Corporations is People ☀
Like the Church, the Monarchy, and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution.
Some thoughts and a comprehensive roundup of recent posts on the ramifications of the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
Corporations is People
Corporations were given the rights, of immortal persons. But then special kinds of persons. Persons who had no moral conscience.
Corporations are artificial entities, but wield more living power than real life being. While it’s possible for one to go bankrupt, a financially healthy corporation exists in perpetuity. It might be levied fines, its officers prosecuted for legal malfeasance, or the target of lawsuits (though one political party has a contract target of eliminating such acts) but it can’t be prosecuted for murder and executed. Oddly ironic, given the United States creation history — considering its rebellion against an alliance of monarchy and state sanctioned multinational chartered corporations (i.e., East India Company). In fact, until the late 19th century, corporate charters were revoked if they compromised the public good. And prior to the Civil War, the state imposed limits on profits, ownership and charters were only granted for finite durations.
A corporation is an amoral, man created construct that exists for the sole purpose of self profit. By law, the corporation’s only consideration is its bottom line, and any action taken by a corporate officer in the interest of altruistic goodwill without regard to self-aggrandizement is verboten. Which means the public interest, environmental externalities (i.e., pollution) is forsaken unless it falls under the framework of corporate self-preservation. The excellent documentary film The Corporation puts “The Corporation” on the couch and concludes, per its casting as a “person”, it fits the clinical definition of a psychopath.
Legal Opinions
I sympathize with the first amendment absolutists like Glenn Greenwald that believe results are immaterial to the principle of free speech codified in the Bill of Rights. It’s about the only line of reasoning in support of the SCOTUS ruling I can grok. Other charges claimed that a SCOTUS ruling in the opposite manner would have meant such media (like the Hillary attack movie in the Citizens United case) could be banned from all sorts of other publishing venues. Here I insert the ubiquitous IANAL disclaimer, but I don’t believe that’s a valid counterpoint — radio and television bands, since inception, have been placed with constraints that they must serve the public interest. The reasoning being that the airwaves belong to the public, and there’s a limited, finite cap on channels in those broadcast spectrums. Yes, the advent and proliferation of cable and satellite programming deliver hundreds of new channels, but for practical purposes, it’s still a limited platform. Totally unlike print and web publishing outlets, where said media creation is available to all.
Now in the Age of the Internet, as old worlds collide with new paradigms, one might push back that the line between traditional publisher and new media upstart grows fuzzier, and a clear demarcation may be impossible to make in a few years (or even now). And that’s a valid point. I’m really interested in the variety of takes from legal trained minds on this matter — I could be completely mistaken in my assessment.
A different wrinkle is the claim that the ruling matters not as politicians and legislatures are already bought and sold. The lobbyist to congress critter ratio is now approximately 1000 to 1 (or greater), and that was a trend long in effect before the conservative SCOTUS justices made their ruling in this case. Some figure that the ruling is just an official consummation of an existing practice. Or even if the dissenters had their way, all would be for naught, as money would just flow like water around the restrictions and meander into election campaigns via a different, but sanctioned route.
Still, I come back to the fact that we do indeed place constraints on “free speech”. You’re free to have your say but not to spread lies and falsehoods about another (although a Florida Court of Appeals has already ruled of a Fox News assertion that “under the First Amendment”, broadcasters have the right to to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves”) Or as the cliche goes, “shouting fire in a crowded theater”. The FCC itself is chartered with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. Agree or not, the government bans profanity and sexually explicit content from mainstream broadcast channels. Also, the FCC stipulates that licensees serve the public interest and until the Reagan presidency, enforced the Fairness Doctrine.
Democracy Ltd.
In one of the cited articles below (a piece by Juan Cole), the author argues that the SCOTUS decision pales in comparison to a potential abolition of Net Neutrality. But that’s a naive assertion, given that bundles of corporate loot can be funneled into stealthy internet campaigns. It’s already happening — the web is awash in astroturf schemes to influence political thought or just macro pasting a presence across popular web locales. Actually, it’s nothing new, as this instructed “cut and paste” “letter to the editor” machination is no one-off phenomenon. Only a fool would deny that Wikipedia, newspaper forums, popular blogger comments, etc.… are infected with such agitprop.
