- In a leap that Justice John Paul Stevens called "profoundly
misguided" the US Supreme Court has written a decision that may well
be the final undoing of American democracy. To see that, it is necessary
to take on board the main trend in the distribution of wealth and power
in this country. Today the spread between rich and poor is as
broad as it has ever been. As of 2000, one percent of the people
owned 40% of the nation's wealth. That gap has been creeping
up; probably as of 2010 one percent of the people now own more
than half of the wealth. In addition to that, a goodly chunk
is owned by foreigners. Thus the democratic base, meaning that
99% of the people may be net owners of little more than a third of our
country's wealth.
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- Link that set of numbers to the fact that it costs more
and more to run for public office in this country. It was a
shocker that the candidates in the last presidential election were working
with war chests of upward of half a billion dollars. In fact,
according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama raised and spent
roughly $730 million, while John McCain raised and spent about half that
amount. Obama avowed that he did not take lobbyists money, but
that budget did not grow on small trees, even though it was only $2.50
for every man, woman, and child in the country.
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- The point is that leading candidates were able to raise
that kind of money while the decades old constraints were in place on corporate
America. In fact, with Thursday's decision the Court overturned
its own 1990 ruling that barred corporations from using funds from their
general treasuries to buy political advertising.
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- Now the cat is truly out of the bag. In principle,
corporations can now spend as much of the treasury as shareholders will
allow on such political ads. This means that every decision
maker in a corporation has contribution and voting rights equal to anyone
on the street, while the firm may blast away with treasury funds to bolster
management preferences.
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- Put in these terms, the issue is not, as the Court majority
averred, about freedom of speech. Every corporate officer and
employee is free to exercise complete freedom of speech along with everybody
else. What the Court said was the corporate treasury now has
an independent voice, with a megaphone as large and loud as its human managers
are prepared to buy. The decision is not about freedom of speech; it is
about being able to add large, loud megaphones.
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- When corporate America already has acquired such a commanding
voice in US decision making, providing the megaphone is overkill. In
the past several decades America has moved steadily away from democracy
toward oligarchy. Washington pays a great deal more attention to lobbyists
inside the Beltway than it does to public opinion. Among other
things, that is why the federal budget focuses so heavily on military spending. But
the US has no enemies likely to be defeated by military attack. We
are not at war with any country (Afghanistan and Pakistan do not count
in this equation because the enemy there is not a country and the numbers
are miniscule), but we are spending nearly as much, maybe more, on the
military budget as it cost us to run World War II. That is because
the oligarchs are making decisions that serve their financial interests,
not the interests of the country. The Supreme Court has just
given corporate America a giant force multiplier.
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- The decision requires a distorted definition of person. Our
constitution only guarantees freedom of speech to people. That
definition is entirely consistent with the concept of a democracy. There
is simply nothing in the constitutional language to suggest that a corporation,
as an entity, is entitled to be treated as a person for voting in an election.
As an entity a corporation is licensed to do business. It is not licensed
to vote in any election, and corporate charters do not guarantee such a
privilege. Of course, corporate officers are privileged, as citizens, to
vote in any election and to vote for laws or regulations that serve corporate
and/or personal interests. However, nowhere is it specified
that a company with six officers has a seventh vote for the company. In
the voting booth, the company as such is mute.
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- I go beyond Justice Stevens who said that the court was
"profoundly misguided." The Court has been careless in suggesting
that the corporate entity has a voice apart from the people who run it.
By this decision the Court certified that our democracy is for sale to
the highest bidder.
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- The writer is the author of the recently published work,
A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist
on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US
Department of State whose overseas service included tours in Egypt, India,
Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Brazil. His immediate pre-retirement positions
were as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National
War College and as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter Terrorism
and Emergency Planning. He studied constitutional law at Union University
Law School in Albany, New York. He will welcome comment at
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- wecanstopit@charter.net
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