Print this post.The age of judicial politicization has formally arrived.
BY TOM ELEY
Dateline: 23 January 2010 [print_link]
THE RULING ISSUED THURSDAY by the United States Supreme Court lifting long-standing restrictions on corporate financing of elections represents a far-reaching attack on democratic rights. The 5-4 decision ensures that the American political system will be dominated even more directly and completely by the financial elite.
The ruling is a naked assertion of the interests of the American financial elite. It lays bare the reality of class rule beneath the threadbare trappings of democracy in America. The decision in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturns more than 100 years of legal precedent, strengthens the grip of big business over the political process. It gives legal sanction to the buying of politicians and offices at every level of government to do the bidding of the rich.
The ruling cloaks this attack on democratic rights as a defense of freedom of speech. Its basic premise—that corporations are entitled to the same rights of speech and political advocacy as individuals—is patently absurd. It makes a mockery of the democratic and Enlightenment principles that animated the revolutionaries who led the American War for Independence and drafted the Constitution. Jefferson, for one, counted the influence of finance on politics as “more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
The ruling is the outcome of decades of political reaction, the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a narrow elite, and increasing attacks on the social conditions of the people.
It culminates years of anti-democratic decisions by the Supreme Court. For the past three decades, the high court has whittled away at civil liberties and the ability of citizens to seek redress in cases of corporate criminality. In recent years it has upheld and expanded the ability of the executive branch to wage war, invade citizens’ private lives, and arrest and incarcerate without trial those the president declares to be enemies. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled against the rights of third-parties, especially left-wing parties, to ballot access.
Barely ten years ago, the same institution, in another politically-driven 5-4 ruling, halted the counting of votes in Florida in order to sanction the theft of the 2000 presidential election and install in power the Republican candidate George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote.
The Democratic Party is complicit in the attacks on democratic rights, from its abject acceptance of the Supreme Court’s installation of Bush, to its support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to its cowardly refusal to mount a filibuster to block the confirmation of Bush nominees Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.
It was Roberts who played the critical role in seizing on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—a narrow lawsuit challenging the applicability of the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign advertising to a particular anti-Hillary Clinton documentary—and using it to undo all restraints on the corporate financing of politics.
This in a country where corporate money already manipulates elections, bribes politicians and largely dictates government policy. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the drive of the American financial aristocracy to throw off any and all restraints on its political domination.
A major concern of those within the establishment who have attacked the ruling is that it will further undermine public confidence in the Supreme Court and all official institutions. The decision “will, I fear, do damage to this institution,” Stevens wrote.
In fact, the ruling shows that working people, the vast majority of the population, cannot defend their interests through the existing political system. The Supreme Court, the Congress, the presidency and both political parties are controlled by the financial elite.
Recognition of this basic fact is growing, especially after a year of broken promises and right-wing policies by the Obama administration, which was carried to office by cynically appealing to popular hatred of the Bush administration and its policies of war, repression and social reaction.
More fundamentally, the ruling demonstrates that the socio-economic structure of American capitalist society is incompatible with democracy. Democratic forms become mere covers for plutocratic rule and must ultimately give way in a society with such vast disparities of wealth as exist in the United States.
The answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling and all of the attacks on democratic rights is to establish the political independence of the working class and fight for a workers’ government. Democratic rights can be defended only through the struggle for socialism—the transformation of society on the basis of the democratic control of economic life by the working class to meet social needs, rather than the accumulation of corporate profit and personal wealth by the ruling elite.
Tom Eley is a senior analyst with the World Socialist Web Site
••••
America Inc., Happy at Last.
By Gui Rochat, Senior Editor
The great danger for a republic like the United States is to have a judiciary of political appointees. And this was proven today in the Supreme Court ruling about free speech.
Large conglomerates such as corporations and even unions can now contribute to and advertise for their political choices. The corporations which were already treated like human individuals have become ‘Ȕbermenschen’, that is to say super-humans. This Supreme Court of supremely biased legal politicos which already brought us eight years of George W. Bush, now has finally demonstrated that voting has become redundant.
