The Court’s Gutting of Restrictions on Corporate Campaign Spending: Scott Lemieux on The American Prospect
From Scott Lemiuex in The American Prospect regarding the Supreme Court’s decision last month in the Citizen United case, in which the Court, in a 5-4 vote, “gutted” the restrictions on corporate campaign spending:
“As I said after the oral arguments, I don’t have any strong objection to the Court’s ruling that the restrictions placed on showing Hillary: the Movie were unconstitutional. Such a holding would be quite defensible even under a legal framework that tried to balance First Amendment interests and the importance of fair elections. The real question was whether the case would be decided in narrow or broad terms, and alas it’s very much the latter. The Court overruled both a 20-year precedent permitting greater restrictions on corporate speech and parts of a more recent ruling upholding the McCain-Feingold Act, and has essentially held that for-profit corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.
“On a related note, it seems worth nothing again that Chief Justice Roberts’s purported “minimalism” — so often touted by his defenders, including liberals who should know better — is an empty fraud. At least in this case — unlike previous campaign finance rulings — the Court was willing to overturn precedents explicitly. But, certainly, this should serve as a reminder that it’s farcical to claim that modern judicial conservatives stand for substantive “minimalism” or “judicial restraint.”
“The central line of argument in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion — that the First Amendment does not permit distinctions based on the identity of the speaker — is superficially attractive. The problem is, there’s no reason to believe that any of the justices believe it. In addition to the examples in Justice Stevens’ superb dissent, consider Morse v. Frederick, a decision denying a free speech claim which all 5 of the justices in today’s majority also joined. Obviously. nobody would dispute that an ordinary citizen who unfurled a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner could be sanctioned by the state; the punishment was upheld solely based on Frederick’s identity as a student, which meant that his free speech rights had to be balanced against a school’s interest in preventing drug use (and could be denied even if there was no plausible argument that his speech actually would promote drug use.) If this kind of balancing test is permissible, surely Congress should be permitted to place some weight on the importance of fair elections when considering the First Amendment rights of for-profit corporations.”
February 7th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
I think that everyone agrees that we need corporations; what we don’t need is corporations running our country. I also think that we don’t need corporations so large that they eliminate any possibility for any competition. Since the early 1980’s corporations have had little of the regulation that were instituted over the first 200 years of our existence. Most of the laws regulating corporations were instituted because the majority of law makers ultimately decided too much corporate power was bad for our society (human people). The trouble with unregulated corporations is by their nature they make decisions to benefit the corporation to the exclusion of competition or society’s best interest. Since corporations only purpose is to accumulate revenue for the corporation and since the corporations, once formed don’t die unless they are dissolved, they must be highly regulated to protect society (human people) from them.
A real world story of an unregulated system and its impact on the whole of humanity would be the invention of the fish trap. Before fish traps an individual would have to work his fishing gear to catch fish to sell to make a living. The fisherman made a living and society got fish to supplement their diet. Then some creative individual invents a fish trap and discovers that no longer must the fisherman work his fishing gear but rather he can just dump a trap in the water and come back later and get the fish out of it and sell it for a profit. This doesn’t sound so bad to anyone because society gets fish for their diet and the fisherman makes a little more money plus he has some leisure time to enjoy his money. In the fisherman’s leisure time he figures out reasons that he needs a lot more money so he makes some more fish traps and dumps them in the water and catches more fish. So far all is good because the fisherman will catch more fish, make more money, and soon society begins to change their diet because of the plentiful affordable fish they can get. The fisherman, now becoming kind of wealthy, notices that he really needs to be a lot more wealthy so he can be powerful like the bankers, so he makes even more fish traps and now hires folks to dump them in the water and bring him the fish to sell. Now the fisherman not only makes himself a lot more money but he rationalizes the great good he is doing for society by providing jobs, so everything is still good. In an unregulated capitalist society some of those fisherman will also understand that they can get their own fish trap and subsidize their income from working for the now large fisherman’s corporation. The original fisherman and now CEO, concerned that this concept of individuals competing with his business could catch on, and now being accustomed to living the good life of the rich and powerful, he sets about to find a way to limit the competition of the labor force who only wants to improve their situation much like the fisherman did. Not only is there competitive pressure from the local fisherman and employees of the fisherman’s corporation who also want to be rich, but now some tree hugger from the local community college notices that some changes are taking place in the ecological balance and the fishing grounds are changing, with some species becoming scarce because of the fishing methods.
The fisherman quickly realizes that he must defend his business if he is going to continue to have the lifestyle that he has now become accustomed to, so the fisherman starts diverting some of his great wealth to the legislators who have the power to make laws to protect the once fisherman now CEO’s business.
In the bigger picture the CEO now has a lot of influence over the legislators who he is now supporting with large contributions of money from his corporation as a tax-deductable political contribution. The folks at the community college are trying to let the public and the legislators know of the looming issues surrounding overfishing and depletion of the resource but they are thwarted by corporate money rolling into the legal institutions from not only the once fisherman now CEO but also the banks, steel makers, energy corporations, transportation corporations, media corporations, food and drug corporations, insurance corporations, defense corporations, and even foreign money through proxies in domestic corporations. All these big money interests have one interest and that is the creation of wealth within their own entities, but they have the common goals of both of limiting government interference with their operations and limiting competition from anyone who may interfere with their primary goal of creation of wealth.
The fisherman convinces the legislators to create laws that make it difficult or impossible for other small companies to form and compete with his business operations while at the same time blocking the tree huggers from having a voice in the development of any regulations on his industry. The fisherman/CEO finds that he can easily enter into an alliance with virtually all the other large corporations particularly on the common goal of limiting competition through regulations limiting free trade, which the alliance of big corporations is amazingly able to argue in the name of protecting capitalism. Secondly they limit any voice from the environmental or ecological community by unrelentingly smearing their credibility in the media. Note that the media corporations are also allied with the rest of the big corporations.
