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Jim Hightower: A Supreme Court Coup
Despite 234 years of progress toward the American ideal of equality for all, we still have to battle unfairness.
How happy, then, to learn that a handful of our leaders in Washington took bold and forceful action last week to lift another group of downtrodden Americans from the pits of injustice, helping them gain more political and governmental power. I refer, of course, to corporations.
Say what? Corporations should get more power over our elected officials?
“Free the corporate money,” the movement’s leaders cried, demanding that America sever the few legal restraints that remain on corporate efforts to buy our elections. “Si, se puede,” chanted these assertive champions of corporate supremacy — “Yes, we can!”
So, they did. “They” being the five doctrinaire corporatists who now form the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s remember their names: Sam Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. These five men, on their own whim, have executed a black-robed coup against the American people’s democratic authority.
They took an obscure case involving a minor violation of election funding law and turned it into a constitutional upheaval. Rushing their handpicked case through the system, they issued a 5-4 decision on Jan. 21 that overturns a century of settled U.S. law and more than two centuries of deep agreement in our Land of the Free that the narrow interests of corporations must be subjugated to the public interest.
Indeed, the founders of our Republic saw corporate power as an inherently selfish and perpetual danger to democracy, and most leaders of that day believed that corporate entities should have no role whatsoever in politics. Thomas Jefferson bluntly declared in 1816 that the country must “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations.”
The Alito-Kennedy-Roberts-Scalia-Thomas cabal, however, has unceremoniously dumped the wisdom of the founders, along with volumes of U.S. judicial precedent, to assert that poor little corporations today are victims of political “censorship” by Congress, states and cities that have outlawed the use of corporate funds in elections. Such restrictions, the five usurpers ruled, violate the “free speech rights” of corporations, putting corporate interests at a disadvantage with other political interests.
Disadvantage? This would be hilarious, were it not so dangerous. No other group in America has anywhere near the voice and raw political power that corporations exert every day. Campaign donations from individual corporate executives (and from their PACs, 527s, front groups and other channels) total hundreds of millions of dollars each election year, effectively shouting down the voices of ordinary folks (the Wall Street bailout being but one sterling example).
Yet the court has just handed these political powerhouses their wildest dream: access to the multitrillion-dollar ocean of funds held within the corporate entities themselves. Every business empire — from Wall Street to Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil to the China Overseas Shipping Company (yes, the five wise guys even waved foreign corporations into our political funfest) — can now open the spigots of their vast corporate treasuries and send a raging torrent of their special-interest cash into any and all of our national, state and local elections.
Two legal perversions are at work here. First, the court has equated the freedom to spend money with the freedom of speech. But if money is speech, those with the most money get the most speech. That’s plutocracy, not democracy, and it’s totally alien to our Constitution, as well as a gross distortion of the crucial principle of one person-one vote.
Second, a corporation literally can’t speak. It has no lips, tongue, breath or brain. Far from being a “person,” a corporation is nothing but a piece of paper — a legal construct created by the state as a mechanism for its owners to make money.
Actual people in the mechanism (shareholders, executives, workers, retirees, lenders, et al.) can and do speak politically — in many diverse voices that express very different viewpoints. But the corporate entity, which the court cabal is trying to turn into a Frankenstein monster, is inanimate, incapable of thought, inherently mute and, in itself, no more deserving of human rights than a trash can would be.
— Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Click here for more information, or click here to contact him.
Comments
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» on 01.27.10 @ 08:34 PM
Jim, I know that the First Amendment is supposed to be selective…but right now we are working to negate 100 years of Constitutional abuse. But it WAS a good progressive attempt wasn’t it? Next on the agenda….the 17th Amendment. Daniel Petry
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» on 01.27.10 @ 09:31 PM
Those evil corporations who employ people, provide products and services we need and want must be stopped. Only unions, environmental groups, hollywood film makers, and main stream media outlets should be allowed to speak for the people (or fish, flora, fauna, felons, etc.) Bush made the mistake of signing that garbage peice of legislation McCain/Feingold, and it took far to long to begin to correct it. Also, substitute union wherever you read corporation and the article will make more sense.
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» on 01.28.10 @ 07:31 AM
The Supreme Court decision is wrong. The Constitution covers people not corporations. I do not want more corporate influence in our flawed election process, especially foreign owned. The only abuse here will be that our politicians will be evenmore bought and sold to the highest corporate bidder. I am glad Obama called the Supreme Court out on this issue during his State of the Union Address. This decision could take America down a very ugly path. Maybe our elected officials should just dress up like NASCAR driver and wear all of their sponsers so all could see why they make the decisions that the are??
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» on 01.28.10 @ 10:00 AM
The Supreme Court erred in it’s decision. Corporations do not have the same Constitutional rights as citizens, plain and simple. It’s not much of a leap to imagine a State of the Union address in the not-so-distant future: “The President of the United States, brought to you by Exxon.”
Corporate “personhood” ought to be abolished. Corporations have legal rights, yes. But they are not identical to the rights of people.
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» on 01.28.10 @ 10:46 AM
The Supreme Court erred in it’s decision. Corporations do not have the same Constitutional rights as citizens, plain and simple. It’s not much of a leap to imagine a State of the Union address in the not-so-distant future: “The President of the United States, brought to you by Exxon.”
Corporate “personhood” ought to be abolished. Corporations have legal rights, yes. But they are not identical to the rights of people.
