WGA West’s Political Action Committee Raised A Record $286,000 For Candidates Last Year
The WGA West’s Political Action Committee last year raised a record $286,000 for federal and state candidates – all Democrats.
The PAC, which also endorsed Joe Biden for president and Kamala Harris for vice president, told guild members today: “As we look to restoring, healing, building and gaining with new leadership, let’s not forget the role writers played in bringing about this historic change. Over the past four years, we organized, mobilized and fundraised, helping flip the House in 2018 and the Senate and White House in 2020.”
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The guild’s PAC said it supported 51 federal and state candidates in 2020 with donations from 837 members, including more than 400 who never had contributed through the PAC before. And after the general election in November, it raised another $20,000 to support Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia Senate runoff elections.
“With a slim majority of allies in Congress who align with the WGAW’s values, now is the time to hold those in power accountable for their promises,” the PAC said. “It will be a long road to recovery, but if one thing is clear from the last four years, we can’t be complacent, we must stay engaged.”
The WGA West Political Action Committee, which relies on voluntary contributions from the guild’s members, helps to elect candidates who support the guild’s public policy priorities. They include an open Internet, the prevention of further corporate concentration of the nation’s media; the protection of union pension and health plans, the rights of workers to form and join unions and the defense of copyright protections and support for reasonable efforts to eliminate piracy.
The PAC also said “bye-bye” to Ajit Pai, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and welcomed President Biden’s appointments of FCC acting chair Jessica Rosenworcel and the Federal Trade Commission’s acting chair Rebecca Slaughter, both of which the PAC called “welcome news for writers and our progressive policy agenda.”
“We expect acting chair Rosenworcel to prioritize undoing the deregulatory damage of Ajit Pai’s tenure, including restoring strong net neutrality rules and bridging the digital divide, an issue she has championed at the FCC and one that has taken on even greater importance during the pandemic,” the PAC said. “As the media landscape continues to change with the dominance of streamers and the new gatekeeping powers of connectivity devices, like Roku, we will also explore new ways for the FCC to assert its jurisdiction over online video distribution, and advocate for increased protections for independent and diverse content producers. And we will call on the FCC to take an expansive view of its powers to review media mergers, something it declined to do in the case of the AT&T-Time Warner and Disney-Fox mergers.”
Slaughter, who has served on the Federal Trade Commission since 2018, “has been a vocal advocate for greater resources for the agency, while tackling threats to competition and promoting equity and inclusion in media,” the PAC said. “As the FTC reasserts its authority to challenge anticompetitive mergers and hold tech giants accountable, we will press the agency to investigate competition in the media and telecom industry, and use its antitrust enforcement power to address depressed wages, worker exploitation, and limited economic mobility.”
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