[edited 4/28 to add Angry Bear link]
Money isn't speech.
In spite of that, the Supreme Court continues to expand its initial holding that treated expenditures of money to purchase speech as equivalent to speech and therefore protected by the Free Speech clause in the Bill of Rights, literally giving away elections and issue education to the top dollar, which will generally be the wealthy elite and the big corporations that own and manage.
This idea--that money is the same as the speech that money can buy--is at heart a radically anti-freedom idea. By equating money with the speech that it can buy, the Supreme Court has ensured that genuine speech rights will wither away, and that money will be able to buy elections and legislation to suit the source of the money. The Court failed to understand that while speech can be bought by money, that purchased speech is merely one mechanism for distributing speech. Speech is much more than the purchased speech that is bought by money. If you don't limit the ability of money to purchase election speech, you are in effect disenfranchising all other types of speech that can't compete with purchased speech. By equating the speech itself with the money that purchases it and claiming that the Free Speech clause applied to the money expenditure, the Court empowered purchased speech and empower Big Money, while it disempowered individual speech and made non-purchased speech practically irrelevant.
Since the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision expanding on this "money can purchase speech, therefore money used to purchase speech is protected in the same way that speech is protected" idiocy, it has been quite clear that Big Business carries a gigantic Big Stick that influences elections through anonymous issue ads and direct campaign contributions.
The people are misled, since the ads are often purportedly sponsored by groups with titles that suggest little people working for the common good.
The politicians aren't misled, because they get the Big Money that will allow them to flood the airwaves with similar stuff and they know where it comes from.
The result is that Big Money, from the few super-rich and the big corporations that they own and manage, can heavily influence critical legislators on deregulation and tax provisions favorable to the rich and Big Business.
- There is a reason that the fringe right elected to Congress in 2010 is pushing for repeal of the health reform and Dodd-Frank financial reform provisions--those reforms require Big Business to operate in ways that protect individual freedoms and limit the way that those Big Businesses can push their costs off into externalities to create socialization of losses, privatization of gains (e.g., high premiums paid only to find delay or denial from health insurance companies, risky casino speculation in derivatives from interconnected banks that lay their losses off on the public while raking in cheap financing provided by the public).
- There is a reason that Big Business got its wish list in the 2003 tax legislation pushed through by the Bush Administration, and then got more and more of its new wish lists in the following years Bush tax legislation and in the Republican provisions fought for in the "compromise" on stimulus funding in the first year of the Obama administration. Those tax provisions provide tax reductions for corporations that increased the deficit and required additional borrowing (including bonus expensing, the active financing exception permitting deferral of income for certain controlled foreign financing subsidiaries, new cross-crediting provisions that permitted U.S. multinationals to subsidize their foreign operations by reducing their US tax rate, and many others).
Imagine an issue ad by "People in support of Removing Bad Regulation" that puts out misleading, non-factual claims about how Big Business X (maybe a resource-extractive business) will be done in if the "bad" regulation is continued, and that all kinds of little people will be harmed if Business X is harmed. The facts are otherwise. Big Business X engages in extraordinarily harmful mining practices that level the mountains, leave toxic debris in streambeds, and put miners in harsh, unhealthy conditions that don't meet anybody's standards of a decent working environment while preventing unionization to allow collective bargaining and bombasting the region with warnings about how jobs would drop if any of these bad practices are regulated. And Business X is actually providing all the funding for "Little People". And Buiness X also contributes $400,000 to several congressional politicians who are on key committees that oversee Business X's industry. It engages in both of these activities anonymously.
How would people react if they knew that Business X was funding the ads that appear to be from a local concerned citizens' grassroots organization and at the same time was contributing huge sums of money to key politicians voting on those issues. They would be more likely to ask questions and more likely to doubt the veracity of the information in the ads, knowing the source of the money behind them.