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» on 01.28.10 @ 11:35 AM
Media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, are not individuals, but were excluded from McCain-Feingold. And don’t kid youself that they do not do politial ads diguised as news. Remember Dan Blather’s forged documents right before the election? Biased op-eds on PBS right before the election?
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» on 01.28.10 @ 11:49 AM
First, we must assume that Standard Oil (Exxon), Goldman Sachs, AIG, Microsoft are
“persons”, not limited-liability, for-profit, private business corporations they are.
Then we must assume that these impoverished Fortune Five Hundred companies are
so “impoverished” that they can not effectively communicate “their views” with anyone else.
Then we must presume that the only way to remedy that “free speech” deficit it to let them spend unlimited amounts of money trying to influence the outcomes of local, state, federal elections.
That’s the nub of Kennedy-Roberts brilliant opinion that 6 generations of federal
restraint on the mis-used power of monopolies, trusts, combines, and corporations
was both legal, and constitutional.
For conservative jurists who like to portray themselves as cautious constructionists,
that’s pretty amazing.
It suggests that Taft, Hughes, Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Black, Vinson, Warren, Burger, Blackmon, even Rehnquist didn’t know what they were doing, and dropped the constitutional ball during the multiple times the 1907 Act
was reviewed before Kennedy-Roberts obliterated it.
On the other hand, its heartening to read that Mr. Petry’s interest in the Bill of Rights
actually extends beyond a single, subordinate clause in the Second Amendment.
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» on 01.28.10 @ 04:03 PM
Unions have spent millions on campaigns. Corporations should have the right.
Amazing that Obama, who turned down Federal Campaign Finances, went on to raise money money that any prior candidate in history, and now is calling out the Supreme Court in speech last night. Very crass and tacky.
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» on 01.28.10 @ 10:01 PM
Y’all carping about those evil Unions are simply avoiding the issue, because it is purely indefensible: money is not speech, language is speech, and corporations are not persons. This is common sense. In fact the notion of corporate personhood has been shown to be an error. It has been said that it was an outcome of the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific railroad, but in fact the justices made no mention whatsoever of corporate personhood. However, a court reporter by the name of John Bancroft Davis wrote an errant casebook headnote, simlilar to the abstract preceding a technical journal article, stating that corporations were persons as far as the 14th Amendment was concerned. Davis totally made this up, but it was entered into the official casebook anyway, and since headnotes had no legal authority and were just summaries of legal opinions nobody did anything about it. Unfortunately for us the idea spread gradually, probably by people who just read the headnote without actually reading the legal opinions. In fact no Justice writing an opinion in this case ever used the phrase “corporate personhood”. The whole idea is based on a 124-year old mistake.
This week’s ruling, thanks to several Justices like Alito and Roberts going directly opposite of the direction they claimed to revere and respect during their confirmation, have made that mistake into a catastrophe.
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» on 01.29.10 @ 02:03 PM
Corporations are an older creation than our constitution and our founding Fathers had the wisdom to give these legal entities the same legal rights as individuals (look up the definition of corporation, idiots). I know liberals hate corporations, particularly those that actually make money, but not all corporations are businesses. Municipalities can be corporations and so can your daddy’s trust fund, Local. Included in that list are unions and many government institutions. Why incorporate these other entities? To give them the same rights as you the individual. Those rights imply protection from government abuse as well as the responsibility of citizenship. It’s a two way street.
Of course, if your purpose is the dismantling of private enterprise, the absconding of private wealth then the first thing you need to do is take away protection from government tyranny. So Jimmy, Local, when you get out of that progressive fog that invades your brain every waking minute ask yourself just how much power do you want government to have? Those of you ignoramuses who think corporations are the entities to be feared better realize which entity has the most powerful military on the planet.
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» on 01.29.10 @ 09:30 PM
AN50, there you go again, calling people names and getting your facts wrong. True, there were exactly 6 US corporations extant at the time the Constitution was signed, and the East India Corporation, Hudson Bay Corporation etc are much older (even the Roman Catholic Church was legally a corporation!) but NOwhere do the framers mention corporations in the US Constitution. They wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole. That’s the first fact. The second one is that nobody wants to dismantle private enterprise, as you say. No one is advocating destroying corporations or removing the protections they deserve from government abuse. We’re talking about the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend as much shareholders’ money as they want at any point in an election campaign, and the obvious (to most people, anyway) deleterious effect such would have on American democracy. You’re a literate person, capable of thinking, so try to get past your idealogic perspective a little: it should be obvious that corporations don’t enjoy all the rights of citizens! You want a corporation on the schoolboard? You want one on the Coastal Commission, or the FDA, at the National Mint? Of course not. Corporations are essential to world finance and need certain protections, but it goes both ways; they should not be allowed to trample the public interests or restrict their own employees’ rights. How else will they be held accountable for their “responsibilitiy of citizenship”, like you and I are? When they expand their power through policy influence, they can be corrupted, and it’s only sensible that government be able to exercise some controls over them in the name of public interest. I know you’ll say you don’t think government is even capable of considering the public interest, but you often speak as if you are an idealogue and see the world in only black & white terms. And speaking of speech…if money equals speech in your world, then your world already has a name: plutocracy. Only the rich have a voice, or at least the rich have the only voice that matters. Is that the world you want to defend, just because you loathe liberal political ideas?
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