Forget the Money: The Problem is Corporate Personhood

Don't be distracted by the hysteria about the billions of dollars corporations are pouring into political campaigns, both national and local.

First, it's not the majority of political money. Via Political Animal:

Nick Penniman and Wendell Potter wrote an op-ed in the LA Times today titled: Citizens United is Only 15% of the Political Cash Problem.

According to theBut Center for Responsive Politics, of the $3.7 billion spent in the 2014 congressional midterms, super PACs, nonprofits and other outside spenders made up around $560 million, or roughly 15%. In contrast, $1.5 billion, or 42%, was spent by candidates themselves, with the rest left to party committees.

Two other inside-the-Beltway terms — call time and the cash committee — illustrate why hard money is the core problem…

Overturning Citizens United or regulating super PACs would, alas, do nothing to free our politicians from this frenetic fundraising. That can only be accomplished by cutting the ties between lobbyists and legislators and redirecting politicians’ time and energy toward small donors. 

Far more importantly, the real harm of Citizens United is in its legitimization of corporate personhood.

The only way the corporatist conservatives on the Supreme Court could justify allowing corporations to give as much money as they wanted to political candidates - to literally buy elections - was to give corporations the same rights that the U.S. Constitution gives to individual people.

And the only way to do that was to declare - in violation of face of logic, common sense, biology, democracy, justice and the plain meaning of the First Amendment - that corporations are, indeed, people.

Yet such corporate personhood does far worse than allow corporations to buy elections. It erases all protections actual people have against the power of corporations. And it opens the door to abominations like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has little to do with trade and everything to do with giving multinational corporations the power to eliminate national sovereignty by overturning any law that costs a corporation a penny in income.

That would be minimum wages, worker safety, food safety, clean water, clean air, anti-pollution, property rights, health care, education and even gun rights.  Anything that any company can claim reduces their profits by a single penny can be outlawed under TPP.  Thanks to Citizens United.
 

A Con-Con Will Harm Democracy, Not Heal It

I wonder if Cenk Uygur, D.R. Tucker and the other Article 5 lovers would be so quick to dismiss the doubters if there were a better-than-even chance that a Constitutional Convention would be high-jacked by fanatics determined to restore black male slavery, rather than just female reproductive slavery.
 

Why Is Your Congress Critter Not SponsoringThis Bill?

It must be anti-American muslinterrist in the pocket of walmart if it won't.

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

It’s a self-evident truth that our democracy’s desecration occurred when the Supreme Court gave free-speech rights to corporations. Good to see that at least a few members of Congress—specifically, Reps. Rick Nolan (D-MN), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Jared Huffman (D-CA), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN)—are committed to doing something about it:

The movement for constitutional reforms that would end what organizers call “corporate rule” has arrived in the chambers of Congress. [On April 29], members of the U.S. House of Representatives joined Move to Amend by announcing their sponsorship of the “We the People Amendment” (House Joint Resolution 48), which clearly and unequivocally states that:

* Rights recognized under the Constitution belong to human beings only, and not to government-created artificial legal entities such as corporations and limited liability companies; and

* Political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected under the First Amendment.

In making the announcement, lead sponsor Rep. Rick Nolan (DFL-Minnesota), said: “It’s time to take the shaping and molding of public policy out of corporate boardrooms, away from the corporate lobbyists, and put it back in city halls - back with county boards and state legislatures - and back in the Congress where it belongs.”

It’s a shame that Republicans remain so intimidated by the Koch Mafia that not one member of the GOP joined their Democratic colleagues in sponsoring the We the People Amendment. Your average Republican voter wants big money out of politics, too (and you can prove it by watching your Republican friends react when you say the words “Tom Steyer” or “Michael Bloomberg”). However, it appears that we’ll have to wait a little bit longer before the bipartisan desire for elections that aren’t bought by billionaires is reflected in Congress.

Nevertheless, it’s quite inspiring to see citizens uniting against Citizens United. I may not be Amy Goodman, but I want democracy now—and the We the People Amendment will help us get it back for good.

Somebody Ask Andy Beshear Who's Bought Him Today

Because somebody who thinks Andy's going to win the election for Attorney General next year probably has.

Charlie Pierce:

This is smooth and edgeless corporate fascism in its classic sense -- a marriage of government and industry that is so tightly consummated that the former is entirely indistinguishable from the latter. The interests of corporate influence and of government power are brought into such close cooperation with each other that their interests correspond to each other personally. Ever since the birth of this bright baby Blog, we've pointed out that the real action -- the real work of converting a self-governing republic into a seamless corporate oligarchy -- is being done in the states, where politicians can be purchased more cheaply, and where the infrastructure of the corruption on the national level is developed. This is where rookie politicians learn how to peddle their influence legally, and where the real power lies, and to whom they owe their allegiance and, therefore, their careers.

Solve 90 Percent of Our Problems In One Stroke: Take the Rights of People Away From Corporations

Friday, May 10 is the 127th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. If you don't understand why corporations - and their executives - get away with lying and stealing and killing when regular citizens have to go to prison, the answer is Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. 

