E.J. Dionne: It Could Be the End of Our Democracy as We Know It

I really hope others are paying attention to this:

President Barack Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday will be only the second most consequential political moment of the week.

Judged by the standard of an event’s potential long-term impact on our public life, the most important will be the argument before the Supreme Court (on the same day, as it happens) about a case that, if decided wrongly, could surrender control of our democracy to corporate interests.

This sounds melodramatic. It’s not. The court is considering eviscerating laws that have been on the books since 1907 in one case and 1947 in the other, banning direct contributions and spending by corporations in federal election campaigns. Doing so would obliterate precedents that go back two and three decades.

The full impact of what the court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Even the word radical does not capture the extent to which the justices could turn our political system upside down. Will the high court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

Citizens United, a conservative group, brought suit arguing that it should be exempt from the restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie it made that was sharply critical of Hillary Clinton. The organization said it should not have to disclose who financed the film.

Instead of deciding the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable act of overreach. On June 29, it postponed a decision and called for new briefs and a highly unusual new hearing, which is Wednesday’s big event. The court chose to consider an issue only tangentially raised by the case. It threatens to overrule a 1990 decision that upheld the long-standing ban on corporate money in campaigns.

Read it all at Truthdig

Corporate free speech? Since when?

"IF DANCING nude and burning the flag are protected by the First Amendment, why would it not protect robust speech about the people who are running for office?" So asks Theodore B. Olson, George W. Bush’s solicitor general until 2004. He is now the lead advocate for Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation that produced “Hillary: The Movie’’ to swift-boat Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign.

"Hillary" didn’t get much distribution because campaign-finance laws (such as McCain-Feingold) and court rulings (such as Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce) bar corporate-funded ads from elections. But now the Supreme Court will review Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission on Sept. 9. Free-speech absolutists, from the National Rifle Association to the American Civil Liberties Union, support Citizens United ’s claim that FEC restraints were unjustified.

But if they win, free speech will be drowned out by people most Americans won’t get to know.

She’s right, because a publicly traded business corporation, driven to maximize profits by market competition and its own charter, can’t rise above that mission any more than it can dance nude. Corporations aren’t “voluntary associations’’ with republican intentions, as Justice Antonin Scalia claims; in a civic sense, they’re mindless, because their shareholders change with every stock-price fluctuation.

This year showed us that a republic periodically has to save capitalism from itself. Corporations are creations of the republic, not its equals or superiors. We citizens charter them, protect them legally, subsidize them, and even bail them out - and punish them when, as with Pfizer Chemical, their profit-maximizing violates drug-safety rules.

We couldn’t do that if a level playing field of “robust speech’’ were overwhelmed by corporate speech, which isn’t free because corporations, unlike individuals, are not full-fledged members of the community. As inanimate entities, they are incapable of what the political philosopher Michael Sandel calls “a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of the common good, and the ability to deliberate well about common purposes and ends.’’

That’s why corporations can’t vote - and shouldn’t be able to use the wealth we let them amass to inundate our deliberations. TV ads telling us how deeply oil companies care about the environment aren’t part of open give-and-take; they’re efforts to cash in on a consensus that might not have emerged at all had corporate money dominated our elections and debates more than it does.

Read the rest at The Boston Globe

Please read Powell Memo: Text and Analysis

The Powell Memo - Manifesto for the corporate overthrow of American democracy, by Lewis Powell in 1971, shortly before Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court. This is the founding document of Reaganism and the Bush corporatist dictatorship. Lewis Powell became the author of the 1978 5-4 majority opinion in the SCOTUS decision FNBofB v. Belloti, which further expanded "corporate personhood". Too many liberals are not knowledgeable about this history - but it is what got us to where we are today. What makes getting health care reform that will actually work and other legislation our nation needs so difficult.