Supreme Court

Shiny Happy Corporate People

Richard Eskow — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:53:32 -0400

Mitt Romney got a lot of press for telling a heckler at the Iowa State Fair that "corporations are people." He did not go on to sing that Patti Smith song, People Have the Power.

But corporate "people" certainly do. Their power was on display this week, both in Washington and among the Republicans campaigning for the nomination.

Ordinary People

Here's Romney's quote in context:

"Corporations are people, my friend... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings my friend."

There's an interesting parsing of language going on here. Corporate money does eventually go into some people's pockets, of course, but Romney said "everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people." "The people" is a phrase that refers to everyone -- the citizenry, the polis, the masses ... Romney's implying that corporate earnings go to all of us. The truth is that executive compensation has never been greater when it's compared to worker pay or average family incomes. That's one reason why we've been experiencing a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

But that's not the sort of thing you want to say at a State Fair, is it? In that setting it's better to speak of corporations as "people" - or, if you prefer, as "jes' folks."

But if they're people, why don't you ever see them at state fairs? After all, people love fairs, so why don't they ever go? And when they do go to the fair, shouldn't they be allowed to participate in fun events along with all us other people? Halliburton should be able to swing that big mallet and make the bell ring. Exxon Mobil should be able to enter the 4H drawing and win a side of beef. And Blackwater should be able to shoot the popup prairie dog and win a stuffed animal for its date.

And if you don't feel that way, Mitt Romney's implying you're a bigot. You think some people are better than others. You don't want to be a bigot, do you?

Power to the People

Funny thing is, Romney's questioner wasn't asking him about corporate personhood. He was asking why Romney wants to cut Social Security but while preserving corporate tax breaks. It seemed as if Romney had already memorized this little speech and was looking for a chance to trot it out. He probably had.

Here's the paradox in this whole concept of "corporate personhood." When it comes to rights, Republicans say corporations are people. But when it comes to the responsibilities of personhood - like paying taxes, being sued for negligence or criminal manslaughter, that sort of thing - their response is "Are you crazy? We're talking about corporations here, not people."

The right-wing radicals on the Supreme Court demonstrated this definitional two-step beautifully at the end of the Court's last term. In a pair of decisions that received very little attention, they managed to allow pharmaceutical companies the rights of personhood without the responsibilities. In Sorrell vs. IMS Health, the Court ruled that states couldn't stop drug companies from collecting prescription patterns for individual physicians and then using that data to encourage them to use more expensive drugs. Corporations are people, after all, and that's infringing on their freedom of speech.

But in a second decision, Pliva v. Mensing, the Court ruled that manufacturers of generic drugs had no obligation to tell people about the adverse reactions other people have had to the drug they're selling. If the brand-name manufacturers didn't tell people about those reactions, then the Court said the generic manufacturers don't have to either - even if they know those reactions could lead to death, or to terrible reactions like tardive kinesis.

Corporations are the kind of people who get to say whatever they want to whomever they want - unless they don't want to say anything. People like you and me might not be allowed to collect data on our neighbors and then use it to sell them stuff. And people like you and me would get our butts sued if we sold you something we knew could hurt or kill you. But apparently some people are more equal than others.

Adverse drug reactions cost an estimated $177 per year in 2000, according to a well-researched study. Because of medical inflation, that figure is much higher now. It's higher, in fact, that the total cost of cardiac care or diabetic care. Drug reactions also cause one out of every five injuries or deaths to patients who are in the hospital. You'd think there would be an obligation to disclose any information that could reduce those figures and save lives.

But those injuries and deaths happen to the wrong kind of people - the human kind.

Our Kind of People

Romney made his comments in the run-up to Thursday's Republican debate. How did that go? Michele Bachmann channeled her inner Freddie Mercury songbook with a "We Are the Champions "monologue in which she said that "I have a very consistent record of fighting very hard against Barack Obama and his unconstitutional measures in Congress ... People are looking for a champion. They want someone who has been fighting."

Tim Pawlenty responded by channeling his inner Tina Turner, laying down a "We Don't Need Another Hero" diatribe that concluded, "leading and failing is not the objective." He may be the only Republican politician in America who feels that way right now - and he's probably wrong, at least politically.

