Amy Goodman: The American citizens rebelling against Citizens United

[marmar]

The American citizens rebelling against Citizens United
Even as the supreme court struck down a Montana law limiting corporate campaign finance, a movement for reform is building

Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 June 2012


"I never bought a man who wasn't for sale," William A Clark reportedly said. He was one of Montana's "copper kings", a man who used his vast wealth to manipulate the state government and literally buy votes to make himself a US senator. That was more than 100 years ago, and the blatant corruption of Clark and the other copper kings created a furor that led to the passage, by citizen initiative, of Montana's Corrupt Practices Act in 1912.

The century of transparent campaign-finance restrictions that followed, preventing corporate money from influencing elections, came to an end this week, as the US supreme court summarily reversed the Montana law. Five justices of the supreme court reiterated: their controversial Citizens United ruling remains the law of the land.

Clark's corruption contributed to the passage of the 17th amendment to the US constitution. Now, close to 100 years later, it may take a popular movement to amend the constitution again – this time, to overturn Citizens United and confirm, finally and legally, that corporations are not people.

Citizens United v Federal Election Commission is the case in which the US supreme court ruled that corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of funds toward what are deemed "independent expenditures" in our elections. Thus, corporations, or shadowy "Super Pacs" that they choose to fund, can spend as much as they care to on negative campaign ads, just as long as they don't coordinate with a candidate's campaign committee. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/29/american-citizens-rebelling-citizens-united

[drm604]

1. Wow. Some of the comments on that article...

Some people seem positively anxious to give away our country to the corporations. Some of them are more concerned about unions than they are about corporations. Do they seriously believe that unions have more financial clout?

What planet are they living on?

[Igel]

2. Financial clout? Not really.

Some would say "yes," but then they'd point out things that cost very little.

My mother's union ran phone banks, had a get-out-the-vote program, and sent people around to push for their candidates. A lot of the materials were produced by the union HQ, mass produced at the local level and distributed. It was really top down. With 20k union employees, they made a lot of phone calls, pushed a lot of doorbells, and handed out a lot of flyers.

Cost to the candidate or Democratic Party at any level: $0.

Cost to the union HQ: The cost of the originals of the materials sent out to locals. Perhaps $500 at most, and that's if they included the time their in-house staff spent designing them.

Cost to the local union: The cost of reproducing the originals, if they weren't just run with the union's own materials. A couple hundred dollars each.

Now, run that same program as an independant organization: You'd have to pay the organizers from the top to a fairly low level; there's be phone, postage, rent, electricity, materials preparation costs; no production costs could be buried. It would be expensive.

Since it was a union thing, union pressure was implicit. "Vote for X and support the union." I seriously couldn't ever imagine any church or school or organization I've been in trying the same stunt: "Vote for X and support the church" or "Vote for X and support the Scouts" or even "Vote for X and support the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages."

Union's financial clout: Not so much. But you'd need tens if not hundreds times their costs to equal their actual clout. This, of course, depends on the union and how it's perceived by the citizenry and by its own members. Where I live, the teachers' unions have pretty much zero clout. In other states, the NEA or even the less active ATF has significantly more clout.