The conservative brain trust was quick to rush to the defense of SCOTUS justice Alito who defied President Obama’s remarks on the ruling, repeating that it was just poppycock about foreign interests exercising control on U.S. policy. But Alito and loyalists are both rooted in ignorance — just examine the composition of “American” multinational corporate executive leadership and significant shareholders — there is a large degree of foreign influence.
Resource Addendum
It is a strange moment in jurisprudence. On the one hand, corporations frequently restrict the expressions of employees or others within their purview: what they may wear, what their T-shirts may say, what political messages they may post on the walls of their cubicles. On the other, the inanimate entity of the corporation itself will now enjoy a range of First Amendment benefits not limited by principles of debate or substance, and it will be constrained only by the size of its treasury in deploying whatever technological bullhorn has the greatest chance of drowning out everyone else.
With the Citizens United ruling, the court revealed the depth of its contempt for judicial restraint, original intent, and deference to the legislature. The ruling is nothing short of a coup, a fundamental change in the structure of the America polity. It will work not only to the defeat of democracy, but to the destruction of what’s left of the small businessman. From this day forward, no one will hold office who does not have the approval of the corporations, no small business will exist save by their sufferance.
Through Domestic-Controlled Corporations, Congress Needs to Act Quickly to Close the Loophole Thus, a corporation organized in Germany, or with its headquarters in China, remains subject to a ban on spending in U.S. elections. But there are domestic corporations - those organized under state law in the United States - which are and can be controlled by foreign interests. Those kinds of corporations - domestic corporations owned by or controlled by foreign governments, foreign corporations or foreign individuals - are not in any way prevented by section 441e from spending corporate treasury funds to influence U.S. elections. Prior to the Citizens United decision, these corporations were prevented from spending their funds on expenditures to influence federal campaigns by the general prohibition on corporate campaign spending. But now that that prohibition has been struck down, these foreign-controlled domestic companies are free to spend their treasury funds directly to influence U.S. elections.
The Supreme Court recently ruled 5-4 that corporations can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose candidates. Corporations! Since there are no restrictions on the citizenship of the owners of corporations foreign companies and governments now have a direct way to manipulate our laws and regulations. Outside interests have been influencing American opinion for decades, but have not before this been able to directly support or oppose candidates. The Washington Times, Fox News, and other corporations with significant foreign ownership already work full-time to turn American public opinion against our own government. “Free trade” advocacy groups with funding from outside our borders work to get us to open our markets to imports that close our factories, outsource our jobs, lower our standard of living and drive us into ever-increasing debt. We have seen this with “grassroots” lobbying on important issues like climate change, trying to make people think that the science is a “hoax”: see Grassroots’ Opposition to Clean Energy Reform Bankrolled by Foreign Oil, Petro-Governments. But this new ability to directly support or oppose candidates offers a vastly more effective and immediate way for America’s competitors to achieve their goals. What will they go after first? Of course a top goal of our competitors is to take down our manufacturing capacity — the foundation of a country’s economic power.
If Persons Were Treated Like Corporations
The State of The Union: The People vs. The Public
The Supreme Court has just anointed the market’s civic legitimacy by removing all limits on private corporate money spent on public elections. The aim of the First Amendment was to secure equality via multivocality. The Court’s decision does precisely the opposite, privileging the powerful and skewing free expression. This decision is not however an aberration but a perfect expression of the people’s current conviction that unleashing private money is itself a public good — which is why Justice Alito was shaking his head in disbelief when the President criticized the decision in front of Congress. They may rag at banks, but the reality is that most Americans today fear their own public institutions far more than they fear private corporations deploying bottomless treasuries in the name of special interests, something Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell captured in his response to Obama when he said we have to “restore the proper, limited role of government at every level.” The conventional wisdom calls the rage of the American public against the Republican Party last year and the Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts this year “populism,” and pundits are asking today whether the President is trying to restore his own “populist” credentials. But when a democratic people rages against its chosen representatives and runs political campaigns against itself, when politicians who spend years in D.C. and define what “Washington” is then vilify it at every turn, it suggests not populism but democratic self-betrayal. It’s not just that government serves us and protects us: it is us; which makes the antagonism to government a kind of civic self-loathing. When we vote against incumbents , we are really voting against ourselves incarnated as politicians, against what we did as citizens last time around.
