The Goldman Sachs Party

Progressive Ponderings by Joe Mayer

United States presidential campaigns today are extremely expensive. In the year 2000, all candidates combined spent $528 million; in 2004 it had risen to $889 million. By Sept. 21, 2008 Obama had spent $454 million and McCain $230 million. The 2008 total easily topped $1,000,000,000 (one billion dollars).

While $1 billion is an extremely large amount of money, it pales when compared with the revenues and profits of major U.S. corporations. Profits for some major corporations in 2007 (before the recent recession) included Exxon-Mobil at $40.6 B., GE at $22.2 B., Chevron at $18.6 B., Walmart at $12.7 B., and AT&T at $11.9 B.

These profits, year after year, produce one of the more inequitable societies in history. As more and more Americans are left behind in our economic system – the middle class shrinking and the number of poor rising – the wealth at the top continues to multiply.

Forbes Magazine annually publishes a list of America’s richest citizens. The following names and net worth are from its Sept. 2009 issue: Wm. Gates - $50 B., Warren Buffet - $40 B., Lawrence Ellison - $27 B., four Walton (Walmart) families - $19 to $21.5 B. each.

On Jan. 29, 2010, Bill Moyers had as one of his guests Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham U. School of Law and a visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Brennan Center for Justice. That night she stated: “Goldman Sachs is the smartest political party I know in this country.”

In one sentence she encapsulates the essence of wealth’s threat to our democracy. Some of our major corporations “earn” in a matter of weeks the equivalent of the cost of a major presidential campaign. Some of our wealthy citizens could pay for a major presidential campaign from the interest, dividends, and rents their investments earn in a year. Transferring these billions to Senatorial or Congressional campaigns allows them to control whole committees of the Senate and House.

Our financial elites were already purchasing favorable legislation before the latest Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and the wealthy unlimited influence on members of Congress. Unless citizens fight back with all the resources available, their access to the legislative process will be denied by the power of money.

This court decision, which sets the stage for the corporate takeover of our democracy, is NOT Constitutional law. It is a case of an ideological activist court whose decisions generate new laws. Indeed, a Goldman Sachs political party is sure to arise. Everything else in our nation is being given corporate names.

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Supreme Court decision a shame and travesty

by Leigh Pomeroy
Published in the Mankato Free Press

MANKATO — In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), the concept of corporate personhood was accidentally and benignly (at that time) inserted into the U.S. Supreme Court canon of judicial decisions. No less than a Frankenstein’s monster has evolved from that seemingly minor insertion.

It is quite clear that the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission even further establishes levels of “free speech”, allocating more power to the few individuals who control corporations and labor unions and, by consequence, allowing less to everyone else, especially employees and stockholders of corporations and members of labor unions who may disagree with the political stance of those corporate and union leaders.

Under the false guise of judicial conservatism, the court has in fact acted just the opposite. Nowhere do the words “corporation” or “labor union” or any phrase or words approximating them appear in the Constitution. And yet, now five members of the current sitting Supreme Court have decided that these institutions “de jure” have the same rights as individuals while “de facto” it is no secret they will have more.

It is a shame and travesty to the intentions of our Founding Fathers.

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Progressive Ponderings: Absolute Power

by Joe Mayer

In 1887, British historian and moralist Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, stated, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

I couldn’t but think of Lord Acton’s wisdom as our own Supreme Court rained (or reigned) down its latest creation on us merely ordinary citizens. We should not be surprised. This same body of absolutes chose to crown George Bush nine years ago.

Keep in mind that members appointed to the Supreme Court are almost always white men of wealth and power. In 1857, these men, in the Dred Scott decision, defied the Deity, and decided that part of his creation did not measure up to the court’s standards. To correct God’s work they proclaimed. “African Americans are not citizens, but property protected by the Constitution.” This decision resulted in civil war.

Since that war the powerful wealthy court set about once again improving on God’s creation. First the states birthed corporations to which the courts gave legal status. Gradually the Court stated that corporations were legal “persons,” entitling them to First Amendment rights such as free speech. The next step really challenged God’s shortsightedness; in this leap to mythology the court decided that money was speech. Now this latest decision, based on the court’s previous rulings and not on the Constitution, declares that the people’s elected representatives cannot limit corporate personhood by restricting corporate/wealth/power’s “money speech.”

In the span of approximately one hundred fifty years our Supreme Court, playing God, went from denying personhood to part of the human race to granting personhood to a creation of its own. THAT’S ABSOLUTE POWER.

Now it is up to us citizens to protest the court’s equating a thing, an object, a creation of wealth with our own God-given humanity.