So there has been a movement in support of individual freedom that demands that at the least we must have disclosure of the Big Money behind the purchased speech that has disemplowered the free speech of the people. Yet, Senate Republicans defeated a Disclose Act proposal in Congress last year through the now common route of requiring a supermajority of 60% to get to a vote, even though 59% of the Senate voted for cloture. See Open Congress on Senate bill; seel also Disclose Act (wikipedia).
Now the Obama administration is apparently considering an executive order that would require those Big Businesses seeking federal contracts to disclose their purchase of direct or indirect campaign contributions. In other words, when they buy election-related speech that clearly serves as a quo inviting a quid from the elected officials aided by such speech. they should disclose it so that we the public can evaluate whether they get the invited quid.
Big Business doesn't want to lose its anonymity--especially when it comes to getting the lucrative federal contracts even though it may be supporting fringe politicians who claim to want to cut government spending. (And of course, Big Business will likely use its money to support those politicians who talk about cutting government spending but mean only cutting spending for programs that form part of the social net for vulnerable citizens, not cutting spending on lucrative military contracts or other lucrative federal spending programs that create instant billionaires, like Eric Prince and his Blackwater security contracts in Iraq).
Big Business doesn't want to engage in real speech, but in purchased speech that can be hidden from the public with the use of misleadingly labeled front groups like the fictitious organization in my hypothetical. And it intends to use all the formidable weapons in its arsenal to ensure it can continue to pour money into election campaigns without revealing its role. So Josten, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major organization supported especially by the U.S.'s biggest multinational corporations, says "all options are on the table" to ensure that Big Business can contribute anonymously. See Lichtblau, Lobbyist Fires Warning Shot over Donation Disclosure Plan, NY Times, Apr. 26, 2011. Josten threatens that "all options are on the table." Big Business will apparently do almost anything to protect its right to spend to elect its politicians of choice while not letting real voters know what it is doing.
Meanwhile, of course, the Supreme Court continues on its tear of decisions that uphold Big Businesses' rights to conduct business as they want, no matter what impact that has on the freedoms of individual citizens of this country that fought a revolution to ensure those freedoms. AT&T Mobility v Concepcion is only the latest foray in this direction. In this case, the Court holds that we little people have no right to join together in a class-action against corporations that have misled us, even when the contract through which we became the corporation's customers was a contract of adhesion and the relinquishment of the right to a class-action is an interpretation by the corporation of the arbitration "term of contract" that we signed to get the service that the corporation provides. Contracts of adhesion are "take it or leave it" contracts. Most customers don't have the ability, let alone the money, to figure out what the terms mean. Even if someone did finally persevere and reject a contract of adhesion because the terms took away individual freedoms, that person would find no better contract at any other service provider, since they all incorporate essentialy the same corporate-friendly terms in their contracts of adhesion.
The Supreme Court's inability to understand that the constitutional protection of individual freedoms was intended to prevent just this kind of corporate tyranny will be costly for this nation. I predict that more and more people will get angrier and angrier about the extraordinary empowerment of Big Business and the extraordinary disemplowerment of ordinary people through this kind of corporatist agenda.
For another Bear's perspective on the AT&T case, see Beverly Mann, The Fine Print, Angry Bear, Apr. 28, 2011. It begins this way:
It’s hardly a secret that Chamber of Commerce types have co-opted a bare majority of the Supreme Court as their proxy in their war against business litigation, and that the most potent categorical weapons are arbitration as a forced substitute for lawsuits and the effective elimination of class actions.
In a manipulative, far-reaching opinion that the Court issued Monday, the five corporate proxies killed both birds with one stone.
And it includes a good description of how this decision turns our past understanding of arbitration on its head.
Breyer, though, writing for the four dissenters, pointed out that Congress’s actual stated purpose was to require courts to treat arbitration agreements as contracts, for the purposes of enforcing them and, when required under contract law, voiding them—and that that is what the text of the FAA says.
Scalia also said that class arbitration defeats the purpose of arbitration. Which I suppose is true if the purpose of arbitration, or at least arbitration as the only option under law, is to undermine any real threat of meaningful penalty for corporate wrongdoing.
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