The Principled and Pure Court?
If the government’s reason for silencing corporations is that they don’t like what corporations would say — if it thinks, for example, that it would be too Republican, or too pro-business — then that’s got to be a terrible reason for the regulation, and we all ought to support a decision that strikes a law so inspired. That, however, is not the only, or the best, justification behind the regulations at issue in Citizens United. Those rules not about suppressing a point of view. They’re about avoiding a kind of dependency that undermines trust in our government. The concentrated, and tacitly, coordinated efforts by large and powerful economic entities — made large and powerful in part because of the gift of immunity given by the state — could certainly help lead many to believe “money is buying results” in Congress. Avoiding that belief — just like avoiding the belief that money bought results on the Supreme Court — has got to be an important and valid interest of the state.
Justice Alito’s conduct and the Court’s credibility
What’s most disturbing here is the increasing trend of right-wing Justices inserting themselves ever more aggressively into overtly political disputes in a way that seriously undermines their claims of apolitical objectivity. Antonin Scalia goes hunting with Dick Cheney, dubiously refuses to recuse himself from a lawsuit challenging the legality of Cheney’s actions, and then rules in Cheney’s favor. Scalia has an increasing tendency to make highly politicized comments about purely political conflicts, most recently defending torture in an interview with 60 Minutes. As part of Clarence Thomas’ promotional efforts to sell his book, he spent substantial time building his conservative icon status with the furthest right-wing media elements — even parading himself around on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program — and turned himself into the food fight of the week between Democrats and Republicans.
If the Constitution were Written Today
Why I’m Calling for a Constitutional Amendment
We need to trust our democracy. We need to believe that its representatives are guided if not by truth, then at least by what their constituents want. Our Framers gave us a Republic in which the government was to be “dependent,” as the Federalist Papers put it, “upon the People.” They were obsessed with assuring that the government be independent of anything else. But the vast majority of Americans do not believe that their government is “dependent upon the People.” The vast majority believes the government is dependent upon money. Most believe “money buys results in Congress.” Most therefore doubt the integrity of this the most important democratic institution established by our Framers. This is a corruption — a corruption of the very institution of our democracy. And this corruption makes it harder for both Reagan Republicans and Progressive Democrats to achieve the substantive ends that each seeks. For 20 out of the last 29 years, we’ve had conservative Republican Presidents. But Reagan Republicans have yet to see the size of government shrink, or the tax code simplified — because Congress has no interest in smaller government or simpler taxes, since both would make it harder to raise campaign funds. Likewise, despite the election of Barack Obama with a super-majority Democratic Congress, Progressive Democrats have watched with disgust as every substantive reform of this administration has been stymied by special interests expert in preserving the status quo.
In Landmark Campaign Finance Ruling, Supreme Court Removes Limits on Corporate Campaign Spending
…we’ve had some terrible Supreme Court interventions against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics. And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That’s one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500. They’re threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy.
The main theoretical flaw in Kennedy’s opinion is different, however. The opinion announces and perpetuates a shallow, simplistic understanding of the First Amendment, one that actually undermines one of the most basic purposes of free speech, which is to protect democracy. The nerve of his argument—that corporations must be treated like real people under the First Amendment—is in my view preposterous. Corporations are legal fictions. They have no opinions of their own to contribute and no rights to participate with equal voice or vote in politics.
