It's official. Corporations not only have more human rights than people do in the US, but more than ever before. Corporations can give money to campaigns, and can spend as much as they like on false and libellous campaign ads at any time, even right before an election when there may not be time to reply.
The Supreme Court decision today says, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." On the face of it, a simple First Amendment argument. But only if corporations have human rights. In which case, since corporations are immortal and have vast privileges not available to human persons, they are more equal than us humans. Actually, more and more equal all the time.
What effect does this have on politics? Corruption from top to bottom. Subsidies, tax exemptions, no-bid contracts, deregulation, Too Big to Fail, you name it. But most of all, the bizarre notion that corporate profits are essential elements of the economy, while the Public Interest, composed of a multitude of personal benefits, is not. Why not? Follow me down the rabbit hole.
Economics is widely supposed to be a science, which is in fact ludicrous. There is, of course, a mathematical side to economics, in which we can discuss what "rational actors" might do to maximize profits expressed in money, and how competition can improve the functioning of public markets. We can do some experiments, and make some observations, too.
But real economics is also about what people value, such as not maximizing monetary profits at the expense of other human values, the environment, and other unpriced aspects of the world. We can price sales and purchases in the official markets, where everything is done in terms of money. But the value of a purchase to an individual in terms of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness doesn't have a price that you can fit into an economics or financial equation. No price, no value, according to doctrinaire economists, particularly the Market Fundamentalists shilling for corporations, and pretending that none of the math about competition has anything to do with the obvious need for regulation.
Adam Smith's magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, lays out the main point very clearly, for those who don't get sidetracked with the other issues he discussed. Wealth is not money. Wealth is not gold and silver, or jewels, or bits of paper that you could trade for gold and silver and jewels. Why? Because you can't eat gold, silver, jewels, or paper, nor wear them, nor live in them. Nor is wealth simply what you can buy with gold, silver, jewels, or paper. What happens if you have lots of gold, but there is nothing to buy? This is how the Spanish Empire destroyed itself after claiming most of the Americas, when almost everybody in the Empire thought only of the gold, silver, and jewels from South America, and stopped making or growing anything. Worse still, the Empire decreed that none of the gold, silver, and jewels could be spent or sold outside the Empire to buy what others were making.
No, according to Smith, wealth is the ability to produce what people need. For everybody, not just the rich.
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
However, our views on those needs have gone beyond Smith. Clothing, food, shelter, transportation, medicine, literature, music, art and all the rest that has an actual use in sustaining life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even TV. Wealth is also what families and communities need, including fire and police protection, utilities, government, defense, emergency services, environmental protection, education, information, and above all sanity.
Wealth as ability to produce consists partly of production facilities (capital in its original sense), and partly in know-how and organization. Information, communications, education, institutions, civil society, government, the commons. Not just for-profit corporations. And sanity. Never forget the sanity.
Do you know what conventional economics says about sanity? Worthless, because you can't buy it. Whereas all of the money spent on creating and treating insanity, including bad drug reactions, addictions, and PTSD in war zones, that's part of the economy you can measure. Similarly, peace is treated as worthless, while war is profitable.
There are a few corporations devoted to producing and selling, or sometimes giving away, aids to sanity. Non-profits, all of them. Publishing companies, many of them, and a few in politics. Let me tell you about the brand of sanity that Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and more recently of Change Congress, is giving away.
Lessig and many others are quite appropriately outraged today at the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC, a case about corporate "persons'" Free Speech vs. the political rights of the human people in the US. But it goes much further. Lessig is outraged at the idea that corporations have a right to rent government (much cheaper than buying, according to Huey Long) at any time to do whatever they want. It comes down to the idea of corporations being given human rights by activist courts, and pretending that this is the Intent of the Founders. In real life, the Founders were highly distrustful of corporations, insisting that corporations were mere creatures of the state, and should be under strong state control. Edmund Burke, once the Father of Conservatism, also. (To Republicans today, Burke is just another lousy Sociaist.) The program of Change Congress and several other organizations is public funding of state and Federal elections.
What legislation are we rallying around?
The bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act was offered last Congress, and was offered again this year by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Reps. John Larson (D-CT) and Walter Jones (R-NC).
Under this legislation, congressional candidates who raise a threshold number of small-dollar donations would qualify for a chunk of funding—several hundred thousand dollars for House, millions for many Senate races. If they accept this funding, they can’t raise big-dollar donations. But they can raise contributions up to $100, which would be matched four to one by a central fund. Reduced fees for TV airtime is also an element of this bill. This would create an incentive for politicians to opt into this system and run people-powered campaigns.
A poll by Celinda Lake in November 2008 found the public supports such a proposal 69% to 13%, including overwhelming majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
Public funding is working well in the states that have put it into practice: Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, New Mexico, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Benefits include more contested elections and a wider pool of candidates, including many who could not afford to run before. However, there have been constitutional challenges to public funding laws, and there will be more.
You can view Lessig's take on the current case on the Change Congress Web site. He will have more to say after he and others get a chance to study today's decision closely, and I intend to follow up on the argument and the issues.
Lessig on the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC Decision
The Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC allows corporations and unions to pour unprecedented amounts of money into elections. From this moment on, when Congress acts, we won't be able to know whether it was because of reason or judgment...or only because of the need for campaign money. The system is broken, and we need to act.
Watch Lawrence Lessig's response to Citizens United now, spread his call to action, and be sure to sign up for updates.
In the meantime, the Right is trumpeting its victory in gutting one of Sen. John McCain's proudest achievements, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Act.
Links
- Campaign finance ruling reflects Supreme Court's growing audacity, By Michael Waldman. Friday, January 22, 2010, Washington Post
- Shed a Tear for Democracy: Supreme Court’s Citizens United Will Unleash Flood of Corporate Money in Elections; Public Citizen Calls for Constitutional Amendment to Reverse Decision, Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen. WASHINGTON - January 21
- Citizens United: What Happens Next?, by Rick Hasen, Author of the Election Law Blog. Posted: January 21, 2010 01:53 PM, Huffington Post
- Democrats Vow to Stop Campaign Finance Changes After Supreme Court Ruling, by Patricia Murphy, Politics Daily
- Supreme Court Unleashes Corporate Campaign Cash In Citizen’s United Decision, By: bmaz. Thursday January 21, 2010 7:22 am, FireDogLake
- Judging the campaign finance ruling: Harvard faculty evaluate surprise Supreme Court ruling