Romney, like any front-runner, wants to be as vague and amorphous as possible. His strategy has been to be an empty suit - unless he's conducting an outdoor photo up, in which case his goal is to be an empty ensemble from the 'rugged' pages of the Land's End catalog. That's smart for someone in his position, and it's why he's polling even with Obama and even leading in some polls.

(ThePresident's strategy is similar to Romney's, but with a twist. He wants to be a liberal and a conservative who share the same suit. That's a risky approach. Elections are a referendum on the incumbent and we're in a terrible economy, so being all things to all people isn't likely to work welll.)

People Will Talk

Romney also said he's "actually worked in the real economy." Where's the unreal economy? Second Life, or some other digital environment? Wait, we know. The unreal economy is the one where corporations are people - and where their money all goes to "the people." The real economy is the one we all live in, but there's no record Romney ever worked there. (Running Bain, the consulting company, doesn't count.)

"People, people, throw your love around. Take it into town. Put it into the ground where the flowers grow ..." R.E.M, "Shiny Happy People"

If corporations are people, they're very special people. They're people who, thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, have the unlimited ability to express their "free speech" with billions of dollars in campaign cash and lobbying loot. Pharmaceutical companies alone have spent more than $2 billion in lobbying since 1998, while insurance companies spent $1.5 billion. When it comes to free speech, these "people" are real chatterboxes.

When it comes to corporate rights, Citizens United is your Supreme Court. Those two pharmaceutical company rulings are your Supreme Court on drugs.

All this corporate cash is creating a wave of deregulation, tax cuts, and other laws that benefit the corporate "people" and are ruining life for the flesh-and-blood kind. They're hijacking democracy. As one of Sartre's characters said in No Exit, "Hell is other people."

They can't do it alone, of course. Our corporate personages need help. And they get it - from their servants in the Republican Party, and from the many Democrats who are also eager to pitch in. It's a good thing for the corporations they have so many friends in Washington. In fact, it's just like that Barbra Streisand song, isn't it? People who need people really are the luckiest people in the world.

Campaign Cash: How Citizens United Will Change Elections Forever

Zach Carter — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:39:45 -0400

Undue corporate influence over U.S. elections has been a serious problem in American politics for decades, but this year's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission made things worse. Worst of all, we may never know the extent of the damage.

Citizens United freed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money backing specific political candidates, and without congressional action, those expenditures can be completely anonymous. Major corporations are already capitalizing on the new legal landscape by the millions, and the public doesn’t really know who is buying what influence or why.

That's why The Media Consortium will be carefully watching the effects of this ruling in the run up to this year's midterm elections. Every day through Nov. 4, we'll bring you some of the best independent reporting on the effects of corporate spending in an attempt to measure just how widespread the effect of Citizens United will be on this—and the next—election. Keep your eye on "Campaign Cash" as we follow this issue in the coming weeks. If you want to tweet about it, use the hashtag #campaigncash.

The impact of Citizens United

As Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig explains in an interview with The Nation’s Christopher Hayes, the Citizens United v. FEC decision represents one of many ways that corporations buy political favors.

Prior to the ruling, companies couldn’t spend money to directly advocate the election of a particular political candidate during election season. They could form Political Action Committees (PACs) to support or attack specific candidates, but those PACs had to be funded by individuals who worked for the company and couldn't be funded from the corporation's treasury directly. The executives of Goldman Sachs, for instance, could band together to form GoldmanPAC and spend their money on whatever candidates they wished—and many corporate employees exercised that right and spent freely on elections through their corporate PACs.

Now corporations can spend as much as they want and actual corporate funds—not just organized individuals—can also be deployed, making massive amounts of corporate cash eligible for political purchasing.

But the scariest part of Citizens United, as Lessig emphasizes, is the money that isn't spent. That is, if a firm makes it known that they are willing spend millions of dollars to fight any politician who opposes them on a particular policy issue, representatives and senators might begin changing their voting behavior in Congress before the company actually has to put up the cash.

And ultimately, Citizens United didn’t just legalize unlimited corporate expenses on elections. It also allows those expenses to be anonymous. If companies launder their political cash through a front group, that third-party spender doesn’t have to disclose who its donors are.

This isn't your local Chamber of Commerce

As Harry Hanbury details for GRITtv, this laundering scheme is essentially the business model for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-- a lobbying powerhouse in the nation's capital. Don’t be fooled by its name—the U.S. Chamber has almost nothing to do with the local small business coalitions who help strengthen local economies.