Not that basically much has changed, it just has now become official. It is a sign of the conservatives’ ‘Putsch’ (drive) to contain what they see as a drift too far into a liberal direction of the government, even though the president is only a center-right executive who surrounded himself with a mostly corporate-friendly cabinet. The interesting part is that the recent election of a Republican senator in liberal Massachusetts, caused the president to quickly pretend to disassociate himself from Wall street and to propose restraining measures on the banksters. Obama saw the writing on the wall and to prevent a full defeat of the Democrats in coming elections he will go even farther and make more noises about reform. All that will make for nice political play-acting, except that any true political input from the public will be even more restricted and engineered with candidates who will perfectly well know which side their bread is oiled on. The election in Massachusetts was a shot across the bow for Obama and he understood the warning. One wonders in how far the American public will react when it realizes and sees the consequences of today’s ruling by the Supreme Court. That could be surprising and interesting, so fasten your seatbelts, it may be a bumpy ride…
5 comments
GERMANE COMMENT by D. Tilson
By the way – just in case anyone is buying into the ridiculous media coverage of the Supreme Court ruling as a big boon for both corporations and labor unions, please note: It’s one thing to report that unions will have the same spending restrictions lifted, but who could really argue that they have anywhere nearly the same financial resources as private corporations?
However, just in case anyone thinks that they do, here’s a juicy, up to the minute fact that helps clarify things, as reported by The Miami Herald:
So far in 2010, business political action committees have spent a total of $115.9 million, while Labor PACs have spent $23.9 million.
To underline the point, the Service Employees International Union – one of the largest and most politically active unions in the country and one of the few that’s growing – immediately came out against the Supreme Court ruling. Didn’t see any major national corporations come out swinging against the decision, did you? While unions will of course do what they can to take advantage of the new rules and balance the scales a bit, the sad truth is that they always have been and always will be massively outspent by big business.
And that’s where we all come in. The People. The Voters. The Victims.
GERMANE COMMENT: Jimbobre
This week’s ruling was the result of Democrats not requiring Republicans to explain and identify which rulings were made by “activists judges” in the past. The genesis of the problem of “activist judges” begins with civil rights victories won by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense fund going back to the 1930’s. In 1935, Marshall won a case against the University of Maryland, which denied black citizens the right to attend its law school (the only one in the state). The judge in that case had to go into hiding because of death threats. Federal Judge Frank Johnson of Alabama made many decisions against segregation during the 1950’s and 60’s. He was vilified mercilessly and lost friends and family members because of his decisions. Bil Moyers said Judge Johnson “forever altered the face of the South.”
Judges like Frank Johnson, who stood up for the spirit of the constitution and were accused of judicial activism, have never been defended by Democrats. Like Liberal Republicans who didn’t stand up to segregation after the Civil War, modern Democrats don’t want to offend conservative (even racist) white voters by seeming to stand up too firmly for the rights of black Americans. This has allowed conservatives to rant and shout about “activist judges” without explaining who they were or which decisions were activist.
Imagine, if Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito comment on the “activist” decisions of Judge Johnson. At the least, it would have exposed the true purpose of the conservative argument.
I see the Supreme Court’s decision on corporate funding of elections as a coup d’etat. Corporations are controlled by the largest shareholders and its directors and they are now officially and legally given carte blanche for power. And all under the pretense of free speech, which was never intended for trade and fiduciary conglomerations. This is precisely an assault on the basic rules of this republic, which prevented a certain degree of deliberate power grabbing by small special interest groups. The present ruling annuls the basic functions of an elective government, placing it under full central control of small factions and the country itself becomes like a corporation, which is by definition an entirely undemocratic structure.
(Gui Rochat is TGP’s senior editor)
Several people, including Thomas Linzey, Richard Grossman and Ralph Nader, have homed in on the finding of the Supreme Court as well as previous debates claiming that corporations have equal rights with individuals.
I am not a legal scholar though I would like to believe that they are not equal before the law. But I wonder if pursuing this line of thought is the most fruitful approach, and whether much would change in political and civic life if in fact corporations were denied such “freedom”.
I say this because there are so many other factors in our economic, political and regulatory system that enhance corporate power over which we have little control or which have not been the focus of reformers.
Let’s start with the regulatory system. When we hear the word “regulation” we instantly equate it with “restrictions”, but this is far from the case. The creation of regulatory agencies and especially of regulatory standards by people has created an almost insuperable barrier to citizen understanding of and involvement in regulatory proceedings. Anyone who has been involved in the nightmare of nuclear power regulatory understands this immediately, or in the thorny issue of cleanup of PCBs in the Hudson River.
Regulation, in fact, legitimizes commercial and industrial activity. Businesses crave regulation because it, in effect, provides cover for them. They can always fall back on the argument that they are operating within the mandated regulations and standards, and disproving this is almost an impossible task for ordinary citizens.
Who sets the standards for how much pollution or radioactivity can be released? What are the criteria used to set these standards? Who enforces them? How meaningful is enforcement? How well is it done, how frequently, by whom, and what are the penalties for violation, if any? If the site changes owners, who is responsible for cleanup?
