The Suppression of The Little Guy
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Supreme Court of the United States today ruled to ease restrictions on corporate campaign donations. This statement from CNN reflects my sentiments:
The Supreme Court has given big business, unions and nonprofits more power to spend freely in federal elections, a major turnaround that threatens a century of government efforts to regulate the power of corporations to bankroll American politics. [emphasis added].Says Obama:
The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics...It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.This, again, reflects my sentiment well. Of course, I am not surprised Obama is not a giant fan of this decision; he raised gobs on money online a couple bucks at a time. But that was when raising gobs of money online could be competitive with limitations set on corporate giving. Now? There's no way you or I can compete. In my mind, the playing field was level when a Wall Street Exec or Random Mega Rich Guy had the same giving limits as me. But now? This Fall will make 2008 look like a school bake sale by comparison.
From supporters of the decision:
The Supreme Court's decision today is a victory for the First Amendment and the right of all Americans to participate in the political process," said Theodore Olson, who successfully argued the case for the conservative Citizens UnitedI get that everyone is protected by the First Amendment, but this statement is tied to a much older decision whereby "corporations" are "people." I'm not a fan of that train of thought at all. Where this sentiment really bothers me is in Kennedy's majority opinion:
When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. "The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."Corporations can have PACs, and this is unaffected by this decision. A PAC is how they exercise their opinions, as corporations, about candidates. What a corporation has that I do not have, as a real person, not a "corporate" person, is enough money, unlimited in some cases, to really really really make my voice heard.
The problem extends itself. How many, say, progressive corporations and labor unions are there? And how many conservative corporations are there? And how many more of one is there than the other, and what are their combined voices, and more importantly, their combined media-buying power, capable of in terms of influence above and beyond the other?
And why the fuck should a corporation, who is not a person, have that kind of say anyway?
Let's take this out of the realm of "this is bad for Democrats/Progressives." This is simply a bad ruling that yet again places corporate interests above and beyond the ability of the average citizen to find equal voice in the political arena.
The issue hinged on whether corporations' ability to pour money into election campaigns could be strictly regulated, or whether corporations have free-speech rights to spend their cash to influence elections, just as individual donors do. In this ruling, the justices also nullified earlier rulings upholding the core of a 6-year-old federal law aimed at curbing corporate campaign spending. Under current law, there are severe restrictions on campaign ads used by corporations for federal elections. They generally must be issue-focused -- talking about abortion or taxes, for instance -- and not expressly supporting or opposing a candidate. Those limits have now been generally removed.I think even giving corporations the ability to weigh-in on issues was bad enough, but at least their power to silence me was limited to a certain extent. Unless I really really cared about the issue ad, I'd skip it.
the bottom line for me: What this does is force political candidates to bow further to corporate interests so that they can reap the benefits of even more money. Read more...