As Hanbury notes, 40 percent of the U.S. Chamber’s 2008 funding came from just 26 corporations. The group represents many of the nation’s largest and most irresponsible corporations, from those responsible for the financial meltdown on Wall Street to BP, the company that spilled millions of barrels worth of oil in the Gulf this summer. The Chamber's branding allows them to disguise their political as a coalition of local businesses while it does dirty work for corporate titans.

When BP was publicly promising to do everything in its power to fix the massive oil disaster it created in the Gulf of Mexico, it was also funneling money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And what was the Chamber up to? It was lobbying furiously to protect BP from new rules that would force the company to pay for oil disaster clean-up. The Wall Street banks did the same thing as financial reform legislation moved through Congress, and companies never have to disclose these expenditures to the public.

So it’s no surprise that the Chamber responded to Citizens United by immediately announcing a 40 percent boost in its political spending operations. So much corporate money then flowed into the Chamber that the group chose to boost this budget again by 50 percent, allocating $75 million for its 2010 war chest. So far, the Chamber’s ads have favored Republican’s 93 percent of the time. No entity spends more on politics than the Chamber—not even the political parties themselves.

Corporations top the list of big election spenders

But while the future of corporate spending in campaigns looks bleak after Citizens United, corporations are still barred from contributing directly to political campaigns. A company might take out a television ad attacking Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), but it can’t make unlimited contributions directly to Grayson’s challenger, Republican Dan Webster.

Nevertheless, corporate employees and company PACs have already been spending lavishly on elections for decades. In a feature for Mother Jones, Dave Gilson compiles the 75 biggest political spenders, both companies and trade groups, from 1989 through 2010, and breaks them down by industry. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are all among the top 20 most extravagant political spenders—but the American Bankers Association, a trade group that all four belong to, is also in the top 10. If you’re wondering how Wall Street was able to secure its massive taxpayer bailout in the face of widespread voter outrage, this is your answer.

To soften the Citizens United blow, Congress has been debating the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, which would require companies to disclose all of their political expenditures as well as requiring front-groups like the Chamber to list the identities and amounts of its donors. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Christopher Van Hollen (D-MD) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), cleared the House this summer but was stymied by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Undoing the damage dealt by Citizens United through something like the DISCLOSE Act will help, but it won’t make our democracy totally safe from corporate abuse. As Lessig notes, the day before the decision was handed down, U.S. election financing was already encouraging rampant corruption and in need of serious reform.

Lessig suggests banning political expenditures by corporations altogether, and placing a hard cap on the amount that individuals can contribute. By limiting individual donations to $100, the ability of corporate PACs to funnel cash into the political process would be thwarted.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the mid-term elections and campaign financing by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit The Media Consortium for more articles on these issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

What Thomas Jefferson Said about Elena Kagan and Juvenile Life Without Parole

Eric Lotke — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:25:25 -0400

Today’s news is the Supreme Court decision that juveniles cannot be locked up without possibility of parole for offenses committed while juveniles (in this case, a very clumsy store robbery by a 16 year old with a crowbar).

Yesterday's news was the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

Between them come all kinds of accusations about judicial activism and judges rewriting the constitution.

One more thing. Also between these events I visited the Jefferson Memorial with some family in Washington, DC. Here’s what's inscribed on the wall. Jefferson’s own words:

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Jefferson is entitled to an opinion about constitutional intent. He was there.

The Case for a Constitutional Visionary

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:45:30 -0400

The conventional wisdom is that President Obama’s nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens won’t change the Supreme Court much, since Justice Stevens is part of the Court’s progressive wing and President Obama’s choice is likely to be of a similar stripe. That thinking is dead wrong. The next nominee could profoundly change the Court’s jurisprudence in ways that defy conservative-liberal labels and have a lasting impact.

The next nominee must, of course, be well qualified and committed to the Constitutional values of liberty, fairness, and equal justice for all. She or he must be someone who approaches each case with an open mind and an unbiased eye. But within those bedrock parameters, there is room for watershed change. President Obama has the opportunity to nominate a constitutional visionary—a justice who charts new pathways, crafted for America in the 21st century.

A constitutional visionary is someone who sees the ways in which our society is evolving and articulates a jurisprudence—sometimes over the course of years or decades—that applies the Constitution’s text and principles to engage that new reality. The term is ideologically neutral, with past examples coming from both parties’ nominees.