The PCB pollution of Hudson River sediments goes back to the 1960s, maybe earlier, before the Clean Water Act was passed. Each state government passed the buck to the next one. Even after the US EPA and NYS DEC were established in the early 1970s, the dumping continued. It was only in the 1990s that citizen litigation forced the government to take action. And even now the full economic costs of this pollution are not being born by the polluter, GE, as squabbles about the use of Superfund money continue and squabbles about whether it is worse to leave the PCBs in place or remove river sediments (removal seem to be the decision but this does not mean that good science has prevailed).
With regard to radiation standards, these have over the years been gradually tightened as more evidence about the dangers of low-level radiation has become known, but this was not a straight path by any means. The nuclear industry and its paid consultants (who are part of that well-known category known as biostitutes) fought to minimize the dangers, while cooking up their own biased “safety” studies to show that the consequences of a nuclear accident were trivial.
In this the government willingly conspired by suppressing its own studies showing the exact opposite (WASH-740, done by Brookhaven National Laboratories, said that a meltdown at a small reactor would release enough radioactivity to permanently contaminate an area the size of Pennsylvania; the government suppressed this report for decades until citizen groups headed by Ralph Nader got it made public). In the area of radiation exposure, expert statistical studies made of workers at the Hanford nuclear facility by Thomas Mancuso, were also suppressed and ultimately ignored.
In an entirely different area of concern are the extensive government subsidies and tax breaks that continue to be given to energy, agriculture, ranching, timber and fisheries, which have encouraged the abuse of soils, unhealthy farm and food practices, overharvesting, destruction of grazing lands and of already threatened ocean fisheries, not to mention the unbridled use of cheap energy, especially coal, which is directly responsible for most of global warming emissions in this country (and elsewhere too).
The awarding of these subsidies and tax breaks meant that the real costs of energy and resource extraction and consumption were being hidden and passed on to the public at large rather than being reflected in the cost of energy and goods. As a result this country continues to be obsessed by consumption and waste; this is most evident and deplorable in the low cost of gasoline, which, according to expert studies, would cost at least $16 a gallon were all negative externalities included. European countries have long paid about $9 a gallon for gasoline and as a result have public transportation systems that are the envy of the world. In the USA we have rickety Amtrak and whole sections of the country with no way of moving themselves except by air.
The same applies to cheap food. Indefensible subsidies to agribusiness and underpricing of transportation fuel, as well as overpackaging and long-distance transport, have given American consumers the nightmare of processed and pre-packaged convenience foods, thus sacrificing our health and well-being on the altar of cheapness and fast food. The American food supply is, with the possible exception of the UK, the most nauseating in the world.
While nutrition experts and doctors argue about the causes of obesity, there is little doubt that the existence of the automobile combined with ubiquitous malls with fast food chains bear a large responsibility for obesity. Yet the price of processed and pre-packaged foods doesn’t come close to reflecting the true costs of these foods, because of farm subsidies, absence of mandatory recycling, and cheap energy costs involved in manufacture and distribution.
However, these inescapable facts have not registered with the American public, and with liberals and the liberal media in particular, hence their fixation on the privileges granted to corporations regarding campaign propaganda and lobbying. It appears that liberals, and Democrats in particular, were particularly upset by a film that blasted Hilary Clinton in the last weeks of her campaign. Were liberals, in their lawsuit that was defeated in the Supreme Court, suggesting that films critical of liberals should be prohibited? They will deny it, but it certainly seems that way, even though heavy attacks on Clinton filled up radio waves, web sites, blogs and listservs for months, coming from both the left and the right, by the way.
These are the same liberals who are hot under the collar about the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, the rights of political prisoners, mistreatment of immigrants, and violations of personal privacy. Nice concerns, of course, but if these liberals are going to kick and scream about corporate propaganda in electoral campaigns, they will be expending a lot of time and effort to curb only one aspect of the corporate crimes and tyranny that continue unabated because of liberals’ recusal from environmental activism.
Lorna Salzman
Indeed all that is true and has been for a long time and the usual obfuscation has well hidden the consequences of corporate behavior from the American people. These facts are documented and recognized, if not for the public at large (and how could they understand, while submitted to the constant propaganda openly and subliminally on the visual media ?). As for Clinton, many of the criticisms originated in misogyny and had little to do with her truly right centrist position. But the present ruling openly demonstrates the legal consolidation of powers and now it is a question not of only a continuation of sub rosa power but a final step in what has come before in homeland security, personal liberties, environmental pollution etc. This legal acknowledgment is not just important because of allowing corporations to advertise and support their political candidates, but because it publicly shows who is boss. If I write coup d’etat it is in the hope that reality will finally sink in for a public that is supposed to be to the left of official policies. Maybe as Steinem wrote about housewives in ‘middle-America’, something will go “click” now in people, so that there will be substantial support for such efforts like environmental activism.