Did SCOTUS Open The Floodgates?

I just found this letter about Citizens United ruling in my inbox (I don’t check it daily–sorry it’s late.)

The Democratic leadership in Congress just announced its response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, the case that struck down limits on independent corporate campaign expenditures.

In a word: hopeless.

The package the Democrats are proposing is filled with ideas that either won’t work or that, if they worked, would only invite the Supreme Court to strike again. (For a description of the proposed changes and my reactions to them, click here or scroll to the bottom of this email.)

Congress had a chance to do something real here, but rather than supporting a bold reform that would make our democracy function better, they failed; they changed nothing. And as a result, our representatives’ dependency on campaign funders — the central corrupting force acting on our government — will continue for another day.

You know why it happened this way. Members of Congress have every incentive to preserve a system that keeps them in office by keeping their campaign coffers full. So the very same funders who’ve blocked progress on issue after issue for decades have now conspired to block a reform that would have made those other reforms possible.

What we need to do is show members of Congress that they’re also dependent on another constituency: the voters. We’re following this issue. We know the difference between fake reform and real reform. And come November, we’ll make our decisions based on who had the courage to stand up to the funders, and who tried to sell America a bill of goods while protecting the status quo.

The Fair Elections Now Act is the reform we need, and we still have the chance to push Congress to pass it. So far, 135 Members of the House have signed on as co-sponsors, but we must continue to urge all of our representatives to support this crucial bill. You can use our simple tool to email your members of Congress and tell them that this issue won’t fly under the radar in 2010:

http://fixcongressfirst.org/email

If the Democratic Party wants to lead, then they need to show us they’re ready to lead. And if the Republican Party wants to rise back to power, they need to prove they’d use that power to enact the will of the people.

Please take action today to make real reform possible.

— Lawrence Lessig

P.S. These are the changes the Democratic leadership proposes, and my view about each. As you read these, ask yourself: Will this change reform the fundraising Congress? Will it really make Members of Congress any less dependent on special interests?

(1) Ban foreign corporations from influencing elections.

This is a fine idea. Problem is that it is completely unclear how under the Supreme Court’s reasoning this change would be constitutional. The Court said the First Amendment doesn’t care who is trying to exercise the right to speak — that the First Amendment simply limits the government’s power to regulate speech. So how will it find foreigners have less freedom than corporations?

(2) Stop government contractors or TARP recipients who haven’t repaid from political spending.

This selective regulation is Supreme Court bait: it wasn’t imposed on TARP recipients when they took the money, and my bet is the Court views the government contractors limitation as too broad.

(3) Impose new disclosure requirements, so that the ultimate funder is exposed.

A perfectly fine regulation, but to what effect? Will the disclosure really make Members less dependent on the funders?

(4) Impose new disclaimers on TV ads.

Same point as above.

(5) Require candidates to have reasonable access to air time.

This is promising and important, though the Court has signaled increasing impatience with this sort of regulation. So again, an uncertain reform of limited effect.

And this update:

“The Democrats

The corporations and the right have been setting the stage for several years for dominance over the middle class.

“There was a memo written by Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 in reaction to the new left, saying that big business has got to fight for itself: we’ve got to do messaging; we’ve got to deal with liberals and leftists in academia; we have to challenge the media. And that Powell memo set off a series of fundraising by big corporate forces and big donors. They set up their think tanks; they set up the Heritage Foundation; they mobilized the Christian right.

And what’s interesting is that that memo to the US Chamber of Commerce

We have faced this before in Huey Long and others, but never before have we had such a well-oiled machine. If the American people can use the most recent information – insurance rates rise 39% – to begin to see what “free enterprise” is doing to us, maybe there is hope.

I query how well the Dems will do responding to this. I fear people such as Rahm are all too willing to cater to the corporations as Jimmy Carter did so eagerly in the 1970s. Had he been a Dem instead of a Lite Republican, much of this would not have occurred. But he bought the corporate global world line, and the fact he was on the Trilateral Commission drove him to accept this deterioration of democracy as a good thing. He, not Reagan, set it in motion. So where are the real progressives? Before Obama was elected, every book in my independent bookstore was a critique of the corporate world. Now only about half are while the other half are poorly written and even more poorly conceived justifications of the corporate and global mentality. Where are our supporters of REAL reform? We have to have them continue to write – what has happened over the past 35 years MUST be stopped.

