Hasta La Gadget!

This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.

Super PACs are supposed to disclose the identities of their donors.

Except when they don’t, exactly.

Nearly all of the money raised by the Citizens for a Working America PAC, a super PAC that’s spent more than $2 million on ads boosting businessman David Perdue in Georgia’s contentious Republican U.S. Senate primary, has come from two “social welfare” nonprofits connected to an Ohio lobbyist, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of campaign finance records.

Such nonprofits may keep their own donors secret. And although nonprofit groups rarely donate to super PACs, the practice worries some campaign finance reformers who fear these transfers leave voters uninformed about who is actually funding political campaigns in their states.

“This PAC’s fundraising operation illustrates a big hole in disclosure when it comes to super PACs,” said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center. “The ability of super PACs to receive money from corporate entities that do not, in turn, disclose their own donors renders federal disclosure laws meaningless.”

In Georgia, the Citizens for a Working America PAC has touted Perdue as a “conservative outsider” and attacked his GOP opponent, Rep. Jack Kingston, as “career politician.”

Through July 2, the super PAC has raised $2.1 million, according to documents filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission.

The group’s top donor — at $1.7 million — is the Ohio-based Jobs and Progress Fund, a social welfare nonprofit that is focused on “education and legislative participation on public policy matters” dealing with the economy and fiscal responsibility, according to its most recent tax return.

That amount accounts for more than 80 percent of the Citizens for a Working America PAC’s receipts this election cycle.

According to data provided to the Center for Public Integrity from ad tracking service Kantar Media CMAG, the Jobs and Progress Fund itself has also spent more than $400,000 on advertisements in June attacking Kingston as the “king of earmarks.” The ads also urge viewers to call him and tell him to “stop wasting taxpayer money.”

Because these ads did not explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against Kingston, and because they were aired more than 30 days before the July 22 runoff election, federal law does not require Jobs and Progress Fund to report its ads to the FEC.

A second Ohio-based social welfare nonprofit, the Government Integrity Fund, is also listed as a major donor to the Citizens for a Working America PAC.

That group has contributed $410,000, or nearly 20 percent, of the super PAC’s receipts.

Formed in 2011 to “promote a stronger economic climate in Ohio,” the Government Integrity Fund this year has also transferred money to a super PAC supporting Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

Not only do the Jobs and Progress Fund and the Government Integrity Fund both hail from Ohio, they also share personnel.

Tax records list Ohio lobbyist Tom Norris as the chairman of the Jobs and Progress Fund and as the president of the Government Integrity Fund.

Norris, the owner of Columbus-based Cap Square Solutions, represents clients including the Ohio Ready Mixed Concrete Association and California-based Optivus Proton Therapy Inc., a company that specializes in proton radiation therapy, according to state lobbying records.

Neither Norris nor other officials with either nonprofit responded to requests for comment.

Perdue, the former CEO of Dollar General, faces a runoff on July 22 against Kingston. The two men emerged as the top-two vote-getters in the state’s May 20 primary, but neither garnered more than 50 percent of the vote.

The winner will face Democrat Michelle Nunn in November.

Perdue campaign spokesman Derrick Dickey said he did not know who was behind the nonprofits funding the Citizens for a Working America PAC.

“An important race such as this one is bound to draw attention from outside groups,” Dickey said. “We do not coordinate with groups outside the campaign, so you probably know as much as I do.”

Meanwhile, Kingston campaign spokesman Chris Crawford argued that television ads from Perdue’s “shady, out-of-state super PAC” represented an effort to “mislead voters” about Kingston’s “proven conservative record.”

Crawford continued: “If these groups and those funding them have nothing to hide, why are they intentionally subverting pubic disclosure?”

The only other donor to the Citizens for a Working America PAC this year is New York-based Paladin Holdings LLC, which gave $5,000 in May.

That limited liability company is connected to Paul Seid, an executive at Strategic Data Marketing, a firm that provides market research services to the dental industry.

“It’s so ugly!” she squealed, burying her face in the puffy shoulder of her friend’s coat. They squealed together. It spread like a super-virus among the tween girls who surrounded them.

In her defense, it was not the most attractive preserved carcass of a giant sea squid (Architeuthis dux) that the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History could have presented. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought I’d accidentally wandered into one of the Alien movie franchise displays at Madame Tussaud’s in Washington, DC.