Consider, for example, Justice Hugo Black, a former Alabama Senator (and, remarkably, a former Ku Klux Klan member) appointed by President Roosevelt in 1937. Serving on the Court through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement, Black saw that many of the threats to liberty and freedom that so troubled the Framers of the Constitution—suppression of free speech, government violence and oppression, taxation without representation, denial of due process and equal justice—were playing out most fiercely within states and localities.

Justice Black saw, too, that the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, and particularly the 14th, were intended by their authors to transform the relationship between state and federal governments, forging a more cohesive and more equal nation, with the same basic rights and responsibilities for all. Applying that history to the contemporary context, Black articulated the “incorporation doctrine,” under which almost all of the Bill of Rights restrain not only the Federal government—as was largely the case when Black first joined the Court—but also state and local governments, via the 14th Amendment.

Though Black was not significantly more liberal or conservative than his colleagues on the Vinson and Warren Courts, his constitutional vision transformed how the Constitution is lived by everyday Americans, in ways that transcend ideology. The incorporation doctrine is accepted in all but the most extremist legal and political circles. It protects the free speech rights of Americans—be they left, right, or center—against censorship by cities, towns, counties and states, for example. And it is used by conservatives to assert property and gun rights, as well as by progressives to assert privacy rights and the rights of people accused of crimes.

Other constitutional visionaries have influenced the court and nation more subtly, yet in important and lasting ways. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, a former state legislator and judge, advanced a theory of “new federalism” popular with conservatives that has hindered the federal government’s efforts to enforce civil rights and other laws against state and local governments—reigniting a trend that cuts against Justice Black’s jurisprudence.

Justice Harry Blackmun, for whom I worked as a law clerk, articulated a privacy jurisprudence that (however haggard) continues to protect most women’s intimate reproductive choices, and was vindicated in the Court’s Lawrence decision protecting the privacy of consensual sexual relations. Lawrence overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, in which Justice Blackmun wrote one of his most eloquent dissents.

As a former constitutional law professor and President of the Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama is as qualified as any President in our history to select and nominate a constitutional visionary for the coming era. Yet the rancorous policies of today’s Senate, looming mid-term elections, and an ambitious legislative agenda will militate toward a politically “safe” choice, with incrementalist and largely unarticulated views.

That would be a mistake—first, Republican leaders have already made clear that they will attack, and may filibuster, whoever the President nominates. More importantly, though, the challenges of today and tomorrow—preserving privacy in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and ubiquitous outdoor surveillance cameras; protecting equality in an era of genetic coding and engineering; ensuring freedom and security at a time of growing corporate power and transborder terrorism—demand fresh ideas and perspectives.

Even a transformative nominee won’t change the nine-member Supreme Court’s jurisprudence overnight, and it shouldn’t. But the vetting of a broad range of ideas and approaches, each committed to fairness, equal justice, and our Constitution, is what our Court and the country need.

Don't Let Citizens United Wreck Our Economy

Zach Carter — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:55:13 -0500

In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.

The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court's hubris in no uncertain terms:

The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.

Citizens United and the financial crisis

How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.

But over the past few decades, we've watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.

The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:

Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.

The bank lobby and the AIG bailout

In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets—if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.

CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG's betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.

"The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout ... is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government," Hiar writes. "The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG—including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing."

The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.

With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.

Redefining corruption

So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn't just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined "corruption" to give corporations—and anyone else—greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:

The most important line in the decision ... was this one: "ingratiation and access ... are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.

Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt—Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay's legislative agenda. The court's ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay's corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.

"Tom DeLay's view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,," Gibney says. "I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision."

Why citizens need to speak out now

So what can we do about this? As GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court's recent decision.

If you liked the bank bailouts, then there's plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn't, then it's time to speak up.

Zach Carter writes for The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora.

America's Competitors Will Use Supreme Court Ruling To Block Our Green Jobs Effort And Close Our Factories

Dave Johnson — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:47:01 -0500

It's not personal, it's business.

The Supreme Court recently ruled 5-4 that ~~George Bush will be President~~ 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.

