Oh No.

Oh Yes!

Poor Dems. Now the union money will have to compete with corporate money and political speech just became a whole lot freer.

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Probably the same way International Unions were included before this decision.

I’ve not had time to wade through the 186 page decision. It’s a monster of legalese and I might stab my eyes out before I get through it.

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This will stand in history as the worst Supreme Court decision since Bush v. Gore, right up there with Dred Scott, Santa Clara County, and damn few others. Obama, and any Democrat, or really ayone who does not sufficiently lick the rectums of the moneyed aristocracy of corporate fascism, will be outspent 10 to one and that’s if there’s even any airtime left to buy.

If the Democratic Congress had even one shriveled little testicle to share among them, they would impeach, at minimum, the three fascist judges who voted for both this and the Bush decision (Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy). These judges are a dagger at the aorta of the Republic and criminals of the lowest odor.

And conservatives need to stop calling themselves good Americans, since they unstintingly support the overweening aristocracy of the corporate state. If you voted for any NFGOP presidential candidate since 1980, you made this horror possible.

I leave you with Gore Vidal, our prescient political Cassandra: ‘We’ll Have a Dictatorship Soon in the US’.

p.s. NFGOP stands for No Fucking Good Old Party.

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“…it’s farcical to claim that modern judicial conservatives stand for substantive “minimalism” or “judicial restraint.” – Scott Lemieux at Tapped

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Bobby,

Unions were under the same restrictions as corporate political action committees. Did you think the unions weren’t already competing with corporate money?

My big question is what this means for state and city council elections in North Carolina. It suddenly became even easier for rich people to throw a lot of money into an ad buy at the eleventh hour.

But of course unions are heavily involved in Asheville city council campaigns, so I guess that’s fair.

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But then the 14th creating a “federal citizenship” was a fraud.

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What I’d like to see is GE’s draft registration card. Surely the company is 18 by now.

But maybe it’s female?

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The question that’s all the rage: Where’s the birth certificate?

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As always, Gibson, Sullivan and Buckner are brilliant. And, as always, count on Bobby to offer up a partisan gloat

Gibson:

“…My big question is what this means for state and city council elections in North Carolina. It suddenly became even easier for rich people to throw a lot of money into an ad buy at the eleventh hour…”

Sullivan:

“…Why is it that conservatives typically oppose granting basic legal rights to some classes of natural persons…and oppose granting certain classes of persons special advantages, except when those “persons” exist on papers filed in a cabinet somewhere?…”

Buckner:

“…In order to unfuck the Constitution…” (and everything else Buckner writes on here)

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Writ dude:

The Overton Window of political possibility is a visual metaphor for the range of political positions which are considered reasonable in a society. Policy ideas within the window are considered reasonable by most people in that society, while beliefs outside the window are considered “beyond the pale” by most. Take a look at it here:
The Overton Window, Illustrated

This version seems truthful to me: that our Overton Window is so far to the right nowadays that even positions which were mainstream forty years ago are deemed “lefty loony” while positions fitting the template of Mussolini’s estado corporativo or Corporate State were, in every meaningful sense, the policy of the Bush/Cheney administration.

This illustrates why you need people like me screaming for the opposite extreme position. The only way to drag the window one tick back toward the center is to have a voice calling for it to move five ticks left. The Right has long understood this; it’s why their lunatic fringe is so useful to them. If we only move halfway toward Glenn Beck they win big anyway.

I have a long memory about some things. When Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Court, the Right cheered that it was “the end of Marshall law.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals out west is pretty much the only remaining bastion of non-fascist judges, and the Right are constantly calling for those judges to be thrown out over one decision or another that the Right doesn’t like. I’m just one little ant pushing back.

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Thanks for the response. I agree that we all need voices “from the wilderness.” It is probably true that any of the major social changes we’ve seen was at one time a “radical” idea. I guess I would just add that I don’t interpret anti-judicial sentiment (and wanton use of impeachment for that matter) as a far left-wing position. It is something I associate with the far right-wing. At least in terms of American politics. Am I incorrect in making this association?

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No, writ, you’re exactly correct. And it’s worked marvelously for them, so why not turn that cannon around?