I, For One, Welcome Our Corporate Overlords
The flaw is obvious. That the ACLU and Exxon are legally labeled the same thing is not an immutable and natural feature of the legal system. It’s a choice, and like all choices, one that could be changed. “Corporation” is not some inherent label that has been handed down with the Commandments, and figuring out a way to separate those groups created specifically to put forward a political agenda and those pushing a political agenda to serve their larger money-earning purpose should be the goal, rather than simply handing General Electric the (financial) keys to the electoral process.
What happens when the state and the most powerful corporate interests forgo any illusion? I think we’re about to find out. The truth is that there is no necessary narrative outcome. People may get depressed, shrug in apathy, or start a revolution. One thing I will predict with confidence is that the shamelessness will endure. It is our response that is in question.
Last week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission confirms that shamelessness is on the march. The decision was a shameless unleashing of further shamelessness: by a majority of five to four, the justices ruled that there can be no limits on the amount of money that corporations spend trying to influence the outcomes of local and national elections. The majority reached this decision by finding that corporate money is somehow a form of speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. I note for the record that no other country in the world treats it as such.
The Court was wrong in perpetuating the lie that corporations are individuals for the simple reason that corporations are incapable of feeling shame. There is an automaticness to what modern corporations do. If competitors are engaging in high-risk, (temporarily) high-reward activities, then they must do the same in order to remain competitive. That is the inexorable logic of capitalism, especially as practiced by corporations whose directors are unaccountable to the shareholder-owners.
The Urgency of a Teddy Roosevelt Moment
Defenders of this vast expansion of corporate influence piously claim it’s about “free speech.” But since when is a corporation, a creation of laws passed by governments, entitled to the same rights as an individual citizen? This ruling will give large business entities far more power than any individual, unless you happen to be Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates. The only proper response to this distortion of our political system by ideologically driven justices is a popular revolt. It would be a revolt of a sort deeply rooted in the American political tradition. The most vibrant reform alliances in our history have involved coalitions between populists (who stand up for the interests and values of average citizens) and progressives (who fight against corruption in government and for institutional changes to improve the workings of our democracy). It’s time for a new populist-progressive alliance.
Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction
Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive. There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission greatly strengthens the authoritarian domination of the people’s speech, reversing the intent of the Framer’s free speech principle. By freeing unaccountable, global corporations to use their nearly unlimited resources to dominate the political sphere, the authoritarian Court has sacrificed free speech on the altar of greed. They would have us believe that it is the powerful and nearly irresistible voices of the rulers that need liberating.
Moloch is unchained.
In the Hebrew Bible, it is the idolatrous Solomon who builds an altar for the sacrifice of children to Moloch, “the abomination of the sons of Ammon” (1 Kings 11.7). In early 21st Century America, it is the five be-robed authoritarians, led by a dull, uncharismatic elitist with the unpoetic name of John Roberts.
The Iliad is a tragic and bloody tale of the failures of kings and elite warriors. The Old Testament is a colorful compendium of woeful human leadership. Buddha found enlightenment only after forsaking his royal family. Jesus’ radical parables pull the spiritual rug from under the powerful. The lone and rugged western hero of the American imagination loathes power.
The democratic revolutions of the 17th-20th centuries represented the political rise of the tale-tellers. Democracy was designed, in principle, to give the people a voice so that the tragedies of kings could be avoided, that Absalom might live, that there would be no Pilate in need of handwash.
But the American political elites flourish behind the walls of Jericho. We expect too much if we think any of them will, without a popular uprising on par with the abolitionists and civil rights movement, participate in the revolutionary music making that might bring down the walls. The Supreme Court’s ruling undermines both government and the competitive marketplace (by allowing corporations to buy government-enforced market dominance rather than compete for it). But they will not see that. They will see only the possibility of more wealth and power.
All this adds up to yet another example, as if one were needed, that conservative complaints about “judicial activism” are usually nothing more than a code for “judicial outcomes conservatives don’t like.” Citizens United strikes down a major federal statute by taking the extreme step of explicitly overturning the Court’s own precedents, while dismissing a century’s worth of congressional attempts to stop special interests from buying legislation. The argument that the relevant legal materials required the Court to take such a step is flatly incredible. In short, the decision is as pure an example of judicial activism as one could hope to find.
