The idiocy money and its manic pursuit generates is at an all time high. We've gone back to a robber baron era mentality just as ruthless and absurd as the last one that both Roosevelts tried to quash last century.
After the continue reading jump, I've included a comment to the following NY Times editorial from one of the readers which pretty much sums up my view about all of it.
When the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech 35 years ago, it was responding to forces of technology and economics reshaping American politics that made it much more expensive to run a campaign. While ruling that public financing and limits on contributions are valid ways to limit donors' undue influence, it struck down candidate, campaign and independent spending limits.
Now the court's conservative majority is again reshaping politics, ruling that what matters most for money and speech is their "fair market" impact. The result will be closer scrutiny of public financing, while enabling even more rampant spending by wealthy candidates.
In the landmark 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the court said that "virtually every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money," so restricting campaign spending meant restricting political speech. The First Amendment required that political speech be unfettered, so the same was required for political spending.
But when the court ruled that money equals speech, it didn't mean, literally, that money is speech. It meant that money enabled speech. A political contribution enabled the symbolic, or indirect, speech of the donor and the actual speech of the candidate -- and may the best speech win. The focus was on enabling the speech, not the money.
That changed in 2008 when the conservative majority struck down a federal rule that had tripled the limit on campaign contributions for a candidate outspent by a rich, self-financed opponent. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote that the rule diminished "the effectiveness" of the rich candidate's spending and of his speech.
In oral argument recently, the court's conservatives appeared ready to take their next step in restricting campaign finance reform and to strike down Arizona's public financing mechanism called triggered matching funds. This is one of the most compelling innovations in the country. The state will match for a state-financed candidate what an opponent raises in private contributions up to triple the initial amount of state financing.
To William Maurer, the lawyer opposing the Arizona mechanism, whenever "a privately financed candidate speaks above a certain amount, the government creates real penalties for them to have engaged in unfettered political expression." That "speaks" was not a slip, but a reinforcement of the money-equals-speech notion.
The fundamental problem, he said, is "the government turning my speech into the vehicle by which my entire political message is undercut," because the public funds triggered are a penalty that reduces the impact of the privately financed candidate's spending and speech. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. made clear in the argument that he, too, sees triggered matching public funds as a limit on the privately financed candidate's speech.
That makes no sense. Arizona's mechanism means more candidates -- not just the wealthy -- will be able to run in elections. And that means more political speech, not less. But that view depends on seeing money as enabling speech, not vice versa. Money already has far too much sway everywhere in politics. If the court continues this way, the damage and corruption will be enormous.
and now the reply to the editorial:
ke Solem, CA
April 12th, 2011 12:22 am
Money is not speech, because if it is defined thus, then those without money must be mute and incapable of communication - a blatantly false assertion. For example, posting comments on internet news sites does not cost any money (although some infrastructure is required). Neither does writing letters to public officials, or organizing grassroots political groups.
Likewise, corporations are not people. If corporations were people, then no corporation could own another, and all holding companies, subsidiaries, etc. would have to be dissolved immediately (as per anti-slavery laws).
A corporation is nothing more than an absentee ownership arrangement which protects the owners (shareholders) from any legal liability, instead handing that liability off to the corporation's management (insiders) and assets.
The notion that such a legal fiction could be defined as a 'person' entitled to spend as much money as it wanted on buying politicians is beyond ludicrous, and shows that the Supreme Court has abandoned rationality and respect for the impartial rule of law in favor of political partisanship.
Clearly, allowing corporate entities (say, the the British East India Company) to buy elections is not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. They were well aware that such entities were profoundly anti-democratic and were in reality little more than puppets that obeyed the British aristocracy that was oppressing the colonies.
It's true that corporations have gained ever-greater political power ever since the Court defined them as 'people' in the late 19th century, but much of their power was rolled back by trust-busters like Teddy Roosevelt. Now, new legal rulings have put us on a course back to the Robber Baron era.
This recent sharp turn away from Constitutional law and towards political partisanship by the Court is unprecedented since the end of that earlier, pre-world war era. Perhaps the real turning point was the 5-4 selection of GW Bush as President (in direct reversal of traditional conservative support for state's rights in election matters) in 2000.
That decision will likely be fingered by future historians as one of the very worst in the entire history of the Court, one that set the stage for the appointment of two highly suspect jurors, Roberts and Alioto, who have continued to steer the Court into politically partisan waters, while continually enhancing the power of corporate conglomerates (see Citizens United, for example).
Many people lost their respect for the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of the rule of law as a result of Bush vs. Gore decision, that's certain enough - and the downhill spiral has continued from that point.
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