Geneva+D’s+OpEd+Article

"Campaign Finance"
by Geneva

When large corporations first emerged on the scene in what is now known as the “Gilded Age” of American History, there were no regulations on what they could or could not do. Without any rules, they ran rampant.

Politicians were largely ineffectual during this period, first because there was no precedent for regulation and so no clear way to do it, and second because regulation was discouraged by large “campaign contributions.”

This corruption and abuse of power is why rules about corporate conduct, particularly with respect to the intersection of politicians and money, were eventually put in place. This is America, after all, where everyone has the right to be free within acceptable parameters codified in the rule of law.

But recently, some of those rules were broken, summarily rejected. Not by corporations themselves, and not by the American people that according to the Washington Post are 80% against this decision across both political parties. No, this alteration of the structure of campaign financing was brought about by the United States Supreme Court, which turned the meaning of “judicial activism” on its head in the process.

The Court in the Citizens United case decided that because corporations (including unions) are persons for certain purposes under the law and spending money on political advertising is free speech and the first amendment protects political speech by persons, corporations must not be limited in how much they can spend on political advertising. Even foreign-based corporations with U.S. operations are free to spend as much as they want to promote candidates or issues. This went against about a hundred years of judicial precedent.

If this Supreme Court decision allowing unions and corporations to spend indiscriminately on political campaigns stands, unions and corporations will dominate political discussion, and the combined contributions of ordinary citizens won't be enough to be heard. Blocking American citizens from participating properly in the democracy they hold so dear is a far greater threat to liberty than restricting the campaign cash flow from conglomerates.

The goals of corporations and people are not the same. The corporation exists to fulfill an economic role and make money. A publicly held company has a duty to its shareholders to make money by every legal means available. Politicians, in contrast, are elected to represent the people that put them in office, not corporate shareholders or union bosses. Politicians must protect people from corporations; it is not in the nature of corporations to protect people.

There's nothing wrong with corporations making money; I just don't want a corporation's money electing my senators.

There's no denying that though corporations are not people, nor do they have the same motivations and goals as people, they do have a measure of free speech. However, does that mean that they have the right to spend as much as they want?

Unions and corporations have money on hand, whether it's from charging dues or making profits. This means that if they have a vested interest in seeing a certain candidate win an election, they have more capital to invest in that candidate's campaign than average working Americans could possibly contribute. That doesn't mean that candidate will win, but it does confer a powerful advantage.

Special interests in politics have had an increasingly smothering effect over the last year. From banks to health insurers, from coal to oil, big corporations, their lobbyists, and their assorted third-party entities—and the promised campaign financing they control—have already done a good job protecting their interests at the expense of the public interest. They have done so, in part, by shamelessly lying.

When both politicians and the media depend on corporate advertising for survival, political discussion will become a seamless loop of the political message that corporations want voters to hear. There will be no one with a voice left whose primary goal is to tell the truth.

“The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind,” Justice Stevens wrote. “And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.”media type="file" key="genevad-muckraker-0910.mp3"