The great efficiency of the fish traps make it impossible for ordinary fisherman to make a living any longer using traditional fishing methods, both because of the lower price of fish based on the hugely increased supply, and the real reduction of the resource from overfishing again with the new fish trap technology. The only way that the folks who used to be independent fisherman can now make a living is to work for the large fishing corporation at terms dictated by the corporation, or to change their operation to use the new fish trap technology. The individual fisherman is unable to use the new technology because of regulations in place to protect the large corporation from competition from all these little companies.
In order for the large corporation to continue to generate the huge sums of money necessary to maintain the CEO’s exorbitant lifestyle it has to increase production or reduce wages or both. In the meantime, those pesky tree huggers are starting to get more traction on the issue of ecologic cost of resource depletion from the few legislators who aren’t getting the bulk of their revenue from the corporate world via K-street, and from alternate and underground media which seems to be moving public opinion ever so slightly in the direction of regulating the use of fish traps.
The corporation now has a board of directors and every decision made is made to maximize profit to the corporation. The corporate board specifically excluded any of the tree huggers from their board in favor of media experts who know how spin the facts to create incorrect perceptions in the population that are favorable to the corporation, and thus decisions end up being shortsighted from the perspective of protecting the resource and in favor of the shorter term gratification of higher profits. After all, the board members are able to extract huge bonuses for themselves by showing higher end of year profits, and so they get all they can while the getting is good. Meanwhile the resource, in this case the fish supply, is spiraling toward the abyss of un-sustainability.
The impact to the resource finally starts to impact the corporate profits because the production begins to decline. The board convenes to evaluate the corporate profit issue and comes up with a list of ideas from their board of corporate experts who know everything about generating corporate wealth by using fish trap technology, manipulating public perception in the media, and manipulating government using the corporations unlimited wealth allied with other huge corporations. The corporate decisions on how to maximize profit is wholly driven by end of the year bonuses expected by the board members and CEO and will not consider what is best for society or the environment. The alliance of huge corporations has already branded any consideration of societal impact as being socialism or some Bolshevik Plot (that was such a great line) which make it easy to manipulate public perception using three-word talking points generated by hired psychologists and media hit men.
The corporate board comes up with a plan based on their expertise to make sure that profits are high at the end of the year when officer bonuses are calculated. They will start a media campaign predicting higher prices for fish which society has grown to depend on because of the seemingly unlimited supply, and blam the higher prices on labor who really don’t have any ability to object and generally are as influenced by the three-word talking points as folks in the rest of society. The corporation also blame government regulations and the tree huggers even though all the current regulations in place were heavily influenced or insome cases writtern their own corporate officers, and also hugely influenced by the unlimited dollars that the corporation funneled into the legislator, and even though the tree huggers have been mostly vilified and silenced with the never ending media campaign to smear them. The few government officials who have been working to protect society are also vulnerable targets, because as the hired psychologists and media expert hit men know, a strong offence is the most effective defense in the business of the manipulation of public perception.
The profits are once again salvaged by hugely increasing the price to consumers who put up little resistance because of the well planned and executed media campaign. The corporate officers and CEO all get their huge bonuses and there is even more pressure on the resource. The corporation now has a system in place to systematically keep prices moving up, keeping profits up, and not worrying too much about the ecological cost from their business activities, because of the political power purchased with their great wealth. Up to now the little political traction that the tree huggers have gained has not been too much of a threat because generally society has been able to absorb the gradually falling supply. But at long last there are actual shortages of fish and the population beginning to get hunger pains, the small influence that the tree hugger group has is becoming more of a problem. The corporation needs to increase its influence on the legislators. The problem is there are some government regulations that are precluding them from spending enough money to buy enough influence, but luckily this is a problem that the banks and brokerage houses have been working for some time and they have finally implemented their long range plan to increase their influence on the government by influencing the politics of the judicial branch by heavily lobbing for certain individuals to be placed in life appointments, whose politics have already been influenced by the corporate alliance. Brilliantly the political appointees have managed to change long standing laws that protect the public from the unlimited funding of particular political positions or the politicians’ assuring complete corporate alliance control over the whole political system.
Everything is once again good for corporate profit but the resource issue is still getting worse and shortage of fish is getting to be the norm in the society; but thanks to the corporate alliance and its total control over government, there seems to be no platform for any political position that conflicts with the corporate alliance, particularly since the media is part of the alliance. The government is more and more run by and for business with little regard to the impact on social justice or environmental sustainability because all corporations are run for the benefit of board and CEO end of year bonuses. Life for the corporate elite becomes more and more extravagant at the cost of the rest of the society, till the peoples situation becomes so wanton that they kill all heads of state and corporate elite, then society starts all over writing laws that attempt to preclude corporations or big money from running the show. In spite of the best efforts of the best political minds it always happens that gradually money buys its way back into the driver’s seat and the whole things start over. The trouble is that the depletion of resources and environmental degradation that is happening right now is on such a grand scale because of all the available advanced technology, that society may not survive this next iteration of the same process that has plagued humans ever since they started their first village. Even with thousands of years of written human history we still haven’t figured out that if selfish motives are the only drivers for society’s institutions they are ultimately doomed.
The founding fathers had the socialist idea that a government that was comprised of the people (and they meant human people) put in place by the people (again human people) and for the best benefit of the (human) people would have the best chance for long term success. I think they were completely correct in their assessment, but I don’t think that they could write rules and laws two hundred and thirty four years ago that could thwart the never-ending efforts of brilliant entrepreneurs that would guarantee gradual erosion of the protections they envisioned.