Supreme Court Rules 5-4 Against Campaign Limitations in The Hillary The Movie Case
There is a push now for a constitutional amendment, which I would not favor. It may be time for a paradigm change in how we think about this problem. We have a political failure in our system that is sucking the life out of the Republic. The monopoly of the two parties on power produces endless loops of corruption and conflict. The problem in my view is structural not financial. We need to break the domination of incumbents and the two parties. This can be done with fundamental changes in our primary system, eliminating the electoral college, creating new opportunities for third parties, and other reforms.
Greenwald’s Response to the “Citizen’s United” ruling
No constitutional right is an absolute, and it’s one thing to defend a principle; it’s another to go rigidly fundamentalist about it. So again, no value, no matter how sacred, is absolute, and when it comes to “liberty” rights, they have to be held in a kind of tension with “equality” rights. It’s one thing to say that we’re all free to say our piece; it’s another to say that people with enormous resources should be allowed to buy a monster megaphone to say theirs, just because they have the money to do it. It basically reinforces the idea that some people are more free than others, and that should never be true in the political sphere, where, I would argue, equality should be the dominant principle. (Liberty, the way I think about it, is the dominant principle in the cultural sphere, not the political or economic spheres, but that’s another argument for another day.) If money equals speech, the power of the rich to buy a greater amount of speech creates a fundamental inequality problem, and it diminishes the free speech of citizens with modest means. There’s an injury there that ordinary citizens should be able to seek a remedy for, but after today’s ruling it would seem impossible to do so.
Follow-up on the Citizens United case
But those who argue that (1) corporations have no First Amendment rights and/or (2) restrictions on money cannot violate the free speech clause should stop pretending that the 4 dissenting Justices agreed with you. They didn’t. None of the 9 Justices made those arguments. To the contrary, the entire dissent — while arguing that corporations have fewer First Amendment protections than individuals — is grounded in the premise that corporations do have First Amendment free speech rights and that restrictions on the expenditure of money do burden those rights, but those free speech rights can be restricted when there’s a “compelling state interest.” In this case, the dissenters argued, such restrictions are justified by the “compelling state interest” the Government has in preventing the corrupting influence of corporate money. That’s why the extent of one’s belief in the First Amendment is outcome-determinative here. Those who want to restrict free speech always argue that there’s a compelling reason to do so (“we must ban the Communist Party because they pose a danger to the country”; “we must ban hate speech because it sparks violence and causes a climate of intimidation”; “we must ban radical Muslim websites because they provoke Terrorism”). One can have reasonable debates over the “compelling interest” question as a constitutional matter — and, as I said yesterday, I’m deeply ambivalent about the Citizens United case because that’s a hard question and I do think corporate influence is one of the greatest threats we face — but, ultimately, it’s because I don’t believe that restrictions on political speech and opinions (as opposed to other kinds of statements) can ever be justified that I agree with the majority’s ruling.
The Hypocrisy of Corporate Personhood
Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like.
What the Supreme Court got right
Ultimately, I think the free speech rights burdened by campaign finance laws are often significantly under-stated. I understand and sympathize with the argument that corporations are creatures of the state and should not enjoy the same rights as individuals. And one can’t help but note the vile irony that Muslim “War on Terror” detainees have been essentially declared by some courts not to be “persons” under the Constitution, whereas corporations are. But the speech restrictions struck down by Citizens United do not only apply to Exxon and Halliburton; they also apply to non-profit advocacy corporations, such as, say, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions, which are genuinely burdened in their ability to express their views by these laws. I tend to take a more absolutist view of the First Amendment than many people, but laws which prohibit organized groups of people — which is what corporations are — from expressing political views goes right to the heart of free speech guarantees no matter how the First Amendment is understood. Does anyone doubt that the facts that gave rise to this case — namely, the government’s banning the release of a critical film about Hillary Clinton by Citizens United — is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to avoid? And does anyone doubt that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting the speech of organizations composed of like-minded citizens who band together in corporate form to work for a particular cause?
