Saturday, January 7, 2012 by CommonDreams.org
It’s true that corporations have no ability to act for themselves. They only act through people; their officers, directors, employees, lawyers and agents. However, the important question to ask is “do corporations behave like people?” Because if they don’t behave like people, our nation faces a serious problem it wasn’t designed to handle.
Our form of government was created in 1788 with the adoption of the US Constitution. This was a time when there were only a handful of corporations in existence (and none of the modern variety which have no obligations to protect the public interest). As a consequence, there is no mention anywhere in the Constitution of the word corporation.
This means that our government governs people and corporations the same way—through the passage of laws enacted by our elected representatives. Until such laws are passed, both people and corporations can harm the environment and other elements of the public interest to the extent they have the capacity and inclination to do so. Sometimes the passage of effective new laws can take a very long time. Sometimes such laws never get passed.
The public interest is exposed while our leaders decide what should be done. However, people are unlikely to take advantage of this situation. They generally have little capacity or inclination to engage in behavior that harms the public interest. Modern corporations, on the other hand, have plenty of both.
Protection of the public interest in our democracy depends upon citizenship. It depends on citizens voluntarily stopping behavior that is harming the public interest even when no law prohibits it. When good citizens realize they are harming the public interest, they stop. They don’t wait for the law to make them stop. They don’t lobby to keep the law from making them stop. They simply stop.
People generally stop. Modern corporations too often do not.
While companies don’t start out with the intention of plundering the public interest, it sometimes becomes evident that their now successful business is doing great harm. This is when their citizenship is tested. Almost universally, companies fail this test when large amounts of money are at stake.
When it becomes evident a citizen is harming the public interest, he, she or it has two options: recognize the obligations of citizenship and stop (the citizenship option) or take advantage of the rights of citizenship and get involved in the legislative process to delay or frustrate the passage of new laws which will prohibit their destructive behavior (the political option). Most human beings choose the former. Corporations choose the latter.
There are several reasons why people choose the good citizen option and corporations choose the political option. Most have to do with the differences between people and corporations. People generally develop a sense of right and wrong. None of us has a compelling need to harm the public interest. Corporations, on the other hand, have no conscience. The people that work for them do, but they have to follow rules that rarely result in a collective conscience. Moreover, at times companies have a compelling need to harm the public interest—when future profits and/or their survival depend upon it.
Lots of people are saying our government is broken. A huge reason for this is they see that government is unable to protect the public interest from corporate anti-social behavior.
Because our Constitution contains no special provisions for the government of corporations, protection of the public interest depends upon corporate citizenship just as it does on individual citizenship. Indeed, it depends on corporate citizenship more. A big corporation has the capacity to do more harm to the public interest in one afternoon legally than the average human being can do in a lifetime.
In the case of modern corporations with huge amounts of money invested in factories, processes and products that harm the public interest, that citizenship is not present. The reason for this has to do with state corporate laws that say, so long as corporations are operating in accordance with existing laws, corporate directors must act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.
These laws encourage corporate managers to continue harming the public interest in the pursuit of their company’s own interest (profit and survival). It’s time to start thinking about changing these laws. The law should balance the duty of directors to act in the company’s best interest with safeguards that will ensure protection of the environment and other elements of the public interest.
In Iowa Mitt Romney argued that “Corporations are people.” New Hampshire is the next stop on the trail to selecting a GOP nominee for president. Two debates are scheduled between now and primary day; one Saturday hosted by New Hampshire's ABC affiliate WMUR and the other Sunday morning, a joint effort by Facebook and NBC's 'Meet The Press'. Isn’t it time all the candidates for president from both parties were asked whether they too believe corporations people?
Thursday, January 5, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
Buying Congress in 2012
"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."—Mitt Romney
It’s true that corporations have no ability to act for themselves. They only act through people; their officers, directors, employees, lawyers and agents. However, the important question to ask is “do corporations behave like people?” Because if they don’t behave like people, our nation faces a serious problem it wasn’t designed to handle.
Our form of government was created in 1788 with the adoption of the US Constitution. This was a time when there were only a handful of corporations in existence (and none of the modern variety which have no obligations to protect the public interest). As a consequence, there is no mention anywhere in the Constitution of the word corporation.
This means that our government governs people and corporations the same way—through the passage of laws enacted by our elected representatives. Until such laws are passed, both people and corporations can harm the environment and other elements of the public interest to the extent they have the capacity and inclination to do so. Sometimes the passage of effective new laws can take a very long time. Sometimes such laws never get passed.