In that 1886 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals. Every anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-middle-class law, policy and decision favoring corporations since then derives from the travesty of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.

The Citizens United decision in 2010 that opened the floodgates for criminal billionaires to buy Congress, state legislatures and the presidency is only its latest destructive descendant.

Find out just what catastrophic damage to our economy, our living standards, our environment and our politics that decision has done by watching The Corporation in Lexington on May 11.

Central Kentucky Move to Amend will be showing the film The Corporation on Saturday May 11, 2:00 PM, at the Farish Theater in the Central Library, downtown Lexington.

The film explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Taking its status as a legal "person" to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics - including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

To see the trailer, click here: https://movetoamend.org/toolkit/recommended-documentaries.

Admission is free, and it's open to the public! 

Move to Amend is also encouraging people

to write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper for publication ahead of May 10, explaining the significance of that case to corporate control of our government, in fact, our lives.  If you'd like some tips on what to include, you can use information at movetoamend.org 

The U.S. Constitution opens with the Preamble, which begins:

We the People

 not "we the corporations."  Corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution, and there are very excellent reasons why.

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Now Shut the Fuck Up About "Big Labor"

It's outgunned in every measure by Big Corporation.

From Firedoglake:

Chart showing contributions by donor groups to Democrats and Republicans, 2011-2012.  Labor contributed $141,187,722, almost all to Democrats, while Finance/Insurance/Real Estate contributed $656,923,622, mostly to Republicans.

Ky's Yarmuth Proposes $100 Max Campaign Contributions

No, Congressman Awesome does not fuck around.

James R. Carroll at the Courier:

Imagine a campaign for the U.S. House in which the definition of a fat-cat donor is somebody who gives the maximum — of $100.

Imagine that same race, but with the federal government providing a 5-to-1 match for every dollar a candidate raises from state residents.


Rep. John Yarmuth, D-3rd District, not only can imagine it, he’s sponsoring legislation that would make it law.


For a candidate, “your support is much more broadly based, and the odds of your being influenced by a big donor are reduced — essentially eliminated,” the Louisville congressman said recently.


For a candidate’s supporters, public campaign financing “gives voters a much greater opportunity to participate and feel that they’re actually helping a candidate,” Yarmuth said.


“We consider this to be a good government initiative,” he said.

No, of course it doesn't have a chance in hell in this Congress.  But what did I just tell you about fighting the fight? File this bill now, make a big honking stink about it, attract the attention of some sit-home Democratic voters who have been waiting to hear about just this kind of reform, and maybe they go to the polls in 2014 and take the House of Representatives away from the repugs.

Mitch: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Because repugs can't ever win a straight-up election, they have to cheat. Or at least rig the rules.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

For decades, when Republicans made the case against campaign-finance reform, they invariably touted disclosure as the panacea that made restrictions unnecessary. As Fred Hiatt explained, "Republicans always dangled this apple in the most alluring way. Political money will find a path, they would insist. Give up! Give in! We will post every donation on the Web, instantly! We will give you transparency! Sunshine! Accountability! What could be more democratic?"

Except, of course, that the right never really meant it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a staunch opponent of campaign-finance reform, spoke at the American Enterprise Institute the other day and condemned the Obama administration's efforts to "silence" political speech.

"It is critically important for all conservatives -- and indeed all Americans -- to stand up and unite in defense of the freedom to organize around the causes we believe in, and against any effort that would constrain our ability to do so," McConnell told AEI.

And what are the "efforts" that have McConnell so outraged? The senator "cited a Democratic proposal to require corporations and unions to disclose their spending on political advertising."

Yes, in Mitch McConnell's mind, the DISCLOSE Act is "nothing less than an effort by the government itself to expose its critics to harassment and intimidation, either by government authorities or through third-party allies."

As far as the Senate Minority Leader is concerned, there's nothing wrong with wealthy interests buying American elections -- the real scandal is a proposal to let American voters know who's doing the buying.

In reality, the DISCLOSE Act (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections) is a fairly modest proposal. In the wake of the Citizens United ruling, Democrats thought it made sense to require corporations, unions, and other interest groups that pay for campaign ads to identify themselves, allowing the public to know who's saying what.

It wasn't even a partisan initiative, at least not completely -- in the House, the proposal even had a Republican co-sponsor.

It would have become law in 2010 were it not for a Republican filibuster. When the bill reached the floor, it had 59 supporters and 39 opponents, which in the broken Senate, means the legislation failed. Proponents only needed one GOP vote, but every Republican in the chamber, including alleged "moderates" like Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) refused to give the bill an up-or-down vote.

But McConnell is still afraid the bill might make a comeback, and has taken a firm stand in support of front groups that keep donations secret. This, as far as the Minority Leader is concerned, makes him a champion of the First Amendment.

Because nothing says "freedom" like secret billionaires quietly buying elections out of public view.