Luckily for corporations, the activist justices appointed by an earlier version of our corporatist government (the Bush 2 regime) have decided to reverse this process. Instead of acting as as stopgap to preserve constitutional rights, they are serving as a new legislative branch – rewriting the law by declaring it unconstitutional. It is a violation of corporations’ civil liberties to limit their influence over the political process. Even though they are artificial entities, with greater access to capital, infinite longevity, and no interest in or connection to humanity, we now guarantee them the right of free speech. Of course, the right of free speech was created in order for human beings to have the ability to talk back to the corporation – the British East India Trading Company – that was running the colonies before the Revolutionary War. And it was upheld a century later so that laborers could organize unions or speak out against industrial abuses without fear of getting killed. (Even though most unions, perhaps predictably, ended up becoming as abstracted as the corporations they were created to counteract.) Freedom of speech was intended a way for human beings to guarantee their ability speak out against largely systemic and structural repression. Now, that structural repression itself has that same guarantee.
Is the Supreme Court Decision so Important in a Web 2.0 World?
…a much greater danger to the republic than the anointing of corporations as persons with the right to flood our airwaves with propaganda is any attack on Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is the principle that my blog is inexpensive to publish and to access, so that I and my readers have the same advantages in this regard as a corporation would. If the Right Wing ever manages to scale the internet and make me pay $70,000 a year to put up this blog and have it easily available to my readers, it will kill it and would signal a return to push media like the networks. And a push-media world where corporations own the Web and can push at us what they please, including their weird ideas about political reality, really would be Orwellian and dangerous.
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.… …This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching. The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate. The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
Corporations can’t have it both ways - insisting upon the political and civil rights guaranteed human rights under the Constitution, while at the same time refusing to live within the constraints of human life in terms of longevity, size, accountability and support of the communities which grant them their existence.
Supreme Court’s momentous decision will derail any financial reform
Conservative Supreme Court justices believe in following precedent and narrowly interpreting the Constitution, except when they don’t. Today’s decision on corporate campaign spending is such an example and it will have far-reaching consequences. The five-justice majority set aside a century of precedents and conveyed essentially full First Amendment speech rights on corporations in ruling that campaign finance limits are unconstitutional. It could unleash up to $1 trillion in corporate money for attack ads in the next election cycle. It also is the culmination of a century of creeping personhood conveyed on corporate entities, beginning with a case involving the Southern Pacific railroad.
A Supreme Victory for Special Interests
This ruling is of the same judical activism ilk that produced Bush v. Gore, not to mention the ensuing eight years of a disastrous Bush/Cheney presidency from which the nation has yet to recover.… …This decision is long, at 183 pages. It includes a powerful dissent by the four centrist justices (there are no liberals on this Court). And the ruling is chocked full of nuanced information that spells out what Congress can and cannot do to reform our dysfunctional and money-hungry election system. This is not a ruling that lends itself to instant analysis.… …Aside from the fact the majority ruling reeks of conservative politics, what I find most striking about conservative judicial activism typified by this ruling is the fact the justices involved are totally out of touch with reality. None of the men involved in this historic decision have been elected to anything, ever. They have no idea how difficult it is for elected officials to deal in the contemporary money-flooded milieu of Washington. The work experience of those who have further opened the floodgates for money in politics all have worked only in the executive branch, high-priced law firms, or the chambers of the lower federal appellate courts. Not since Justice Hugo Black, a former U.S. Senator, retired in 1971 has the Court had a member of Congress on its bench, someone who can explain the real world to the other justices. These conservative justices live in a bubble, and they have little true understanding of what they have done, other than, of course, to know that they have taken care of conservatives, the so-called Citizens United, who filed this lawsuit. (Yes, David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United, is the same fellow who worked overtime to impeach President Bill Clinton.)
