The Left loves to lament the evil-corporations spending money on political matters -- supporting presumably conservative political candidates and causes.   The presumption is that the "working class" party is buried by the profligate political contributions of the unfettered Fat Cats using "Independent Expenditure" (IE) campaign committees. But there are two important aspects they fail to mention:

1.  Corporations give to whoever is in power, attempting to buy access and influence.  Depending on the jurisdiction, corporations often give as much or more to Democrats as Republicans.  In the aggregate, ideology takes a back seat in such distributions.

2.  The biggest "corporate" givers donate almost exclusively to Democrats and their causes.  And these "businesses" are indeed not corporations at all -- they are labor unions.

What I particularly relish is that frequently this spending information is available on liberal research sites tailored to lambast corporate influence on politics.  But being honest in their data, the true owners and operators of politicians becomes readily apparent with just a little digging -- in this case, on the www.followthemoney.org website.  

Here's a chart of the "Independent Expenditures" in California during the 2010 election year (I can't get the chart to print in this blog format):

http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance/state_ie_spenders.phtml?y=2010&s=CA

There were 111 Independent Spenders, totaling almost $39 million. Consider the bigger spenders of these groups -- the ones that spent over $50,000.

There were 28 such entities, broken down as follows:  

·       SIXTEEN of the 28 IE groups were totally funded by labor unions directly. 

·       Four more were Democrat leaning (including the Democrat Party, which gets big funding from labor).  

·       Two were GOP -- including the Republican Party.  

·       Five were GOP leaning.  

·       One was an unknown. 

Just counting these 16 top labor groups, labor spent $21,360,000 of the $39,000,000 spent by all 112 groups (most of the $50,000 and under groups were also labor groups, and are not counted in this figure).

The California Democratic Party spent $8,215,000, the Republican Party $3,335,000. 

But let's narrow it down further.  Consider just the top 10 IE groups:

Seven of the top ten are labor unions, spending an incredible total of $20,598,000.

Aside from the two parties, only one GOP IE is in the top ten -- and it spent only $1,600,000. 

There is far more IE money spent in CA on local campaigns and propositions -- these amounts apparently cover only state matters.  

Clearly the labor unions rule the roost in California campaign spending -- THEY should get the majority of the credit for our state’s fiscal meltdown.  That's why "paycheck protection" -- the ending of mandatory collection of union dues by governments for political purposes -- is so desperately needed in California.