlandish proposal into a more or less explicit government policy option after Boris Johnson became prime minister in the summer of 2019. BRITTANY KAISER: I believe it was owned by the Mercer family, that building. And we would come into the basement and use that boardroom for our meetings. And we would use that for planning who we were going to go pitch to, what campaigns we were going to work for, what advocacy groups, what conservative 501(c)(3)s and (c)(4)s he wanted us to go see. Politicians lie gleefully, making wild claims that can be shared instantly with millions of people on social media. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and populists in many other countries are the beneficiaries. His hatred of Christians and love of Soros permeates throughout the book (p.257-288). The Soros-funded Irishman (p.167) was clearly unimpressed when he arrived in Budapest, to give a "journalism workshop" in the Soros-funded Central European University, and spotted anti-Soros posters in the city. He is unhappy that Soros-funded institutions "have effectively been forced out of the country" (pps.277-278). It would seem that Geoghegan believes that Soros is entitled to illegally pump dark money into universities (CEU for example), campaigns (Ireland's abortion campaign), think tanks, etc. and is entitled to manipulate universities and organisations like Geoghegan's own employer, openDemocracy (oh the irony!) - and that he shouldn't be sanctioned for it. Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries.