If there is any lesson to be learned from the past thirty years, it is that the unrestrained political influence of money is utterly destructive to our democracy.
The Prime Directive of the Republican Party since the days of Reagan has been to repeal the 20th Century, and they have now very nearly succeeded.
To go straight to my wish for 2010, a constitutional amendment that may be our best hope for enabling true campaign finance reform, and for saving our experiment in democracy:
Amendment 28 to the Constitution of the United States
The use of no monetary instrument, financial currency, gift of any value, or promise of financial reward or services, shall be equated to freedom of expression or speech, and no law that regulates or abridges the use of any such monetary reward in the conduct of affairs in the public interest shall be construed as abridging the freedom of speech guaranteed under the 1st Amendment to this Constitution.
In short: spending money for political purposes does NOT equate to the exercise of constitutionally protected speech, and can, and should, be regulated.
Update: I am astonished at the nihilism in some comments. I was hoping for a more vigorous discussion.
While wealth has become ever more concentrated, and the gap between the few very ultra rich and everyone else has grown wider than we have seen since the Gilded Age of the 19th Century, we have seen parallel concentration of power and influence in the hands of huge corporations that exist primarily for the enrichment of their owners, while shipping jobs overseas, dismantling our industrial base, crushing competition, decreasing wages and benefits, suppressing unions, disregarding public safety, paying ever more exorbitant salaries and bonuses to those at the very top, and shifting all risk for failure to the American people.
We have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from 99% of the population to the top 1% in our nation's history, and there is no indication that this trend will reverse anytime soon. The word "transfer" here is very euphemistic; what we have seen is the greatest theft of wealth in our nation's history, and arguably in the history of civilization.
All of this has happened while the most powerful interests have used their wealth to purchase influence at the very highest levels of government, to ensure that taxes for the wealthy remain at lower levels than we have seen in sixty years, and that no laws or regulations are put in place that will moderate the exercise of corporate power, greed and prerogative.
We are now in a country where almost every state government is insolvent, services are collapsing, our infrastructure is crumbling, we are stuck in a recession with levels of unemployment unheard of since the Great Depression, record numbers of bankruptcies and foreclosures, one out of six people without adequate access to health care, and yet the prevailing meme, repeated over and over and over by the media owned and dominated by a few wealthy and powerful corporations that have no interest in changing the status quo, is that the solution is to cut services, reduce federal spending, and incapacitate government by cutting taxes on the wealthy even more.
This meme has been carefully promoted to the angry and unemployed so that their populist anger is directed against those who actually are seeking solutions and reform. Liberals are the enemy!
Make sure liberals are demonized as elite and conceited. Use adjectives that are emotionally charged and evoke the worst nightmares, like socialist, communist, nazi, foreign. Accuse liberals of doing everything that has actually been done: Liberals want to control you, own you, take away your jobs (and give them to foreigners) and take away what you have! Make sure to promote religion. We (conservatives) are religious, this is all god's plan, and we are god's agents. Repeat over and over: this life really doesn't matter. Heaven awaits you. In the meantime? Teabaggers unite! Backlash, against all those smartypants elite libruls, you know, the folks you resented in high school.
It is no great surprise that these interests seek to incapacitate that very government that might actually seek to impose some restraints on the wealthy and powerful becoming even more wealthy and powerful, even if the continued lack of any regulation and restraint were to guarantee economic collapse and the ultimate failure of the United States.
The behavior of the owners of corporations and financial institutions has been that of people who may or may not recognize that they are on a sinking ship, but just in case, whose only priority is to steal everything they can before the ship goes down and comandeer all the lifeboats.
In short, to hell with everyone else. Screw future generations. Let the poor fend for themselves. Fuck the planet. I'm going to get mine while I can, and then, who cares.
And all of this is brought to you by the power of the almighty dollar.
Kossacks need no reminders of how utterly dysfunctional the United States Senate has become in recent years, how completely dominated by lobbyists and money. We need to look no further than the HCR debate of the last six months. How many dozens of diaries have been written about Baucus and Lieberman and others who have received obscene levels of contributions from the very same corporate interests that have brought this country to its knees, and about whom they are supposed to be making laws to protect the public interest.
In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court ruled that “the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” This is the ruling that has been used over and over to justify the concept that $$ = speech: spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech.
A parallel concern is the concept of corporate personhood, developed over the course of several other Supreme Court cases. I'm not a legal scholar, but I suspect that money equals speech also underlies corporate personhood, and that the key to unraveling corporate personhood is to undo the underlying equation.
In fact, I think it must be argued that underlying the entire disintegration of the middle class and the collapse of our industrial base and our infrastructure, and the extreme dysfucntional partisanship that has so divided and paralyzed us, is the pernicious effect of unrestrained influence of concentrated wealth. Unless we can disable the equation of money and speech, there is a very good liklikhood that the United States as a great democracy is doomed, and the only question remaining will be how much wealth will be stolen by those at the very top before the ship goes down for good.
Hence, the necessity of a constitutional amendment uncoupling clearly and decisively the exercise of wealth from the exercise of free speech. The lack of wealth never impeded anyone from expressing or communicating an opnion, but speech itself does not confer power. Money does. The Supreme Court decision saying otherwise at very best is entirely disingenuous. It is a cancer that now undermines our economy, our ability to govern ourselves and our very democracy.
What we have seen with the health care reform debate is going to be repeated over and over and over. We will see it with energy, jobs, climate change, immigration, EFCA, education, and every other issue of importance.
Would the effort to amend the Consitution be a huge distraction? Yes. But the longer we wait, the more dire our circumstances as a nation will become, and there may come a time in the future, much sooner than any of us are willing to admit, when it may be too late. Some may argue that it may already be too late, but I disagree. If we can restore true representative democracy, we have a chance to turn ourselves back from the brink, to restore our middle class, to break up monopolies, to revitalize small business, to promote fairness, to rebuild our infrastructure, fix our educational system, and reinstill a sense of shared community in this country.
But we will never do this without major reforms in campaign finance and the exercise of unrestrained corporate power and influence, and we will never achieve those reforms until money is no longer considered equivalent to speech.
I put out my proposed wording as a strawman. I'm sure there are many people here smarter than I who could craft better language. Others have proposed similar amendments, for example this one that is very detailed and focused specifically on campaign finance reform. I think that simplicity is better. The American people have little patience for detailed, legalistic language that can be easily misconstued. I've aimed for a simple and direct statement. Perhaps it even could be simpler: "Money is not speech." That may not go far enough. But I'm not so much suggesting specific wording as I am putting forward the idea, and saying that it's an idea whose time has come.
I can think of no better New Year's present for our country.
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Update: I appreciate the comment by rossl discussing the Fair Elections Now! Act. Interestingly, on the home page of their website, there is a recording of various sponsors talking about this act that includes Arlen Spector quoting Justice Stephens in disagreeing with the Court's decision that money equals speech. While I think this act is a great idea that is worthy of strong consideration, as I understand the bill, participation would be voluntary. While it might be attractive to some, especially House members who have to run every two years, I can imagine that Senators, particularly those who have received corporate largesse in the millions, will see little reason to forgo their corporate benefactors. I also have seen little momentum on this bill. I would be astonished if it ever went anywhere, especially in the Senate. So, while this is good idea, it has no teeth, and will not solve the mess we find ourselves mired in now unless it could be made mandatory, and that will never happen as long as the Court's 1974 ruling remains in effect.