Incidentally, did you ever see Angels In America? It’s an incredible masterpiece. Anyway, there’s a scene where Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) talks about planting conservative judges like land mines so that everywhere liberals try to get some traction or push some reform: BOOM. And so it has been. (Angels was written twenty years ago; this was a very smart observation).

The Right, being very good strategists, have simultaneously badmouthed the judiciary and made it theirs. Reagan once said “Always throw your clubs in the direction you’re walking.” In other words, tantrum strategically.

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Why is it always a “you did it, so we can do it” thing with you faithful GOPers? I mean seriously I wouldn’t let my 3 year old pull that one on me, yet this “logic” functions as something approaching rational thought for those of you who enjoy the righty whiteys (forgive me, I have into the rum). But really, Nathan the examples you cite are really quite limp in comparison to the massive blow to the fundamental pillars (what was left of them anyway) of our Republic by this ruling.
What I really don’t get is why ya’ll have suddenly decided that you are totally fine with letting corporations run your party, the county, and whatever else they can get their hands on?
The problem is that the private sector (as you call it) isn’t interested in competing, it is interested in consolidating power. That isn’t a judgmental critique, but rather a fundamental law of nature (to be a bit free with analogies). Government should be, IMHO, a tool to hold that force in check. No citizen, or group of citizens, can compete with that force–no matter how well informed, connected or funded they are.

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Nathan, having no souls, public corporations are not evil — they are amoral, driven only by appetite and instinct, and not persons in any commonsense meaning. Time maybe to add “natural” to the definition of persons in the 14th Amendment.

BTW: The 2nd is working just fine for me. Never has anyone tried to take ours. Good places to target shoot on your farm?

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For the first hundred years of US history, corporations were strictly limited in scope. A corporation would be formed for a particular purpose (building a canal, for instance) and would exist for a limited time. It could lose its charter if it violated some strict rules: <a href="http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html"Our Hidden History of Corporations in the United States covers the subject well.
From the article:
“* Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.

* Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.

* Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.

* Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.

* Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.

* Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.”

Americans feared corporate power because it was one of the tools the British monarchy had used to create trade monopoly within its colonies. As soon as corporations began to free themselves from these rules, they began to abuse their power.

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Fact – President Obama was the first candidate from any major political party (rep. or dem.) in the General Election in 9 election cycles (36 years) to abandon public financing for an unlimited money grab. Ross Perot ran in ’92 and ’96 and spent big bucks but it came out of his pocket. I miss those infomercials!

Fact – Studies show the breakdown between small donors, bundlers, and large donors wasn’t historically different from other Presidential campaigns, he just raised more of it.

I am not criticizing the President for doing so, he recognized that he could raise a gazillion dollars so he dumped the progressive idea of public financing so he could amass huge amounts of cash. I think the President, like many other candidates from both political parties, is paying the political price for running on a platform that conveyed one set of ideas and governing in a totally different way. He would have probably still won the election anyway (because the economy was falling off a cliff, Wall Street imploded on the eve of the general election & because he had a billion plus dollars including third party groups) if he would have been forthright beyond “hope”, “change”, “yes we can”, etc. and been more honest.

For example, on health care he could have said “here is why we need to make changes so I am going to force everyone to buy health insurance or you’ll pay a fine”, etc., on energy “I am for cap and trade which will cause you home energy bills and gasoline bill to go up but here is why”, . . . out goes the promise that 95% of us will get a tax cut but he would have been in a much stronger position to govern. When that schism between campaigning and governing is too large, you have the problem that our nation finds itself in today. I would like someone to run for political office and tell the truth, things that voters don’t like to hear but that we need to hear. That is the only way we are going to get out of the predicament we’re in.

A corporation is just a legal entity made up of stockholders who may be other corporations, partnerships, individuals, etc. but ultimately a corporation is a collection of individuals engaged is some type of activity (profit or nonprofit) with a legal structure to establish governance and other matters as broad or as narrow as the founding stockholders adopt in accordance with the state law in the state where said corporation is established. A corporation can be huge (Microsoft) or very small (your neighborhood deli). There may be certain reasons why a business has incoroporated such as taxes, liability of the owners, etc. and there are advantages and disadvantages that must be weighed in determining your business structure. Let’s just say a corporation can’t do the things the Supreme Court says is constitutionally protected speech, then they’ll find some other avenue to express their political thoughts. This is true for viewpoints on the left or right or whereever. Doesn’t matter if you are an oil & gas company or if you are renewable energy company.