And, of course, this is exactly what is happening. Oil countries are already planning strategies to use this ruling to block our alternative energy and green jobs efforts. According to Think Progress:

For instance, Saudi Arabia has already signaled that the progressive effort to build a clean energy American economy is its “biggest threat”:

Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports so stands to be one of the biggest losers in any pact that curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. “It’s one of the biggest threats that we are facing,” said Muhammed al-Sabban, head of the Saudi delegation to U.N. talks on climate change and a senior economic adviser to the Saudi oil ministry. [...] Climate talks posed a bigger threat, Sabban said, and subsidies for the development of renewable energy were distorting market economics in the sector, he said."

Presumably because of the Citizens United ruling, Saudi Arabian-owned subsidiaries operating in the United States can now spend unlimited amounts advocating the defeat of candidates who support clean energy legislation. According to a ThinkProgress investigation, foreign-oil backed lobbyists in America are already instigating efforts to kill clean energy legislation.

What are we doing about it? What is our plan? Every other country has economic/industrial policies, but for one reason or another the American public has been persuaded that America should not have an economic/industrial policy of our own. We're bombarded with propaganda that says having a plan would be government - that We, the People thing - "interfering" with "the market." This ideology is like an anchor on our country, holding us back from progress.

We must rally and take back control of our democracy and our future. This Supreme Court decision must be countered with immediate legislation or it means the loss of so many things that we value. And we must develop an economic/manufacturing policy for our country's future. This time it's personal.

What Barack Obama Said about the Supreme Court Before it Mattered

Eric Lotke — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 07:40:33 -0500

The Supreme Court says corporations are people, and corporate spending on political campaigns is the same as free speech. Here’s what Barack Obama said in Audacity of Hope, when he was halfway between a community organizer and president:

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interest,” which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my mind there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals – whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers – coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence.

The Audacity of Hope, p. 116 in my paperback Three Rivers edition.

He had it right back then. We need to help him remember it now.

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UPDATE: In his new weekly address, Obama called the Supreme Court decision "devastating to the public interest." The old quote suggests that this more than a short-term political populist swing. It's real.
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[Check out my novel, 2044. The problem didn’t turn out to be Big Brother. It’s Big Brother, Inc.]

Shock Doctrine in Reverse: A Week of Setbacks, A Window of Opportunity

Richard Eskow — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:56:14 -0500

What a week. Call it the Shock Doctrine in reverse: The Massachusetts election and yesterday's Supreme Court ruling may force the Democrats to move to the left to ensure their political survival. They're now faced with a choice they clearly didn't want: forcefully reject the corporate agenda, or risk losing to opponents who can attract an unlimited flow of corporate dollars.

Many of us who supported the Democrats last year knew they'd disappoint us at times, but Barack Obama's mid-course corrections during the campaign showed that he had an innate teachability in the face of events that challenged his tactics or his beliefs. We need that teachability now, and it must extend to the rest of his party. Without it we may find ourselves in a nation where democracy is a commodity and real reform is an unreachable goal.

First came Massachusetts. Voters in a liberal state - one with a health reform initiative already in place - rejected the Democratic candidate in favor of a handsome cipher. Good-looking strangers are a sure sign that a marriage is in trouble, so when Northeastern voters went for a retread of Fred Thompson's phony "old pickup truck" routine from Tennessee ... well, it showed they're pretty unhappy with what they're getting at "home."

And, as analyses and next-day polling made clear, these pro-health-reform voters rejected the Senate bill's more right-wing remix of their own law. Most Obama voters who switched to Brown felt the Obama/Senate proposal "didn't go far enough," and polls now confirm that hostility toward the anti-middle-class "Cadillac tax" played a part in their disaffection, too. Democrats love to mock the tea-partiers, but it turns out they understood the nation's middle class rage better than the White House did.

The Democrats are pivoting somewhat in response to the Massachusetts vote. As Simon Johnson explains, the President's move to institute what he calls the "Volcker rule" limiting banks is clearly a response to Massachusetts. Pictures of the announcement showed Volcker standing behind Obama while Geithner, perhaps symbolically, stood well off to the side - the right side - of the President.

There was an immediate reaction in the Senate. The momentum shifted away from confirming Ben Bernanke, whose re-appointment marked the latest in a series of Presidential moves to endorse the Wall Street-friendly people who got us into this mess.