Citizens United: The Problem Isn’t the Law, It’s the Court
Progressives may have thought the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts earlier this week was bad news, but today’s Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC may ultimately prove far more devastating.
That is because today, the Court’s conservative majority re-wrote the Constitution to give corporations—never mentioned in the Constitution—the same right to influence the electoral process as ‘We the People.’ As theNYT’s Adam Liptak explains, “Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court … ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.” The justices did what many progressives feared for months they would do: hold that long-standing restrictions on corporate campaign spending violate the First Amendment.
The Court’s ruling could transform our electoral politics. During 2008 alone, Exxon Mobil Corporation generated profits of $45 billion. With a diversion of even two percent of those profits to the political process, this one company could have outspent both presidential candidates and fundamentally changed the dynamic of the 2008 election.
Corporate Money is Just Like a Citizen’s Speech
Once again, the judicial right shows itself to be unrepentant activists, contemptuous of both precedent and the actions of our elected representatives. Anyway, the first thought that leapt to my mind was this quote from the 18th-Century British Jurist, Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who asked “[d]id you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked.” Well, according to the Supreme Court, a corporation may have neither soul nor body, but evidently possesses a mouth that cannot be shut. This strikes me as a decision that is monumental in its implications and staggering in terms of its fundamental badness.
In a ruling that has overwhelming implications for how elections are funded, the Supreme Court has struck down a key campaign-finance restriction that prevents corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads. In a 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case, the door is now wide open for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics. The Republican-appointed right-wing five members of the court explicitly said that corporations are “persons” under the law, and thus entitled to Constitutional rights just like the Founders fought and died to give to you and me. The four dissenters pointed out that corporations will now own politicians, will dominate our politics, and that democracy itself is now at risk. Bennito Mussolini invented a new form of government where corporations ran the government – he called it “fascism.” Welcome to Mussolini’s America.
Lessig on SCOTUS Campaign Finance Decision
Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For All
Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars. This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow “King Corporation” and restore the sovereignty of “We the People”!
SCOTUS: Corporations Are People, Election Spending Is Speech
Free Speech Rights Are For People, Not Corporations
Today’s decision is backwards in many senses. It elevates the majority’s agenda over the litigants’ submissions, facial attacks over as-applied claims, broad constitutional theories over narrow statutory grounds, individual dissenting opinions over precedential holdings, assertion over tradition, absolutism over empiricism, rhetoric over reality.
A Constitutional Amendment for Public Campaign Financing: Now Is the Time
But today’s Supreme Court ruling, declaring corporate cash is protected free speech, opens up the floodgates of corporate influence. And as horrifying as that prospect is, it does create new political possibilities.
Disgust with corporate influence is raging. The appearance of Wall Street influence in the Obama administration contributed to an unthinkable result in the Massachusetts senate race. And the White House dealings with the insurance and drug lobbies during the health care debate have been pilloried on the left and the right.
Now the conservative Supreme Court showed its hand, and shredded our campaign finance laws, leaving our democracy even more vulnerable to special interests.
What better time to raise the stakes.
Put a constitutional amendment on the floor of the House and Senate creating a public campaign finance system banning all private money.
Dare conservatives to side with more corporate influence in our campaigns and our policymaking.
In fact, the Supreme Court had to rule in favor of Citizens United, and what is remarkable is not that it did, but that four Justices dissented. Remember, the government’s position in the case was that under the Constitution, it had the power to ban the distribution of books through Kindle; to prohibit political movies from being distributed by video on demand technology; to prevent Simon & Schuster from publishing, or Barnes & Noble from selling, a 500-page book with even one sentence of candidate advocacy; or to prevent a union from hiring a writer to author a book about the benefits to working Americans of the Obama agenda. For all the outrage about this opinion, I have yet to hear anybody seriously defend that result. The fact that not one of the dissenters could find a middle ground on which to concur in the judgment suggests that the majority was correct – this case was all or nothing. Far from being activist, the majority reached the only logical conclusion. The dissenters were the activists here, prepared to enforce an interpretation of the First Amendment wholly foreign to most Americans.