Tom and others – if any of you want to come out to the farm to shoot, contact me at natbin@charter.net and you are more than welcome. Just be respectful of our neighbors so they don’t believe WWIII is here and don’t shoot any cows!

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Nathan,

1) The problem isn’t that corporations aren’t made up of people. Those people also have the right to form PACs, to donate individually, to do as Ross Perot and spend their own money influencing the political process.

The problems are, however:

(a) that corporations spending from their general treasury have no requirements placed on them for transparency. We can’t know where their money comes from, and we will more than likely have very little idea of where their money is going.

(b) that along with the decrease in transparency, corporate structures lack accountability – if a CEO or board of directors decides that the profit motive requires them to intervene in an election, shareholders will have few means at their disposal to stop them. PACs and other specifically political organizations get their money from people freely donating in support of specific political objectives. Even unions have at least nominally more democratic structures.

(c) that corporations are creations of the state. Form a corporation, and you get your limited liability and all the other rights under the law because the state decides you’re on the up-and-up. The Supreme Court has now granted corporations a slew of additional rights that they have not enjoyed for over thirty years; what do we do if the body politic thinks that these artificial entities don’t deserve those rights, and never did?

Had they known that this would happen, states might have put in a “no electioneering” clause into the standard corporate charter: it seems reasonable to me that a state could require corporations to voluntarily relinquish that one right in order to gain the rest. But the court’s decision makes that impossible for existing corporations, and I’m not clear that they would allow states to do that for new ones as they were created. Are we now in a position in which corporations enjoy certain rights in utero, and that states may not deny those rights? It certainly seems that way to me.

(d) that many U.S. corporations are managed and controlled by foreign nationals whose interests might not correspond with those of U.S. citizens. “International Unions” in this context is laughable, since most “international” unions don’t share management structures or revenue between countries: if they do, it’s mostly the American unions supporting unions abroad. Now we’re in a situation in which foreign investors may provide capital to an American company solely in order to influence an American election. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ruling allowed someone to set up a corporation with the specific intent of facilitating foreign influence on our elections.

There are other problems with the ruling – most of which have already been pointed out on this thread – but I’m going to stop there.

2) The issue of public financing ignores the historical context. Beyond having raised a ton of money, the Obama campaign also wanted to avoid the situation the Kerry campaign found itself in, where it was tied to a limited amount of public funds from the primary, and forced to wait for another limited disbursement that would not arrive until after Kerry received the nomination at the convention.

Bush had forgone public financing in the primary, and in the time between the primary and the Republican convention (in early September, with about eight weeks left in the campaign) he used that money advantage to pummel Kerry mercilessly. It got worse after the Democratic convention: Kerry was forced to conserve his general election funds throughout the month of August, while Bush was still using unlimited primary funds.

In that context, the contrast you draw between public financing in the primary and the general election is a distinction without a difference. Bush had no opposition in his primary, and he used unlimited primary funds almost exclusively toward winning the general election. The answer is to provide more money and to provide it as soon as a candidate clinches the nomination, rather than after the convention. Maybe after 2008, Republicans would be more interested in fixing that, but I’m not holding my breath.

3) Finally, you talk about how government shouldn’t regulate corporations, and just provide efficient services, etc, as if everyone left of center was too blind to see the good things that entrepreneurship has to offer us. Quite the contrary: the American left by and large respects private enterprise as an engine of prosperity; certainly the Democratic Party does for the most part.

Regulation has been chosen over direct provision of services because of that respect, not in spite of our skepticism. I see regulation as an absolutely necessary part of a free market: it relieves those in charge of corporations of having to choose between immoral actions and decreased profits by enforcing community standards. Corporations are – most often – groups of people, and it is far easier for groups to exceed the bounds of morality than individuals, especially when one group is in competition with another. Regulation holds these groups to the same moral strictures they’re likely to observe as individuals.

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The Court upheld the right of government to require disclosure of independent expenditures by corporations or unions so there should be transparency. But if we are going to restrict corporations political activities, why not restrict newspapers, tv stations, radio stations, popular internet sites, etc. because these media conglomerates have a tremendous impact on voters’ perceptions?

