Dems General Meeting this Tuesday!
Posted 4/07/12 by petey.menz
Read post »A few thoughts on the recent Supreme Court decision
Posted 1/25/10 by Nikko Pomata
As you no doubt heard, there is no longer a legal limit on corporate input to the electoral process. Of course, it’s still true that corporations cannot buy votes (well, at least not legally). But they can still produce enormous amounts of advertising–in the forms not only of media but also, no doubt, hired campaign workers–and thus they can not just say almost anything that they want provided that it is close enough to the truth that it will not be removed by the courts as libel. Naturally, citizens can still exercise their freedom not to listen, and many will, but in we have all seen how compelling corporate advertising can be. So, especially in these contentious times, the newfound corporate powers will have an undeniable influence on our political system. And it will likely not be as fast or as extreme as Keith Olbermann’s dystopian Special Comment suggests, but this system would likely eventually yield an interconnectedness between the government and the corporate world so great that politicians, beholden to the corporations that gave them their jobs, would put these corporations before their constituents as a matter of principle, and help the more aggressive corporations, which would no doubt have led the charge to interfere in such ways with politics, to suppress undesirable information and perhaps at some point, to some extent, opinions about their companies. Well, there’s a word for that kind of government: fascism.
It’s true that, in the past, there have not been corporate spending limits; then again, in the past advertising has not been neither as ubiquitous nor as effective; and the same is true for other means of outreach. Indeed, this is precisely why campaign spending has ballooned so much over the past fifty or so years. It used to be the case that a contribution on the scale of, say, profit margins of major corporations would not be particularly more helpful than a smaller donation, unless perhaps made directly into the candidate’s income, nod nod wink wink. But now, as expenditures solely toward presidential elections are in the billions of dollars, this is no longer true. (And in addition to all of that, “the past” has not always been a particularly good time for the American working class.)
In the meantime, elected officials must, in order to maintain both their electibility and their legislative integrity, recognize the hope that, if they speak well, loudly, and honestly enough in the people’s interest, and work hard enough toward that effect, then there is no amount of money that can defeat them.
[insert part where I meant to ruminate on the judicial philosophy behind the decision and what might be done about it]