Thread by @JewhadiTM

How Influential Is @AIPAC? Less Than Beer Sellers, Public Accountants, and Toyota

A list of lobbies and their spending may surprise @IlhanMN and her supporters (but it wouldn't if they bothered to become informed)

tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an…

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s controversial comments, repeatedly suggesting that the relationship between the United States and Israel is fueled by vast sums of lobbying money, have been condemned by several of her fellow Democrats.

Still, her allegations linger , with The New York Times publishing a story seriously examining Omar’s premise and wondering “Has Aipac—founded more than 50 years ago to ‘strengthen, protect and promote the U.S.-Israel relationship’—become too powerful?”

In the online edition of the article, the question was positioned directly below an image of a pro-Israel activist in tefillin.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the organization under discussion was one of the biggest political spenders in America.

In reality, @AIPAC is a public affairs committee - NOT a PAC; as a result, the group itself donates nothing to candidates or campaigns. By far the largest pro-Israel donor to political candidates last election cycle was JStreetAC, which gave ENTIRELY to Dems.

AIPAC has a unique model that a simple dollar comparison might miss. AIPAC-linked activists often begin donating to future members of Congress early in their political careers, thus encouraging other pro-Israel donors to fund and support candidates with long-term promise.

Pro-Israel activists are a political force, but the reasons apparently go beyond sheer spending power or the influence of AIPAC-linked networks.

Pro-Israel donors were’ the 34th largest-giving interest group to members of Congress in 2018, slightly behind the nonprofit sector and slightly ahead of building-trades unions, neither of which are generally thought of as the invisible hand guiding American policy.

Even a large and impactful donor network is fairly useless without a Washington operation that can translate its priorities into actual legislation. The way AIPAC is talked about, you’d think they’d be a lobbying juggernaut, surely one of the largest in the nation’s capital.

Wrong again: For the period between 1998 and 2018, AIPAC didn’t make a dent in the Center for Responsive Politics’ list of the top-spending lobbying groups.

The US Chamber of Commerce spent $1.5 billion during that span, with the National Association of Realtors coming in a distant second, at $534 million.

In 2018, top spenders included Google parent company Alphabet, which spent $21.7 million in Washington, and Facebook, which shelled out over $12 million to lobbyists that year.

The third-largest spender of 2018 was the Open Society Policy Center, a project of the notably Israel-critical billionaire George Soros, which ran up a $31.5 million tab in its attempts to influence the federal government.

That nearly doubled the organization’s $16 million in spending in 2017, another year that AIPAC failed to crack the top 50, unlike such notorious civic menaces as American Amusements and AARP.

In 2018, total pro-Israel lobbying spending was around $5M, of which AIPAC accounted for $3.5M. In contrast, Native American casinos spent around $22M that year. By Tablet’s count, AIPAC was the 147th highest-ranked entity in terms of lobbying spending in 2018.

Their expenditures were about the same as International Paper, a company which is seldom tweet-stormed or even written about.

The American Association of Airport Executives and Association of American Railroads outspent AIPAC by nearly a million dollars each—sensible, given the rivalry between the respective modes of transportation whose interests they represent.

It’s $2 million behind both American Airlines and the Recording Industry Association of America, entities whose malign influence has gone regrettably underexamined over the years.

** Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King, Jr. **

** The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance. Karl A. Menninger **