I was not advocating for no rules or regulation of private business, every business sector must meet certain standards (hopefully reasonable) like the dairy buiness – environmental, public sanitation, worker protection, etc. I think we have gone too far though in most areas. Just recently Boone Pickens announced he was going to cut his order of wind turbines in half because of the inability to jump through all the regulatory hurdles for transmission of the wind power to the power grid. It takes us over fifteen years to build a nuclear power plant (that’s a guess since we haven’t built a new one in 30 years) because of all the compliance requirements. China is going gang busters with renewable energy, nuclear, etc. and we just seem to stand still (sort of like the I 26 Connector project). Say we wanted to build Fontana Dam today, how long do you think it would take? Probably wouldn’t happen in my lifetime.

Most businesses (including corporations) are successful when they empower their workers because ultimately, especially in a large organization, good employees will result in the increased growth and profit of the business. A great example of this attitude is right here in NC with SAS which consistently ranks as one of the best places in America to work. Traditionally and for most of my adult life, our employment market has been sufficiently robust that if you didn’t take care of your workers, they could go somewhere else. Unfortunately for the past year and a half, that hasn’t necessarily been the case. Long term due to demographic issues (it is hard to imagine now) corporations and other employers may see more worker shortages especially in skilled areas so employee retention will become more important.

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This Supreme Court decision means that China can buy or start domestic companies, and then buy our Congress. That means that not only will they be selling us toxic crap, there will finally be no rules to stop them (not that the ones currently in place are working). And they will enable laws to change immigration, so that the Chinese can easily move here.

Of course, all the comments about how corporations are totally amoral will still apply. Chinese business are totally amoral also.

Our country will be sold to the amoral corporations with the most money and some fools will call it ‘free speech’.

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writ reminds me of what Thom Hartmann said: Corporations are how capital organizes itself, unions are how labor organizes itself. It’s well known how difficult it is to form a new labor union. What does it take to form a Limited Liability Corporation in the very, very, very corporate-friendly state of Delaware? About a hundred clams and one business day.
http://www.delawareintercorp.com/t-WhyIncorporateinDelaware.aspx

That’s but one basic example of how corporations have gotten both the federal and state governments to tilt the playing field toward them. Imagine if your fooseball opponent was allowed to put bricks under his end of the table. It’s like that.

This is why I always get suspicious whenever I hear someone lumping labor unions in with corporations in the too-much-money-in-politics debate. It’s like when the UN placed an arms embargo in the former Yugoslavia while Serbian artillery pounded Bosnian civilians. It was an uneven fight and the “even-handed” embargo merely locked in the advantage of the side that had most of the heavy guns.

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From Glenn Greenwald at Salon (full article here):

I’m also quite skeptical of the apocalyptic claims about how this decision will radically transform and subvert our democracy by empowering corporate control over the political process. My skepticism is due to one principal fact: I really don’t see how things can get much worse in that regard. The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin: “banks own” the Congress). Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions — their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold — and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can’t imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There’s not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday’s issuance of this ruling?

I’m even more unpersuaded by the argument — seen in today’s New York Times Editorial — that this decision will “ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.” What evidence is there for that? Over the past five years, corporate money has poured far more into the coffers of the Democratic Party than the GOP — and far more into Obama’s campaign coffers than McCain’s (especially from Wall Street). If anything, unlimited corporate money will be far more likely to strengthen incumbents than either of the two parties (and unlimited union spending, though dwarfed by corporate spending, will obviously benefit Democrats more). Besides, if it were the case that this law restricts the ability of Republicans far more than Democrats to raise money in election cycles, doesn’t that rather obviously intensify the First Amendment concerns?

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I forgot to mention that I stumbled across something recently called the “B Corporation”. The B Corp is a type of corporation that includes social and environmental measures in its “bottom line,” sometimes referred to as a triple bottom line. These goals that go beyond simple financial return to shareholders are included in their corporate by-laws. From the B Corp organization’s website, I see that North Carolina has 11 such corporations and my own California has 72. I don’t know if this is the whole answer, but I do find it encouraging that companies can voluntarily and legally enhance their mission beyond profit.

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