The never-trumped lies blatantly again (pps.195, 215-217, 260, 274-275, 279) when he regurgitates the left's lie of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The FBI, themselves vehemently anti-Trump, found no evidence of Russian interference even after 4 years of desperately searching for it. But there again we must remember, the truth does not matter to the left. Regulators err on the side of institutions, not the public they are supposed to protect. "In all the windows of government, the curtains have been closed". We hear much from the author about think tanks, small groups, with hidden funding, hoping to sway opinion. Is this book from that same space and trying to do exactly that. Come the second referendum, this might be offered to the nation for free.

If you wanted to influence politics, the key is not to own individual politicians, but own the political conversation and its dominant agenda. u201c.@matthewstoller is correct to focus on the anti-democratic impact of industry concentration. Antitrust is not just about competition, jobs, and consumer welfare, but about preventing corporate and lobbyist dominance of politics.\u201d — Ro Khanna (@Ro Khanna) Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond. In the months that followed the Brexit vote, my mind kept returning to Seaburn station. How could the Democratic Unionists, a tiny party in the context of British politics, afford to buy hugely expensive ads in northern English newspapers? Why were voters in Sunderland seeing stories on Facebook about Turkey joining the EU? Who was paying for all this? My colleagues and I would spend much of the next three years asking such questions. This urgent, vital book is essential reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics' Carole CadwalladrAMY GOODMAN: And then it becomes Cambridge Analytica, for Cambridge University, right? Where Kogan got this information that he culled from Facebook. AMY GOODMAN: Brittany Kaiser, can you talk about the “Crooked Hillary” campaign and how it developed? In the oil and gas industry as well as among internet companies, the more market power a corporation acquires, the more it lobbies. In the pharmaceutical industry, the data is even more compelling. When pharmaceutical companies gained market power, they lobbied more, and when they lost market power, they lobbied less. One tentative conclusion from this analysis is that monopolies seek to acquire political power, whereas competitive businesses focus on competing with each other instead of dominating public rule-making bodies.

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". 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. He very briefly (p.167) discusses the fact that his employer openDemocracy is a Soros-funded, pro-EU organisation. But he tries to state that Soros, unlike all the mean baddies on the "right", has not editorial control. BUT WAIT - how do WE know that? He has no evidence to support this. We are supposed to just believe Geoghegan. This very book highlights the blatant lies he is willing to tell - but we should trust him...AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that, psychographic groupings, and especially for people who are not on Facebook, who don’t understand its enormous power and the intimate knowledge it has of people. Think of someone you’re talking to who’s never experienced Facebook. Explain what is there. And the thing that’s allowing this to happen is these information platforms like Facebook. And that is what’s so upsetting, because we can actually do something about that. We are the only country in the world that can hold Facebook accountable, yet we still have not done so. And we still keep going to their leadership hoping they do the right thing, but they have not. And why is that? Because no industry has ever shown in American history that it can regulate itself. There is a reason why antitrust laws exist in this country. There’s a tradition of holding companies accountable, and we need to re-embrace that tradition, especially as we enter into 2020, where the stakes could not be higher. So this is the company admitting to their own know-how. There is no debate about whether it works or not. This is not them advertising it to the world. This is them saying, “This is what we’ve learned. Based off that, this is how we’re going to run our business. This is how we’re going to invest in the expansion of this to sell this outside of politics.” The game was, take the political experience, parlay it into the commercial sector. That was the strategy. So, there is no debate whether it worked or not. It was highly effective.

You don’t need to be sensitive to have detected a whiff coming off politics in certain countries in recent years. Brexit is the thing that brought the odour to immediate attention in this part of western Europe, but it didn’t begin with the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, and after reading Peter Geoghegan’s unsparing account of shady money in politics, you would be naive to believe it will end there. Without the commitment and enthusiasm of these people who so generously donated their expertise and time, this important project could never have come to fruition. The future 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.By the time he gets to his out-and-out Trump-bashing (pps.323-332) the reader knows to expect the usual leftist prattle. Geoghegan lets it be known that he believes the US was all above-aboard and wonderfully legal (no dark money to see here! Unless it's, umm, on the "right" of course!) I wonder if he read the Times article where they admit they interfered in the due process, using dirty politics and dark money so they could "fortify" the election. 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.

The genesis of my book took place somewhere less obvious: Seaburn metro station on the outskirts of Sunderland, on June 21, 2016. Two days before the UK voted to leave the European Union, my editor had sent me to report on what voters thought in Sunderland. It was a warm summer’s morning and there were only a handful of people on the open-air platform. BRITTANY KAISER: Yeah, Leave.EU, that panel that I was on, which has now become quite an infamous video, was their launch event to launch the campaign. And Cambridge Analytica was in deep negotiations, through introduction of Steve Bannon, with both of the Brexit campaigns. I was told, actually, originally we pitched remain, and the remain side said that they did not need to spend money on expensive political consultants, because they were going to win anyway. And that’s actually what I also truly believed, and so did they. JEHANE NOUJAIM: My theory is that it’s got something to do with this film. Maybe we’re doing something right. We were at first — we’ve been stopped in Egypt, but we’ve never been stopped in the U.S. in this way. We’re American citizens. Right? 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. 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.The Internet calls for a very different set of political and personal talents: confrontation, wit, defiance, spontaneity and rule breaking. Where Clinton and Blair tried desparately to appera normal for the TV camera, digital politicians intentionally court the lulz. u201c11/ Lawmakers have begun to talk tougher on antitrust issues, for many reasons. \n\nBut this research makes the case in a new way: Until they dismantle the failures of the "consumer welfare" standard, corporate consolidation will keep warping the work they were elected to do.\u201d — American Economic Liberties Project (@American Economic Liberties Project) Dark money is an American neologism for an increasingly global phenomenon: funds from unknown sources that influence our politics. This money gets into the political system in an increasing variety of ways, from loopholes in election law and online campaign fundraising through to anonymously funded, agenda-setting pressure groups. In her authoritative book on election finance, Dark Money, American journalist Jane Mayer outlines how US democracy was effectively bought by a cadre of the super-rich and their surrogates, often through faceless political action committees – so-called ‘super Pacs’ – that can spend limitless amounts of money. The middle section of the book explores how dark money has amplified the growing influence of the American right on British politics. This is a story of ideology and finance – of how the long-term Hayekian, neoliberal project has played out on these shores. It’s a great case study in how ruling elites can be infected with policy ideas and programmes via those “second-hand traders in ideas” of whom Hayek spoke so eloquently: academics, thinktanks and media commentators. In that context, Geoghegan’s account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group – the party within a party that did for Theresa May – is absolutely riveting. And again it leaves one wondering why there was so little media exploration of the origins and financing of that particular little cabal.