Democrats should view this as a campaign gift. Every candidate, at every level, for every office should be required to state his or her position on this issue of corporate personhood. Those politicians favoring the court’s decision (yes, there are many already in the clutches of corporate “persons”) should be forced to explain: (1) How this ruling advances the principle of people rule, i.e., “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” (2) How “profit only” motivated institutions will advance our human and social values such as love, hope, empathy, community, (3) How this new “person” creation is in harmony with our human creation stories.

Our democracy has already been wounded by the previous court rulings. This could be the death blow.

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The new hijackers: Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy

The End of Restraint

By Stuart Taylor Jr. | NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 22, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 1, 2010

The Supreme Court's five conservatives are properly protective of American citizens' First Amendment rights to spend as much of their money as they wish on political speech, both individually and by funding nonprofit advocacy groups. But this was no justification for the court's blockbuster, precedent-smashing Jan. 21 decision unleashing corporate executives to pour unlimited amounts of stockholders' money—without their consent—into ads supporting or attacking federal candidates. Indeed the 5–4 decision would allow any big company to spend a fortune attacking candidates whom many, or even most, of its stockholders would rather support. And corporations—including multinationals controlled by foreigners—will spend money on elections not to advance the political views of their stockholders, but to seek economic advantage.

So the court's decision strikes me as a perverse interpretation of the First Amendment, one that will at best increase the already unhealthy political power of big businesses (and big unions, too), and at worst swamp our elections under a new deluge of special-interest cash. More ominously still, Citizens United v. FEC lends credence to liberal claims that all five of the more conservative justices are "judicial activists," the same imprecation that conservatives have for so long—and often justifiably—hurled at liberal justices.

Judicial activists—at least as I define them—are judges who are unduly eager to aggrandize their own power and impose their own policy preferences on the electorate. They invoke farfetched interpretations of the Constitution to sweep aside democratically adopted laws and deeply rooted societal traditions. I'd hoped that Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who came across in their confirmation hearings as believers in judicial modesty, would bring a healthy dose of restraint to a court long populated by activists, and would thereby shun sharp lurches to the ideological right. It appears that I misjudged them.

(More here.)

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So much for the Constitution

High-Court Hypocrisy

By Jonathan Alter | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 1, 2010

The year 2010 is already a nightmare for progressives, and it's only January. In one week alone, the health-care bill derailed, the liberal radio network Air America went silent, and the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allows corporations to pump as much money as they want into political campaigns. I've got no answers on the first two, but a few suggestions for avoiding despair on the third, the most serious threat to American democracy in a generation.

In a devastating decision, the high court cleared the way for one of those corporate takeovers you read about, only much bigger. If Exxon wants to spend $1 million (a bar tab for Big Oil) defeating an environmentalist running for city council, it can now do so. If Goldman Sachs wants to pay the entire cost of every congressional campaign in the U.S., the law of the land now allows it. The decision frees unions, too, but they already spend about as much as they can on politics. Fortune 100 firms currently spend only a fraction of 1 percent of their $605 billion in annual profits on buying politicians.

(More here.)

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Money Isn't Speech and Corporations Aren't People

The misguided theories behind the Supreme Court's ruling on campaign finance reform

By David Kairys
Slate.com
Posted Friday, Jan. 22, 2010

Go back almost a century, to the time when the modern corporation was created, and you'll find laws that prohibit or limit the use of corporate money in elections. And yet this week, a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the limits that Congress passed in 2002 in this tradition in the case Citizens United v. FEC.

The majority's ruling unleashes a new wave of campaign cash and adds to the already considerable power of corporations. The court's main rationale is that limits on using corporate treasuries for campaigns are a "classic example of censorship," as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. To get there, Kennedy depends on two legal theories that blossomed as constitutional principles in the mid-1970s: money is speech and corporations are people. Both theories are strange, if not simply wrongheaded—why, according to the Constitution or common sense, would money be speech or corporations be people? The court has also employed theories not uniformly but, rather, as constitutional cover for dominance of the electoral system by corporations and by the wealthy.

The first theory appeared in a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which invalidated some campaign-finance reforms that came out of Watergate. The Court concluded that most limits on campaign expenditures, and some limits on donations, are unconstitutional because money is itself speech and the "quantity of expression"—the amounts of money—can't be limited.

But in subsequent cases, the conservative justices who had emphatically embraced the money-is-speech principle didn't apply it to money solicited by speakers of ordinary means. For example, the court limited the First Amendment rights of Hare Krishna leafleters soliciting donations in airports to support their own leafleting. The leafleting drew no money-is-speech analysis. To the contrary, the conservative justices, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, found that by asking for money for leafleting—their form of speech—the Hare Krishnas were being "disruptive" and posing an "inconvenience" to others. In other words, in the court's view, some people's money is speech; others' money is annoying. And the conservative justices have raised no objection to other limits on the quantity of speech, such as limits on the number of picketers.

(Continued here.)

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