In defense of the squid, none of these little girls on their school field trip were going to be winning any “Miss Tween DC” pageant anytime soon. It wasn’t their fault; they were simply all at that age of having no idea what to do with their budding womanhood nor their personal grooming habits. Soon, someone was going to have to introduce them to some tritely named deodorant product and an astringent.

I imagined one of these adolescent girls preserved in glass in one of the sprawling halls of this very museum, perused by one of our future descendants, or maybe by the alien race that eventually takes over our planet. “Oh, it’s so ugly!” the alien would cry upon seeing the floating thing labeled “LOLol-icus omg-ipod, Female,” and then bury its horns in the prehensile arm bud of its friend, horrified by the specimen’s oily complexion and awkward fashion choices.

“Well, I think it’s beautiful,” I said aloud to no one. It was probably wasted on them, but I didn’t care. I was uncommonly free of any social responsibility or concern for what others thought of me. I was solo today in my DC adventure; I was visiting a friend who was previously engaged for the day. I had spent the morning in the sculpture park by the ice skating rink in the Capital Mall, marveling at the beauty of life and feeling very full of myself for it. I had come upon the museum and stumbled in, lured by the promise of dinosaur and butterfly exhibits–two of my favorite things.

Dinosaurs are both fascinating and innocuous to me; I cannot help but imagine having been on the earth at the same time as these magnificent beasts. It is easy to do because they have become extinct and taken the danger with them. Frolicking in a live butterfly exhibit poses no danger save the risk of inadvertently proclaiming just how gay I actually am. I enjoyed both in turn that day after observing the girls and the giant squid.

I had my “picture” “taken” with a “dinosaur” (the green screen process leaves me at a loss for which word to place in irony quotes), and I listened to an elderly museum volunteer explain the life cycle of the lunar moth. (My God, that poor thing doesn’t even have a mouth! Once it’s out of the cocoon it just starts starving to death (now, that’s an eating disorder to rival any teenage girl’s). But I had an unsettled feeling in me that I just couldn’t shake. Had we been elsewhere in this museum, in another hall, I might have buried my face in the puffy shoulder of one of my friends. I mean, if any of my friends had actually been there wearing a puffy coat.

I think I’ve figured out what that feeling was: discomfort from confronting my own hypocrisy. Some things make me squeal and squirm irrationally, too. Things that I wish I could perceive as a beautiful part of this vast universe, but rather seem to me proof that evil exists, and its pastime is making things that scare the crap out of me.

Take, for instance, scorpions. I mean, no matter how you look at it, scorpions are disgusting. Like they are the depths of ugliness. I’m sorry, but where is your head? You’re all legs, torso, arms, claws, legs, and, yes, a very distinctly horrifying tail. But WHERE IS YOUR HEAD? Your nasty poisonous claw arms come right out of your neck? Seriously, get it together.

I make my way cautiously toward the Live Insect Zoo, fairly certain that the addition of the word “zoo” will make this experience no less horrifying. I’m on a mission. I have a vendetta to settle. I will face this fear head on. I will not cower from something that I don’t understand, something that I fear (with some valid reasons), something that is, yes, another intricate part of this thing called Creation. Whether dinosaur or butterfly, squid or scorpion, extinct or alive-and-well in front of me, each creature deserves to be admired as the beautiful part of the Tree of Life that it is. I will find you, Scorpion Fiend, and I will find you beautiful.

And suddenly I wish I had a girlfriend’s puffy shoulder to bury my face in. I’m staring through the glass at this monster no larger than my pinky finger, sitting peacefully on the sand, barely discernible from the little rocks scattered about its lair, atomic compared to the beast from the sea whose beauty I proclaimed earlier. The scorpion lies still, drawn into itself, its claws tucked under its non-head, its evil tailed curled into its hind-whatever, almost as if it were asleep. And the only thing echoing through my head is “IT’S SO UGLY! OH MY GOD IN HEAVEN, IT’S SO UGLY!”

It’s beautiful, my calm inner voice convinces. It’s beautiful.

“NO, IT’S UGLY. IT’S SO UGLY! GET AWAY BEFORE IT ESCAPES AND ATTACKS!”

That’s absurd. It can’t escape.

“THAT’S WHAT IT WANTS YOU TO THINK!”

The sound of giggling and squealing breaks me from my trance. I look up to see the mob of girls I encountered earlier reacting to finding themselves in the Live Insect Zoo. They take turns pretending to have just noticed where they are and outdo their friends’ freaked reactions. They point at the glass cages lining the walls, finding a new horror in each one.

I look back down into the scorpion’s lair. I can’t tell if it has moved. But for a moment, I think it’s looking at me, studying me with its non-eyes in its non-head.

