SCOTUS campaign finance decision: Some say “Game over”
January 22, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off
To be sure, there is a lot of support — mostly from conservatives — for yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend as much as they want in supporting or opposing political candidates.
But the ruling has also set off a fury of apocalyptic posting by progressives and other observers who see it as the last step in paving the way for absolute rule by the rich.
Hysteria or harsh new reality? You decide….
I’ve always wondered if I would have recognized the end of the Roman Republic if I had been alive at that time.
Today I saw rhe end of the American Republic. We are now just a plutocracy. What will it be like to live in a purely Feudalistic Corporate society?
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Pretty cool! I get to watch and be part of the end of democracy and an empire. Now, the corporations can simply buy their puppets into every seat in congress—don’t even have to pretend to be doing anything other than filling the seats with “yes-men”, who are going to go to DC and finally, completely handover all our money to mega-corporations. Imagine the ramifications of this: Say Wall Street wants a constitutional amendment making it illegal to tax banks or wages over $100,000 per-year—they’ll just buy 100 Liebermans and 530+ Republicans in the House and…just like that, CEOs get to write and pass laws. Great day for democracy, no?
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Corporations want to be able to pollute freely, to mislead consumers, to include whatever ingredients in our food that they like, to keep all information on their activities and operations secret from consumers. When they have packed the congress and the executive branches – soon – whatever regulations which remain after Bush will be gone. Probably with doublespeak to make people think things are more transparent and consumer-friendly. Unless the actual people at the corporations have a change of thinking, things will get really bad.Somewhere, the ghost of Alexander Hamilton is laughing.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that placing restrictions on political campaign spending by corporations represents a violation on free speech. This is, of course, utter nonsense. Natural rights such as the right to free speech are possessed by human beings, not artificial entities like corporations. A corporation has no more an inherent right to donate to a political campaign than does a puddle of water.
The idea of corporate personhood is an insidious legal concept that should be rejected with maximum prejudice. After all, can the entity known as “Bank of America” or “Walmart” walk into a county courthouse and register to vote?
If the executives of a corporation want to donate their own money to a political campaign, they are as free to do so as any other citizen. But they have no moral right, and should have no legal right, to rob the company coffers of shareholder money and funnel it to political candidates their shareholders may or may not support. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous on the face of it. The same, by the way, is true of labor union bosses using the funds of the union members.
Beyond the abstract outrages inherent in this court decision, its practical impact is likely to be extremely damaging to American democracy. Without any restrictions, corporations will be able to use their gargantuan financial weight to flood the airwaves and mail boxes with virtually unlimited advertisements attacking or supporting political candidates. If the past is any guide, these ads will be mere twenty-second soundbites designed to create false caricatures, utterly devoid of any meaningful content. The grassroots efforts of ordinary citizens, the true currency of genuine democracy, simply won’t be able to compete.
Genuine democracy can only function when all viewpoints have a roughly equal opportunity for expression, and that requires the playing field to be as level as possible. If the financial power of the corporations is allowed to sweep away the words of ordinary citizens, then our elections are no better than the sham elections held by tin-pot dictatorships all over the world, in which the ruling party’s control of the media ensures that the people hear only good things about the incumbents and only bad things about the challengers.
This decision is terrible news, and unfortunately not likely to be overturned anytime soon. It is yet more evidence of the critical need for fundamental reforms of the American electoral system on all levels. We need public financing of elections to ensure a more level playing field, we need redistricting reform to prevent partisan gerrymandering, and we need many other reforms…
Main Line Investors stock market analysis
The Supreme Court destroyed American Democracy Thursday. Stick a fork in it. We are done. The grand experiment in democracy called the United States of America had a nice run, about 235 years, but it has been destroyed today, Thursday, January 21st, 2010 from within… The Supreme Court virtually assured we will be completely ruled by an Oligarchy from now on, which will of course lead to dictatorship, as we saw happened in both ancient Greece and ancient Rome. The Constitution has been destroyed. What did the gang of five do? The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that corporations are people, and therefore have the right to spend all the money they want to in support of any candidate they choose. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the first amendment right of free speech because they are “people.”
They have erred of course, and violated the intent of the U.S. Constitution. They have stretched the definition of “people” to non-people…They have redefined the plain definition of a word to something totally different than that word. Corporations are not people. That is common sense and plain to any rationally thinking honest person with a soul. Corporations do not vote. Corporations do not run for election to political office. Corporations are legal creations, associations of people with human souls (shareholders) who already have the right to vote and hold political office. The human souls who are shareholders are not the same as the corporation itself. They are different.