And that was just the first part of the week. The bigger shock was yet to come, with the Supreme Court's ruling that corporate campaign contributions could not be limited because corporations are "persons." Don't try to understand the tortured logic, since this decision was clearly as cravenly political as Bush v. Gore. "Persons"? Here's my test for "personhood": Every person I know has had their heart broken at least once, then spent the night listening to sentimental songs. The only tune that moves corporations is that Motown classic, "Money."

The Supreme Court ruling leaves Obama and the Democrats with another choice: Push aggressively for genuine campaign reform, or watch their careers get swept away by corporate-friendly (some would say more corporate-friendly) candidates awash in name-brand funding.

(Corporate sponsorship in sports has given us American Airlines Arena and the Staples Center; are we about to see the Wal-Mart White House and the Halliburton Hall of Congress?)

So a confluence of events struck the Democratic Party this week: A clear rejection of their Wall Street and health reform strategies, and a Supreme Court decision - perhaps "brought to you by Philip Morris" - that forces them to choose between genuine electoral reform or tacking right to compete with Republicans for corporate sponsors.

It was encouraging to see the President shift dramatically on both topics this week, with his articulation of the "Volcker rule" and his forceful statement in response to the Supreme Court ruling. But it's in his nature to seek consensus, and consensus will be hard to find without confronting some difficult decisions first.

The window of opportunity is closing fast: We may have already seen the last American election where individual donors even matter. But if the President and his party rise to the occasion, this week may be remembered as the moment that meaningful change began.
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UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has a considerably less apocalyptic view of the SCOTUS ruling than most people, including me, in part because things are already so bad. We present his comments as counterpoint, because I have such high regard for his judgment regarding the First Amendment. But his preferred solution is the same as mine - public financing of elections.

It’s Official. Corporations Rule.

Eric Lotke — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:46:42 -0500

People have been wondering for years who runs our country. People or wealthy corporations? Today the Supreme Court settled the debate.

Today’s decision, Citizens United v. FEC, comes down decisively on the corporate side. It gives advertisers more power than voters, and tilts the balance of power even farther towards wealthy and corporate interests. The newly composed conservative court upset decades of precedent and settled expectations. As Justice Stevens says in dissent:

Congress has placed special limitations on campaign spending by corporations ever since the passage of the Tillman Act in 1907. We have unanimously concluded that this “reflects a permissible assessment of the dangers posed by those entities to the electoral process,” FEC v. NRWC (1982), and have accepted the “legislative judgment that the special characteristics of the corporate structure require particularly careful regulation.” (Citations compressed).

Today’s decision turns paper corporations into actual people, and gives advertisers more constitutional protection than voters.

Progressives can't give up in the face of this setback. Bill Scher and Ralph Nader have called for a constitutional amendment. I’m all for it … though I think we can find easier solutions. We can start by publicly financing campaigns, and add public matches to any private funding raised. Adding speech rather than subtracting it avoids constitutional hurdles.

Money has always had power, and always will. The theory of our capitalist democracy is that people voting provides a counterbalance. If money controls business and it controls the ballot box, we’re all in trouble.

All of this reminds me of a scene in my novel, 2044.

Our hero finds herself in a political fundraiser, where her boss is raising money for a campaign. “Why bother voting?” she asks.

“Because it’s a democracy. The process is crucial. If we didn’t have elections people would lose faith in the government, and that wouldn’t suit anybody. Besides, it’s great fun. Get yourself a drink.”

Monopoly Corporatocracy Replaces Democracy

Dave Johnson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:39:32 -0500

The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to ~~make George W. Bush President~~ allow large corporations to spend as much as needed to place their candidates in office, so that they will pass laws:

giving them access to government funds
restricting their smaller competitors
allowing them to dump toxins in the water and air
~~requiring people to purchase health insurance~~ - (already in progress)
anything else they want

This ruling unleashes monopoly corporatocracy. The - currently - biggest corporations win. This sets in place that they get to run things now, and stay biggest. Of course first and foremost the biggest companies will use their vast resources to keep the playing field rigged to their advantage so they stay biggest. And then to get bigger. How long before they get antitrust laws off the books? And then of course we will see things like Exxon will get laws passed restricting alternate energy.

Imagine being a state legislator and a company tells you they will spend ten or a hundred million against you - smearing you like the Hillary documentary this case was about - if you don't do what they say. No one can stand up against that and if they DO they'll be out of office in a heartbeat.

This one-dollar-one-vote ruling is a sad day for one-person-one-vote democracy.

“I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816