A S I have said, concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power, especially as the cost of elections continues to skyrocket. There is the shredding of the democratic system by the rapid increase in the ability to just buy elections. Take Citizens United, a very important Supreme Court decision in 2009. Now this has a history, and you’ve got to think about the history.
See Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Supreme Court of the United States, January 21, 2010
The Fourteenth Amendment has a provision that says no person’s rights can be infringed without due process of law (actually the wording is also in the Fifth Amendment, but it was extended in the Fourteenth Amendment), and the intent, clearly, was to protect freed slaves. It says, “Okay, they’ve got the protection of the law.” I don’t think it’s ever been used for freed slaves—if ever, marginally. Almost immediately, it was used for businesses—corporations—their rights can’t be infringed without due process of law. This is a sharp attack on classical liberal principles, and was condemned by conservatives in those days. But that trend continued into the early twentieth century, when it was pretty much established that corporations have personal rights, and it extended through the twentieth century, when they gradually became persons under the law.
Corporations are state-created legal fictions. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re bad—but to call them persons is kind of outrageous. For example, take the so called free trade agreements, say, NAFTA. They gave corporations rights way beyond what persons have. So if General Motors invests in Mexico, they get national rights, the rights of a Mexican business—but if a Mexican person comes to New York and says, “I want national rights,” well, there’s no need to say what happens. So while the notion of personhood was expanded to include corporations, it was restricted for others.
If you take the Fourteenth Amendment literally, then no undocumented alien can be deprived of rights if they’re a person. Well, the courts, in their wisdom over the years, have carved that away and said they’re not persons. Undocumented aliens who are living here and building your buildings, cleaning your lawns, and so on, they’re not persons, but General Electric is a person, an immortal, super powerful person. This perversion of the elementary morality, and the obvious meaning of the law, is quite incredible.
In the 1970s, the courts decided that money was a form of speech in the ruling of Buckley v. Valeo. But then you go on through the years to Citizens United, which says the right of free speech of corporations—mainly to spend as much money as they want—that can’t be curtailed. Take a look at what that means. It means that corporations, which have been pretty much buying elections anyway, are now free to do it with virtually no constraint. That’s a tremendous attack on the residue of democracy.
It’s very interesting to read the rulings, like Justice Kennedy’s swing vote. His ruling said, “Well, look, after all, CBS is given freedom of speech—they’re a corporation—why shouldn’t General Electric be free to spend as much money as they want?” It’s true that CBS is given freedom of speech, but they’re supposed to be performing a public service. That’s why. That’s what the press is supposed to be, and General Electric is trying to make money for the chief executive, some of the shareholders, the other banks, and so on. And it was passed with no disclosure required—so that gives immense freedom.
It’s an incredible decision, and it puts the country in a position where business power is greatly extended beyond what it always was. This is part of that vicious cycle. The Supreme Court justices are put in by reactionary presidents, who get in there because they’re funded by business. It’s the way the cycle works.
Thomas Ferguson, the political scientist who’s the leading specialist on campaign funding, has developed what he calls “the investment theory of politics,” implying that business and investors, not the voters, have tremendous influence in the political system. I mean, candidates are going to continue to need billions of dollars in campaign funding and where do you go—especially after Citizens United, which frees up corporate funding? If you want to be in the game, you go to the center of the corporate system.
The funding for campaigns is not just to get the candidate in. If you’re funding a candidate, it buys access. Every funder understands that. That candidate is going to give you privileged access, because he or she wants the funding to continue. And when the candidate wins, privileged access means that your corporate lawyers go to the staff of the legislator, the people who actually write the legislation. The legislators often don’t even know what’s in it, but the people who actually do the work—your corporate lawyers—go and deluge them with alleged data, arguments, and tons of material; they basically write the laws. So, what comes out as policy is pretty much what’s written by corporate lobbyists and lawyers, who gain the access thanks to funding.
In my own view, the electoral extravaganza that takes place every four years should take about ten minutes of our time, literally. One minute should be spent on learning something about arithmetic. There’s a very simple point about arithmetic—if you happen to be in a swing state, a state where the outcome is indefinite, and you don’t vote for, say, Clinton, that’s equivalent to voting for Trump. That’s arithmetic. So we take one minute to settle the question of arithmetic, then we take about two minutes to look at the merits of the two parties. Not just the candidates, but the parties. My own view is that under current circumstances it should take about two minutes. And then we take the rest of the ten minutes to go to the ballot box and push a lever.
Meanwhile, after we’ve spent those ten minutes, we’ve turned to what really matters, which is not the election, but the continued effort to develop and organize active dedicated popular movements that will continue to struggle constantly for what has to be done. That’s not only demonstrating, pressuring candidates, and so on—but it’s also building an electoral system that means something. You don’t build a better-functioning democracy, or a party for that matter, by voting once every four years.
If you want a third party, an independent party, it’s not enough to vote for it every four years. You have to be out there constantly—developing the system that goes from school boards to city councils, legislatures, all the way up to Congress. And there are people who understand that, namely the Far Right. That’s how the Tea Party got organized—with plenty of capital and plenty of thinking—and it has an effect. Those who are interested in an independent progressive party just haven’t done that. They’ve been trapped by the propaganda that says the only thing that matters is the electoral extravaganza. You can’t ignore it—it’s there—but, like I say, it should take about ten minutes. But the other things—the things that really matter—they need to be done constantly.
The law’s exception for media corporations is, on its own terms, all but an admission of the invalidity of the antidistortion rationale. And the exemption results in a further, separate reason for finding this law invalid: Again by its own terms, the law exempts some corporations but covers others, even though both have the need or the motive to communicate their views. The exemption applies to media corporations owned or controlled by corporations that have diverse and substantial investments and participate in endeavors other than news. So even assuming the most doubtful proposition that a news organization has a right to speak when others do not, the exemption would allow a conglomerate that owns both a media business and an unrelated business to influence or control the media in order to advance its overall business interest. At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure, would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue. This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.
A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money. The distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet entails printing, paper, and circulation costs. Speeches and rallies generally necessitate hiring a hall and publicizing the event. The electorate’s increasing dependence on television, radio, and other mass media for news and information has made these expensive modes of communication indispensable instruments of effective political speech.
For now we remind readers that the dynamics of campaigns funded mostly by major investors are quite different than the campaigns imagined by traditional democratic theory: “Big Money’s most significant impact on politics is certainly not to deliver elections to the highest bidders. Instead it is to cement parties, candidates, and campaigns into the narrow range of issues that are acceptable to big donors. The basis of the ‘Golden Rule’ in politics derives from the simple fact that running for major office in the U.S. is fabulously expensive. In the absence of large scale social movements, only political positions that can be financed can be presented to voters. On issues on which all major investors agree (think of the now famous 1 percent), no party competition at all takes place, even if everyone knows that heavy majorities of voters want something else.”