QOTD

From Firedoglake:

Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT), referring to the unprecedented amount of money spent to fight WI Gov Scott Walker’s recall, says “There is an aggressiveness out there among the ruling class of this country, among the billionaires who are saying: ‘You now what? Ya, we got a whole lot now, but we want even more. And we don’t give a damn about the middle class. We don’t care about working families. We want it all. And now we can buy it.’”

Free the Files!

Big surprise: congressional repugs have blocked an FCC rule that would have forced television stations to post online the names of those paying for billionaire-backed campaign lies.

But there's a way around those motherfuckers, and you, personally, can do it.

Crowdsourcing to the rescue!

ProPublica:

Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”

These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.

But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome — it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station [3],” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.

Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)

We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves — and we want your help.

Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.

You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.

Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.

We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.

Rachel had a great segment on it last week:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Find out more here.

The Repug Message Keeps Winning

Yes, zillions of dollars spent by repugs saved Scott Walker's corrupt ass, but not because all those ads made people like the man who is destroying Wisconsin. Walker survived recall because all those ads reinforced the long-standing national repug message that Dmocratic politics is illegitimate.

Steve M.:

A major reason Scott Walker survived recall is that voters were persuaded that the recall was happening for illegitimate reasons:

So what happened? It's actually quite simple if you look at the exit polls. The final question there was the key to the entire recall election. When asked “Do you think recall elections are appropriate” some 60% of Wisconsin voters said “Only for official misconduct” and another 10% said “never”....

Walker's massive cash advantage painted the recall process itself as the bad guy here...

Funny, I don't remember anything like that happening in 2003, when Gray Davis, a Democrat, was recalled and replaced as California's governor by Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the time a hero to the Republican right. I remember that the recall process was portrayed as a circus. But I don't remember the conversation centering on the argument that recalling Davis was an affront to common decency and an insult to democracy.

As I was Googling around to test my memory of those days, I was reminded that the phrase most commonly associated with the Davis recall -- see it here and here and here and here and here -- was "voter revolt."

Revolt? Wow, that sounds scary and dangerous and violent. It sounds anti-democratic. Ahhh, but it was a voter revolt. That's quite a packed phrase. You say "voter revolt" and you're implying that somehow the guy who's being recalled got there in defiance of the wishes of voters -- even though, obviously, he won an election. The phrase implies that the election was the illegitimate part of the process and the recall is the legitimate part.

And notice that it's a voter revolt and not a conservative or Republican or right-wing revolt. Everyone knows that the people who tried to oust Scott Walker were those dirty liberals. The people who ousted Gray Davis were voters.

That's the message. It's similar to the framing of recent protest movements: the angry members of Occupy Wall Street are a bunch of hippies, but the members of the tea party movement who shouted down members of Congress at 2009 town meetings and revolted at the ballot box in 2010 were righteously angry Americans.

That's how we look at right-wing revolts -- especially when millions of right-wing dollars are available to shape our perceptions.

How to counter that message?

The last of the Rude Pundit's lessons from Wisconsin:

5. We have to nut up and go after them with a savagery that would make a tiger shark shit itself. How bad does it have to be? You might have read about or seen Barrett condemning Walker for a particularly harsh ad. Did you check out the actual ad about crime in Milwaukee? A blurred photo of a dead two year-old? That's some terrible shit. And it didn't appall people enough to turn against Walker. No, it worked. So we have to be at least that brutal. And don't be a pussy and say that we shouldn't stoop to their tactics. You use the tactics that succeed or you lose.

The Big Lie, Now With Corporate Billions

By @KYYellowDog

Via Down with Tyranny, Robert Reich on the real goal behind all the anti-Obama lies.

Big corporations and Wall Street are also secretly funneling big bucks into front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that will use the money to air anti-Obama ads, while keeping secret the identities of these firms.

Looking at the all the anti-Obama super PACs and political fronts like Crossroads GPS, Politico estimates the anti-Obama forces (including the Romney campaign) will outspend Obama and pro-Obama groups by 2 to 1.

How can it be that big corporations and billionaires will be spending unlimited amounts on big lies like this one, without any accountability because no one will know where the money is coming from?

Blame a majority of the Supreme Court in its grotesque 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision — as well as the IRS for lax enforcement that lets political front groups like Crossroads GPS or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pretend they’re not political.

But you might also blame something deeper, more sinister.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist (you can’t have served in Washington and seriously believe more than two people can hold on to a big story without it leaking), but I fear that at least since 2010 we’ve been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d’etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful — who haven’t been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

Its techique is to inundate America with a few big lies, told over and over (the debt is Obama’s fault and it’s out of control; corporations and the very rich are the “job creators” that need tax cuts; government is the enemy, and its regulations are strangling the private sector; unions are bad; and so on), and tell them so often they’re taken as fact.

Then having convinced enough Americans that these lies are true, take over the White House, Congress, and remaining states that haven’t yet succumbed to the regressive right (witness Tuesday’s recall election in Wisconsin).

I desperately hope I’m wrong, but all there’s growing evidence I may be right.

Go here to find out how to make it stop.

Jennifer Gets Her Keith On

She still needs to stop tolerating lying repugs and to find a professional production crew somewhere, but dayum, this one had me standing and cheering.