How One Guy Stood Up to the Koch Brothers and Won!

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/public-interest-activists-wins-million-dollar-fine-against-koch-brothers



It’s rare that campaign finance reformers win in our era of billionaires bankrolling elections and political campaigns. But that’s exactly what happened this week as the California Fair Political Practices Commission announced $16 million in penalties, including a $1 million fine for secretive groups funded by the right-wing Koch brothers.

During the 2012 presidential election, California political circles were shocked to learn that two Arizona-based non-profits were poised to spend $15 million to try to defeat Gov. Jerry Brown’s ultimately successful tax hike, Proposition 30, and to support an ultimately unsuccessful measure, Proposition 32, which would have crippled labor union organizing.

At the time, the big mystery was who bankrolling the secretive Arizona groups and the California political committees receiving the windfall? This week, a lot of praise went to the FPPC’s Chairwoman, Ann Ravel, who announced a legal settlement naming some of the donors and the fines. She soon heads to Washington as one of two new Federal Election Commission members.

But the penalties—the largest in California history—only came because public-interest advocates led by Derek Cressman at Common Cause’s Sacramento office filed the complaint with the FPPC to require the groups to disclose their donors. Cressman is one of three Democrats running for California secretary of state. On Friday, he recounted how he and others followed hints and ended up with a multi-million dollar fine against some the country’s richest Republicans.