(Revolting stuff… I haven’t felt this way since they first challenged our sovereignty via Bush v. Gore. – promoted by eli_beckerman)
By now you have probably heard about the recent Supreme Court ruling that frees corporations to spend unlimited amounts on independent efforts to support political candidates.
An already tattered and ineffective campaign finance system just got worse. People with any sense of the problem corporations pose to the existence of a basic democratic order are outraged.
Two efforts to amend the Constitution to limit corporate “rights” have already popped up, Free Speech for People and Move to Amend. Both are extremely crucial starting points, but is it enough?
I say that because corporate power has not weakened but strengthened over past 30 years. Communities are foreclosured, imprisoned, polluted, and laid-off in corporate boardrooms every day. Spheres of our lives that once had some autonomy from business logic and corporate planning are now embedded in that suffocating vacuum of “buy, sell, brand, liquidate”. We have moved from a market economy to a market society.
The Democratic and Republican parties are embedded in this logic and do not self-reflect on or ground themselves to institutions or values that are autonomous of this sort of society. Where Democrats support government action it has been on behalf of or on the terms of corporations. Look at the bailouts, carbon markets, and health “reform”.
The answer to this is a new kind of politics anchored on democratic and ecological principles. No it will not happen overnight or in one election cycle, but the potential is there and we must strive for it as we contend with the various crises our current system is hoisting upon us.
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Hehehe, not much activity so I figure I would say something else.
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… and Spitzer’s column is also an interesting read.
But I think there’s a slippery slope here that is testing out whether or not corporations themselves are entitled to constitutional protections. While the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights protects the freedom of speech and the freedom of association, does it extend to those associations the rights of citizens? While there is no explicit right to vote in the Constitution, this ruling seems to indicate that corporations have the right to speak… and what higher form of speech than a formally recorded ballot indicating who that corporation would like to represent them in government? Why not take a billion dollars, set up 100 million corporations, and demand their right to vote? And if a state decides to revoke a corporate charter, is it not committing the greatest abuse of that corporation’s constitutional rights — in essence a permanent revocation of that corporation’s freedom of speech, association, privacy, etc.?
Thank God for the rule of law!
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I found this piece by Glenn Greenwald offered an interesting viewpoint.
He basically says that although this will loosen restrictions on corporations, its hard to imagine how corporate influence over government could get any worse than it is already. The movement to take away corporate personhood may not solve the problem as the first amendment protects speech and does not specify the speech must come from a person. We continue to focus on publicly financed elections in addition to fighting corporate personhood.
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When I first heard that this was being considered by the Supreme Court a few months ago on the radio, I almost fainted. I couldn’t believe what they were considering doing. One of my major problems with the two party system is the fact that corporations run politics that directly affect people’s lives; it’s one of the main reasons I’m registered Green. To remove limits on how much they can spend on influencing elections is upsetting because of its pure moral reprehensibility.
It’s no joke that people are easily influenced by what they see on television. And it appears that they’re not so much looking to be informed by what they watch, but have their opinions affirmed by it (see also http://www.good.is/post/why-th… I’m of the opinion that it’s a dangerous and questionable thing to even have campaign commercials on TV. Now that a drug company, for instance, can shovel money into advertisements telling people to vote for a candidate because he or she supports the shoveling of their products onto the market is frightening.
I was musing today on just what we’ll see in the next major election cycle. Vote for someone in favor of free trade agreements, and get a 20% off coupon at your local big box chain? Vote for someone the oil companies likes and get a gift card from Exxon Mobile? Will we see millions of dollars spent to influence people to vote for an NRA nut who’ll weaken already laughable gun control laws? I’m sure they already push as hard as they can, to let the limits go just seems like it invites a flood of undue influence in our political system. To companies making money by peddling political influence or any other way is a way to make living, but to us, dealing with their choices affects our daily lives.
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