The public interest is exposed while our leaders decide what should be done. However, people are unlikely to take advantage of this situation. They generally have little capacity or inclination to engage in behavior that harms the public interest. Modern corporations, on the other hand, have plenty of both.
Protection of the public interest in our democracy depends upon citizenship. It depends on citizens voluntarily stopping behavior that is harming the public interest even when no law prohibits it. When good citizens realize they are harming the public interest, they stop. They don’t wait for the law to make them stop. They don’t lobby to keep the law from making them stop. They simply stop.
People generally stop. Modern corporations too often do not.
While companies don’t start out with the intention of plundering the public interest, it sometimes becomes evident that their now successful business is doing great harm. This is when their citizenship is tested. Almost universally, companies fail this test when large amounts of money are at stake.
When it becomes evident a citizen is harming the public interest, he, she or it has two options: recognize the obligations of citizenship and stop (the citizenship option) or take advantage of the rights of citizenship and get involved in the legislative process to delay or frustrate the passage of new laws which will prohibit their destructive behavior (the political option). Most human beings choose the former. Corporations choose the latter.
There are several reasons why people choose the good citizen option and corporations choose the political option. Most have to do with the differences between people and corporations. People generally develop a sense of right and wrong. None of us has a compelling need to harm the public interest. Corporations, on the other hand, have no conscience. The people that work for them do, but they have to follow rules that rarely result in a collective conscience. Moreover, at times companies have a compelling need to harm the public interest—when future profits and/or their survival depend upon it.
Lots of people are saying our government is broken. A huge reason for this is they see that government is unable to protect the public interest from corporate anti-social behavior.
Because our Constitution contains no special provisions for the government of corporations, protection of the public interest depends upon corporate citizenship just as it does on individual citizenship. Indeed, it depends on corporate citizenship more. A big corporation has the capacity to do more harm to the public interest in one afternoon legally than the average human being can do in a lifetime.
In the case of modern corporations with huge amounts of money invested in factories, processes and products that harm the public interest, that citizenship is not present. The reason for this has to do with state corporate laws that say, so long as corporations are operating in accordance with existing laws, corporate directors must act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.
These laws encourage corporate managers to continue harming the public interest in the pursuit of their company’s own interest (profit and survival). It’s time to start thinking about changing these laws. The law should balance the duty of directors to act in the company’s best interest with safeguards that will ensure protection of the environment and other elements of the public interest.
In Iowa Mitt Romney argued that “Corporations are people.” New Hampshire is the next stop on the trail to selecting a GOP nominee for president. Two debates are scheduled between now and primary day; one Saturday hosted by New Hampshire's ABC affiliate WMUR and the other Sunday morning, a joint effort by Facebook and NBC's 'Meet The Press'. Isn’t it time all the candidates for president from both parties were asked whether they too believe corporations people?
***
Thursday, January 5, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
Buying Congress in 2012
My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for. It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.
Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings. We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation. Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.
And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review. (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.) Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.
A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms.
Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline. Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.
That was an obvious pre-election year attempt to put the president on the spot.
Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the White House will now reject the permit. After all, its communications director said that the rider, by hurrying the decision, “virtually guarantees that the pipeline will not be approved.”
As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.
Buying Congress
I know that cynics -- call them realists, if you prefer -- will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.
We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core.
So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.
They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs. Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.
If you find this too harsh, think about how obligated you feel when someone gives you something. Did you get a Christmas present last month from someone you hadn’t remembered to buy one for? Are you going to send them an extra-special one next year?
And that’s for a pair of socks. Speaker of the House John Boehner, who insisted that the Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.
If someone had helped your career to the tune of a million dollars, wouldn’t you feel in their debt? I would. I get somewhat less than that from my employer, Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue. Don’t ask me to compare my school with, say, Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because that’s what you’ll get. Which is fine -- I am an employee.
But you’d be a fool to let me referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in any other walk of life we wouldn’t think twice before concluding that paying off the referees is wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, everyone in America would be outraged to see owner Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and field judges.
If he did it secretly, the newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would win a Pulitzer.
But a political reporter who bothered to point out Boehner’s and McConnell’s payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for simpleminded journalism. That’s how the game is played and we’ve all bought into it, even if only to sputter in hopeless outrage.
Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks. This really matters. The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.
It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more money each year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.
Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.
Whose Money? Whose Washington?
I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.
Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted. Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.
To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before. This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.
Still, there’s a chance. The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.
It’s fertile ground for action. After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.
A good time to take an initial stand comes later this month, when rallies outside every federal courthouse will mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. That’s the one where the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend whatever they wanted on campaigns.