The single biggest thing I fear is our own (not the Planet people but the Huff afficionados) elitism. I STILL hear snide comments about farmers in Kansas and Iowa, I STILL hear dismissal of the critical importance of restoring industry and the blue collar jobs it produces, I STILL hear snotty feminists state they care nothing about white males’ and their conditions. We have too many in our ranks who hate the others in our ranks and dismiss them out of hand.

I see a massively pernicious purportedly LEFT WING academic view that people (fill in the blanks – Black, Indian, etc.) made their own choices – had “agency” – which led to their own repression! The idea that all of life is in our hands – that we can “reinvent” ourselves, communities, etc. with a wave of the wand – that plays right into neo-fascism. I kow she’d be horrified, but Oprah does the same as does the book, “The Secret”. It makes each of us utterly responsible for the outcomes of our lives, and failure, poverty, want, etc. are because we did not want and work hard enough to have all our dreams fulfilled. Taken to extremes, it makes the Jews responsible for the Holocaust because they did not “want” freedom from genocide enough. Their fault. Not the perpetrators of unequal, violent power. Next we’ll hear how Muslims have been torturing themselves…

It blocks the key issue: that standing in front of every individual dream, hope, want lies a structure of power that is primed to say, “NO”! Whatever movies we can make about one man’s success overcoming all odds, there is the reality of the millions who worked just as hard and failed. Failed because there were obstacles over which they could not come because the system of entrenched power did not WANT them to overcome.

Of course hard work and self discipline are important, but take careful note of how much we are reverting to Social Darwinism – that only the really “fit” survive – or deserve to do so.

We did this 100 years ago during the Gilded Age, and it failed miserably then. Will it fail miserably now? Or will we accommodate the creeping fascism inch by inch until it’s too late? Unlike the situation of the Labor Wars then, post WWII corporate America found ways to accommodate us enough to coopt us well. My only hope is that they have over-reached and impacted enough of us to once again motivate us to act.

We need the movement we’ve started here at the Planet to challenge at every level the fascists AND their phony liberal supporters. I truly fear the outcomes if we don’t because almost anything can be sold to Americans when they act from fear rather than from strength.

American cannot become the Brave New World.

Thank you Sue, this is very well put together.
I hope people can still be open to facts.
Somehow we have to make facts and reality a GOOD thing again.

Sue wonderful article, when reading V.P. Henry Wallace’s statement, I would have said that this was a current opinion….the first thing that came to me was, they are talking about Glen Beck and Fox News, because that’s what they do, “poison the channels of public information”.

You are so right to compare this with Germany in 1930 and the beer hall movement that eventually turned into the Nazis.

We have been brought to the brink in our economy and our country, just as Germany was after WWI, our citizens are scared and fearful. This fear then turns into anger, and groups like the promoters of the Tea Baggers, the Christian Right and Glen Beck’s Patriots are looking to cash in on this anger, just as Hitler did in the 30’s.

This is the “Perfect Storm” that “The Family” has been waiting for since 1946.

I have been watching a lot of Glen Beck lately, not out of curiosity, but out of fear of what this man could do,know thine enemy. He has such a massive following, I fear he fancies himself the new Hitler. Which he will deny, because he is only doing this for his “Country” and is a true “Patriot”, Hitler said these same things.

His new thing is his “100 year Plan for America”, to me it sounds like Hitler’s “1000 year Reich Plan”. He plans to tour the country presenting it and gathering a force to implement it. Little too much like Hitler and the ball hall movement for my liking.

This man needs to be exposed and discredited, apparently his favorite saying is “Tell a lie long enough and people will begin to believe it”, but what he doesn’t tell his audience is that this quote was stolen from Joseph Goebbels.

I am going to DIGG this article so that it may be read by others not members of Planet.POV, so that more will understand the threat we have here in our Country with this new SCOTUS ruling, I urge all you to do so too.

“Fascism will come to America in the name of antifascism.”

Huey Long

Excellent, Sue!
And very timely!

This also follows Cher’s hate series, in that desperate people might also turn to hate groups.

Love the quote by Margaret Mead.