For awhile there, it looked like all the paranoid cyberpunk fiction of the 80s and early 90s was just silly. The US had elected its first black president, we were on the verge of getting some kind of major health care reform and things were finally starting to move on reforming banking and finance.
Then came MA special election and Pelosi announcing she didn’t have the HCR votes in the House. That was bad. That was disappointing. It’s nothing compared to the unmitigated disaster that is the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
Since it’s not getting anywhere near the news coverage it should, and frankly, it takes a little bit of time for the ramifications to sink in, I’ll be blunt about what this means:
Corporations can now spend whatever they want on politics.
Let that sink in for a moment. Imagine this had been reality in 2008. Obama spent $740.6 million (Bloomberg) on his presidential campaign, much of it raised is small donations from millions of supporters online. Now imagine that Halliburton was able to spend whatever they wanted on the 2008 campaign. Their 10-k showed $1.124 billion in cash and $1.538 billion in net income for 2008.
So Halliburton, with their petty cash, could have outspent Obama, in favor of McCain (or whatever further right candidate they would choose). And oh, by the way, all those “this ad is approved by… ” such and such disclaimers? Yeah, those are gone too.
This is complete fucking disaster. Democracy, as if it wasn’t already at a discount, is now officially for sale to the highest bidder. Hello Neuromancer, hello Snow Crash, we are on.our.way.
And just for special irony, the entire argument is based around the notion that a corporation is a person, and is therefore entitled to the same rights to free speech as a person. Incidentally, you as an individual can now spend gazillions on campaigns too.
But back to the irony: in order to “protect” free speech, your voice can now be completely, utterly outspent by a “legal person” with no motivation except shareholder value (time to buy more stocks?).
Justice Stevens explains just how little sense this actually makes, in the dissent:
The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its “identity” as a corpo ration. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. Nor does it tell us when a corporation may engage in electioneering that some of its shareholders oppose. It does not even resolve the specific question whether Citizens United may be required to finance some of its messages with the money in its PAC. The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.
In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our soci ety, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be man aged and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legiti mate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.
Just who is Citizens United and what was the case actually about? From their website:
Citizens United is an organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United’s goal is to restore the founding fathers’ vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens.
Setting aside the spectacular irony of the first sentence, the rest of it pretty standard fair libertarian buzzwordium.
The organization’s president, David N. Bossie, “led investigations ranging from the Whitewater land deal to the transfer of dual-use technology to China and to foreign fundraising in the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign” (bonus points if you can dissect the special irony about the foreign fundraising). You can read the rest about them for yourself.
The case was about this film they did and, essentially, that they thought they should be able to spend more money promoting it during the 30 day pre-primary window (again, from Stevens: “All that the parties dispute is whether Citizens United had a right to use the funds in its general treasury to pay for broadcasts during the 30-day period”) than the law allowed.
Really, that’s it. I couldn’t make this up. Somehow we got from that dispute to OMFGUNLIMITEDFUNDING.
You know when the last time we had a legislature that was so divided that hardly anything could get passed and there was a really awful, really important supreme court ruling? The 1850s. Scary.