LA Times: Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections

[marmar]

Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections
Voters stand to lose out if the Supreme Court treats political spending by businesses and other big-money players as protected speech.

By Monica Youn
January 10, 2010


Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don't support their preferred agenda. Voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies.

The Supreme Court's decision in the hotly anticipated campaign finance reform case Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission -- which may be announced as early as Tuesday -- will show whether a majority of the Roberts court is buying their argument.

The case may be the turning point in a concerted, decades-long ideological campaign -- the "corporate free speech movement," as Robert L. Kerr and other scholars have chronicled. As far back as 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr. (whom President Nixon would shortly nominate to the Supreme Court) sent a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor Jr. at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that corporate interests needed to take advantage of a "neglected opportunity in the courts." Because "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change," the memo said, the chamber and other corporate interests should develop a cadre of constitutional lawyers to file lawsuits and amicus briefs to push a corporate-friendly legal agenda in the Supreme Court.

Corporations heeded this call to arms, generously funding the chamber's litigation arm and founding other think tanks. In hundreds of lawsuits and briefs, the chamber and corporations such as Exxon-Mobil and Nike have drilled in the pro-business party line that 1st Amendment protection should extend to corporate political spending -- such as the corporate-funded movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton that is at issue in Citizens United. The case, which began on narrow grounds (did restrictions on corporate campaign ads apply to this film?) has become a test of whether restrictions on political speech by corporations should be ended altogether. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-youn10-2010jan10,0,1203910.story

[ClassWarrior]

1. K&R

NGU.

[Gman2]

2. If Repukes get hold, they will outright own us. And say so.

You thought free speech cages were fun the first time? They will put a bounty on liberals, as well as hunting RINO's.

[Kablooie]

3. All this comes from defining a corporation as an individual.

And if that's the case, corporations should have to follow the same laws and restrictions that other individuals have.
If they steal from someone, the whole corporation must be locked in prison. It must stop producing until it has carried out it's sentence.