To me, that decision was, in essence, corporate America saying, “We’re not going to bother pretending any more. This country belongs to us.”
We need to say, loud and clear: “Sorry. Time to give it back.”
Friday, January 6, 2012 by YES! Magazine
How Cities and States are Sticking It to Citizens United
From courthouses to statehouses, the pro-corporate ruling is under pressure.
by Brooke Jarvis
The Supreme Court may have declared in Citizens United v. the FEC that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, but that doesn’t mean cities and states have to be happy about it.
They’re expressing their disagreement on an increasing number of battlegrounds, with Citizens United under challenge in courts, in city council meetings, in state legislatures, on ballots, and in the streets.
Dissension in the Courts
Some of the most interesting recent action has been in the courts, with lower courts—including a state Supreme Court and a federal appeals court—taking on Citizens United.
In Montana, the state Supreme Court upheld a longstanding law limiting corporate spending in politics. A lower court had held that Citizens United invalidated the Corrupt Practices Act, a law passed by citizens’ ballot initiative in 1912, when it was common practice for the copper industry to bribe state politicians. Unwilling to lose a basic, century-old protection against corruption, the state appealed the issue to the Montana Supreme Court, which on Dec. 30 allowed the law to stand.
For over 100 years, Montana has had an electoral system that preserves the integrity of the political process, encourages full participation, and safeguards against corruption,” said Attorney General Steve Bullock, who argued the state’s case. “The Supreme Court’s decision upholds that system and is truly a victory for all Montanans.”
The decision holds that Montana—for a host of reasons, from its history of corrupt industries to its thinly spread population—has a compelling interest in keeping the law. “If the statute has worked to preserve a degree of political and social autonomy, is the State required to throw away its protections?” asked Chief Justice Mike McGrath, writing for the majority.
Even Justice James C. Nelson, who dissented, did so regretfully. “While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision,” he wrote. “And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it.”
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took a similar stand when, in late December, it upheld a 2006 New York City law that, among other things, bans lobbyists from giving gifts to City officials and requires them to disclose all fundraising and consulting activities. A group of plaintiffs challenging the law hoped it would be invalidated under Citizens United; the court dismissed their lawsuit, upholding the City’s right to put limits on political contributions and prevent “pay-to-play” schemes.
Judge Guido Calabresi, in a concurring opinion, explained his reasoning for maintaining limits on corporate lobbying: “If an external factor, such as wealth, allows some individuals to communicate their political views too powerfully, then persons who lack wealth may, for all intents and purposes, be excluded from the democratic dialogue.”
From Cities and States to the U.S. Constitution
Though lower courts can take stands against it, the Supreme Court’s ruling—that money is constitutionally protected free speech and that corporations are legal persons entitled to such protections—is final. If the Montana and New York City cases are appealed to the Supreme Court, the lower court rulings are likely to be reversed; Montana and New York City would quickly see the end of their hard-won protections.
That’s why the New York City Council on Wednesday joined a group of other cities (including Los Angeles, Boulder, Albany, Oakland, and Madison) in asking Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The resolution declares support for an amendment saying “that corporations are not entitled to the entirety of protections or ‘rights’ of natural persons, specifically so that the expenditure of corporate money to influence the electoral process is no longer a form of constitutionally protected speech.”
The same day, California lawmakers introduced a similar resolution in the state legislature.
Meanwhile, activists are gearing up for the upcoming 2-year anniversary of the ruling, planning rallies on the steps of the Supreme Court and federal courthouses across the country.
It won’t be easy to stop big money from undermining our democracy. But momentum is building. The desire for a functioning democracy, writes Judge Calabresi in his concurring opinion for the 2nd Circuit, “is, I believe, something that is so fundamental that sooner or later it is going to be recognized. Whether this will happen through a constitutional amendment or through changes in Supreme Court doctrine, I do not know. But it will happen.”
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for. It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.
Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings. We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation. Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.
And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review. (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.) Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.
A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms.
Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline. Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.
That was an obvious pre-election year attempt to put the president on the spot.
Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the White House will now reject the permit. After all, its communications director said that the rider, by hurrying the decision, “virtually guarantees that the pipeline will not be approved.”
As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.
Buying Congress
I know that cynics -- call them realists, if you prefer -- will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.
We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core.
So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.
They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs. Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.
If you find this too harsh, think about how obligated you feel when someone gives you something. Did you get a Christmas present last month from someone you hadn’t remembered to buy one for? Are you going to send them an extra-special one next year?
And that’s for a pair of socks. Speaker of the House John Boehner, who insisted that the Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.