This ruling undermines the integrity of the election system. It throws out over a century of restrictions imposed by Congress against corporations so that they would not influence the outcome of elections. Corporations have an unfair advantage over the small guy, over real people, in the amount of money they control.
What does this mean? It means future Supreme Court Justices will be appointed by presidents who have been bought, purchased, and are controlled by corporations, and confirmed by U.S. senators who also have been purchased by corporations. It means Exxon Mobil, who earn $45 billion a year, can spend any amount of money they want on advertisements supporting a political candidate. It means any candidate who wants to get elected will cut deals with corporations in exchange for their billions in advertising support. It means Goldman Sachs will decide elections. It means Chubb and Cigna and General Electric and Microsoft and Astra Zeneca will put their people in place in our government, who will pass and enforce legislation favorable to their special interests.
Those who are happy with the Supreme Court’s decision believe that large corporations are good, that they know what is best for us, that we should yield our rights and interests for the greater good as defined by large corporations’ boardrooms. It means more Enrons, more AIGs, more Lehman Brothers, more World Coms. It means gasoline prices of $10 a gallon if Exxon Mobil decides it needs the money, it means free loans to Wall Street firms so they can invest the money and make more profits and distribute larger bonuses to executives….
It means the elimination of antitrust laws prohibiting monopolies, it means the gobbling up of small businesses through unfair business practices. It means more wars so large corporations that produce military resources can profit. It means the changing of all laws and regulations to suit the desires of large corporations. It means no benefits for full time workers. It means requiring more hours or risk getting fired. It means euthanizing patients who are sick and costing insurance companies too much to keep alive.
This Supreme Court ruling changes everything. Whether you are conservative or liberal, you are now a slave, a serf, within the new ruling class, the large corporations. Power will be in the hands of the few CEOs and majority shareholders of the large corporations. Elected officials will be puppets.
The result cannot be good. For those of you who thought those large Head & Shoulders patterns in major stock indices with downside targets of zero were ridiculous, I’ll bet none of you anticipated this Supreme Court ruling. Markets know the future. They know where they are headed next. They foresee tomorrow’s news today. There are likely more surprises coming down the pike, which will assure the destruction of capitalism, of world economies. This is scary stuff. This decision by the Supreme Court has arrived like a thief in the night. It sets the table for one-world government as future purchased politicians yield to the wishes of large multi-national corporation sponsors.
American Constitution Society blog
With today’s decision in Citizens United, the Roberts Court has proudly unveiled the Anatole France First Amendment. “The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges and beg in the streets,” Anatole France famously wrote. After today, the First Amendment, in its majestic impartiality, will allow ordinary citizens and massive corporations alike to spend as much as they desire to elect their preferred candidates to office.
During the 2007-2008 election cycle . . . FEC-registered political parties spent $1.5 billion, and federal PACs spent $1.2 billion, while the Fortune 100 companies had combined revenues of $13.1 trillion and profits of $605 billion. If those 100 companies alone had devoted just one percent of their profits (or one-twentieth of one percent of their revenues) to electoral advocacy, such spending would have more than doubled the federally-reported disbursements of all American political parties and PACs combined.
One of the most striking features of the majority opinion is thus the disconnect between its rhetoric – which frames the ideal of protecting the political arena from the terrible dangers of public oversight – and the reality – namely, the massive damage the decision itself will do to the political arena and the ideal of self governance by unleashing for-profit corporate treasury funds in the electoral sphere. At the heart of this disconnect is the deeply flawed assumption that political spending by an artificial, entirely state-created entity such as a for-profit corporation serves precisely the same function of self-expression and political actualization as it does for an individual person…
Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.
But the majority’s decision to overrule decades of precedent in order to unleash for-profit corporate participation in the political marketplace displays an even more striking disconnect when we think about the timing of the decision. The notion of perfecting our democracy by casting off all restrictions on corporate political spending comes on the heels of massive and appalling failures of corporate governance in the economic sphere itself – the very sphere for which the corporate form was created. Unrestrained and under-regulated pursuit of corporate profit helped spark a financial meltdown that wiped out $2 trillion in retirement savings in 15 months, lost 2 million homes to foreclosure over the past two years; and saw the disappearance of 7.2 million jobs. In the wake of all this, the Roberts Court’s response is to ask “What could possibly go wrong from putting corporations in charge of politics too?”
The reform movement is gearing up quickly to move from outrage to action. The responses vary. Many are calling on a renewed push for public financing of congressional elections to help give citizens a place at the table; others are urging the need for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision; and others are proposing shareholder protection measures that would give shareholders greater control over political spending by corporations. All of these approaches have promise and should be widely debated in the coming days.
Just a small sampling, but you get the picture…