I slip out of the exhibit, wondering if the insects are looking back at us through the glass, trying not to be terrified. I wonder if they, too, are trying to find us beautiful.

Francis Fukuyama revisited his influential “End of History?” article recently and told readers of the Wall Street Journal (on June 6) that he was right after all. Twenty-five years ago, as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, Fukuyama claimed that “we may be witnessing … the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukuyama has looked around again and once more sees only inferior alternatives to this liberal democracy — for example in China, Russia, and Iran. He might have looked in some other places.

History did not end in 1989, but for too many of the people who bought into Fukuyama’s claim, as well as the related conclusion that capitalism had triumphed, what ended then was thinking.

And what triumphed then was balance. While the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were utterly out of balance, with so much power concentrated in their public sectors, the successful countries of the West maintained a sufficient balance of power across the three main sectors of their societies: public, private, and what can be called plural (civil society, community-based). This includes the United States, which arguably experienced from 1945 to 1989 the greatest period of development — social and political as well as economic — of any nation ever.

But a failure to understand this has been throwing the U.S. and many other countries out of balance ever since, on the side of their private sectors. The consequences of this can be seen in the degradation of our environments, the demise of our democracies, and the denigration of ourselves, who these days are often treated as “human resources” more than human beings.

Read about trade pacts that have allowed global corporations to sue sovereign states for, among other things, trying to curb their citizens’ use of tobacco; the games that Facebook et al. play with their clients’ information; the “level playing field” of globalization that pits the New York Giants against some high-school team from Timbuktu. Note how Adam Smith’s invisible hand in the marketplace has become a visible claw in the U.S. Congress, as corporate entitlements escalate while corporate taxes decline. America is having a tea party, all right: It’s being hosted by private institutions, under the slogan “No taxation with representation.”

Almost two centuries ago Alexis de Tocqueville identified the genius of America as “self-interest rightly understood.” Now the country is dominated by self-interest fatefully misunderstood. Consider the evidence that has been come out about conditions of life for so many Americans, for example in the epidemic of obesity, the escalation of income disparities, the world’s highest rates of incarceration and use of illicit drugs. Most surprising, the country’s greatest claim to fame, social mobility, now ranks well behind some other developed countries. If these are the consequences of “liberal democracy,” then no wonder people in so many places are questioning it.

There is a great deal of political turmoil right now. Like many other prominent commentators, Fukuyama discusses it but hardly explains it. Indeed, he dismisses it as temporary, warning the reader not “to get carried away by short-term developments,” not to judge the performance of a political system “in any given decade.” The problems discussed above have been festering for a lot longer than that.

There may be various reasons for this political turmoil, but one that needs to be faced head-on is that many people in the world — left and right, north and south, east and west — have had it with social imbalance. And that includes a “liberal democracy” seen neither as liberal nor as democratic as authorities in the West would like to believe.

Capitalism has been a significant force in helping create and fund enterprises that supply us with many of our goods and services. It is not, however, the be-all and end-all of our human existence, let alone, as we are finding out in short-sighted stock markets, even an ideal way to fund business enterprises themselves.

The alternative that Fukuyama failed to see can be found in countries that function closer to balance. This requires a strong private sector, to be sure, but acting responsibly, not only with regard to pollution but in how private power is used to influence public policies. It also requires respected governments in the public sector to give significant attention to collective needs for protection, including regulations to curb the excesses of private institutions, global as well as domestic. And reinforcing this, as a third pillar of a balanced society, has to be robust communities in the plural sector, from which come many of our most important social initiatives, for example in the alleviation of poverty, the improvement of education, and campaigns to reverse global warming.

A number of the developed countries, including the United States, were closer to this before 1989, and some do retain it to a considerable degree. Germany, for example, has one of the most vibrant economies in the world, together with high wage rates and, for decades, significant worker representation on the boards of its corporations. Brazil, despite its problems, has perhaps the most vibrant plural sector of any country, with people engaged in all kinds of novel social initiatives, many as cooperative efforts across the sectors. A most remarkable example is how the country dealt with its HIV/AIDS crisis.

Francis Fukuyama has looked back economically. The rest of us need to look forward socially, with eyes wide open, to understand what has been happening in this world, for better and for worse. Then, perhaps, we shall be able to use our human resourcefulness to avoid what could be the end of our history.

Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University, has posted an electronic pamphlet entitled Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center on mintzberg.org and is preparing it in book form.

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