If someone had helped your career to the tune of a million dollars, wouldn’t you feel in their debt? I would. I get somewhat less than that from my employer, Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue. Don’t ask me to compare my school with, say, Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because that’s what you’ll get. Which is fine -- I am an employee.
But you’d be a fool to let me referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in any other walk of life we wouldn’t think twice before concluding that paying off the referees is wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, everyone in America would be outraged to see owner Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and field judges.
If he did it secretly, the newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would win a Pulitzer.
But a political reporter who bothered to point out Boehner’s and McConnell’s payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for simpleminded journalism. That’s how the game is played and we’ve all bought into it, even if only to sputter in hopeless outrage.
Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks. This really matters. The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.
It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more money each year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.
Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.
Whose Money? Whose Washington?
I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.
Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted. Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.
To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before. This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.
Still, there’s a chance. The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.
It’s fertile ground for action. After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.
A good time to take an initial stand comes later this month, when rallies outside every federal courthouse will mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. That’s the one where the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend whatever they wanted on campaigns.
To me, that decision was, in essence, corporate America saying, “We’re not going to bother pretending any more. This country belongs to us.”
We need to say, loud and clear: “Sorry. Time to give it back.”
***
Friday, January 6, 2012 by YES! Magazine
How Cities and States are Sticking It to Citizens United
From courthouses to statehouses, the pro-corporate ruling is under pressure.
by Brooke Jarvis
The Supreme Court may have declared in Citizens United v. the FEC that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, but that doesn’t mean cities and states have to be happy about it.
They’re expressing their disagreement on an increasing number of battlegrounds, with Citizens United under challenge in courts, in city council meetings, in state legislatures, on ballots, and in the streets.
Dissension in the Courts
Some of the most interesting recent action has been in the courts, with lower courts—including a state Supreme Court and a federal appeals court—taking on Citizens United.
“While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision." -Justice James C. Nelson
For over 100 years, Montana has had an electoral system that preserves the integrity of the political process, encourages full participation, and safeguards against corruption,” said Attorney General Steve Bullock, who argued the state’s case. “The Supreme Court’s decision upholds that system and is truly a victory for all Montanans.”
The decision holds that Montana—for a host of reasons, from its history of corrupt industries to its thinly spread population—has a compelling interest in keeping the law. “If the statute has worked to preserve a degree of political and social autonomy, is the State required to throw away its protections?” asked Chief Justice Mike McGrath, writing for the majority.
Even Justice James C. Nelson, who dissented, did so regretfully. “While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision,” he wrote. “And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it.”
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took a similar stand when, in late December, it upheld a 2006 New York City law that, among other things, bans lobbyists from giving gifts to City officials and requires them to disclose all fundraising and consulting activities. A group of plaintiffs challenging the law hoped it would be invalidated under Citizens United; the court dismissed their lawsuit, upholding the City’s right to put limits on political contributions and prevent “pay-to-play” schemes.
Judge Guido Calabresi, in a concurring opinion, explained his reasoning for maintaining limits on corporate lobbying: “If an external factor, such as wealth, allows some individuals to communicate their political views too powerfully, then persons who lack wealth may, for all intents and purposes, be excluded from the democratic dialogue.”
From Cities and States to the U.S. Constitution
Though lower courts can take stands against it, the Supreme Court’s ruling—that money is constitutionally protected free speech and that corporations are legal persons entitled to such protections—is final. If the Montana and New York City cases are appealed to the Supreme Court, the lower court rulings are likely to be reversed; Montana and New York City would quickly see the end of their hard-won protections.
That’s why the New York City Council on Wednesday joined a group of other cities (including Los Angeles, Boulder, Albany, Oakland, and Madison) in asking Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The resolution declares support for an amendment saying “that corporations are not entitled to the entirety of protections or ‘rights’ of natural persons, specifically so that the expenditure of corporate money to influence the electoral process is no longer a form of constitutionally protected speech.”
The same day, California lawmakers introduced a similar resolution in the state legislature.
Meanwhile, activists are gearing up for the upcoming 2-year anniversary of the ruling, planning rallies on the steps of the Supreme Court and federal courthouses across the country.
It won’t be easy to stop big money from undermining our democracy. But momentum is building. The desire for a functioning democracy, writes Judge Calabresi in his concurring opinion for the 2nd Circuit, “is, I believe, something that is so fundamental that sooner or later it is going to be recognized. Whether this will happen through a constitutional amendment or through changes in Supreme Court doctrine, I do not know. But it will happen.”
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