Lately we’ve been talking about the vast amounts of money that the super-wealthy have been pouring into politics with the hope of buying elections for pro-corporations, anti-worker candidates who will further tip the scales of power against working people’s interests.

One of the key front groups for the 1 percent is Crossroads. “Crossroads” is actually multiple groups formed by former GOP operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, with the shared goal of electing anti-worker candidates. The most important entities within the Crossroads family are American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. 

Some folks have been trying to make political hay with the easy availability of union financial information. As noted in an earlier post, however, The Wall Street Journal’s methodology in “discovering” the levels of labor union spending was fatally flawed and painted a false (and politically advantageous) picture.

And now Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC, is using ridiculous fictions to try to defend the activities of the Karl Rove-backed group, claiming that the hundreds of millions of dollars that American Crossroads will spend on the election will somehow be dwarfed by what unions will spend.  

With less than 100 days until the election, campaign finance is a topic that everybody in Washington, D.C., and on TV is talking about. Yet according to a recent poll by the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center, most Americans are unfamiliar with outside campaign spending and don’t know important terms and concepts.

AFL-CIO Field Communications Coordinator Andrew Richards sends us this follow up from Ohio on the dirty tricks campaign to kill collective bargaining for public employees.

Although nearly every TV station in Ohio and West Virginia are refusing to air a campaign ad that distorts the views of Marlene Quinn, a 78-year-old great-grandmother from Cincinnati, Ohio, Gov. John Kasich and his operatives defend their decision to use their deceptive commercial. (To date, 30 stations have pulled the ad.)