Saturday, January 23, 2010

Watchdog groups warn: ‘Corporate globalization’ of US elections is upon us

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 -- 3:42 pm

The Supreme Court may have ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission days ago, but the decision's shockwaves are still rippling across American democracy.

Key among them is a concern first raised by Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in his dissent that the court, by removing all prohibitions against corporate or union money in U.S. elections, "would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."

"I guess this would be the corporate globalization of the U.S. electoral system," a blogger for watchdog group The Sunlight Foundation opined.

RELATED: 41 industry leaders call on Congress to halt corporate 'bribery'

In other words, The Sunlight Foundation noted, the Supreme Court "might support allowing foreign companies to spend freely in elections in the United States."


"A majority of large businesses are now owned by foreign entities, and this means international corporations could pour tons of money into the United States political scene, potentially swaying the political climate," added Newsweek.

The Center for Public Integrity specifically highlights foreign-owned corporations which operate U.S.-based subsidiaries. The group focused on CITGO Petroleum Company, purchased by Venezuela's state-run oil firm PetrĂ³leos de Venezuela in 1990. Through the association, Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez might conceivably "spend government funds to defeat an American political candidate, just by having CITGO buy TV ads bashing his target."

"And it’s not just Chavez," the Center continued. "The Saudi government owns Houston’s Saudi Refining Company and half of Motiva Enterprises. Lenovo, which bought IBM’s PC assets in 2004, is partially owned by the Chinese government’s Chinese Academy of Sciences. And Singapore’s APL Limited operates several U.S. port operations. A weakening of the limit on corporate giving could mean China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and any other country that owns companies that operate in the U.S. could also have significant sway in American electioneering."

President Barack Obama, in his weekly YouTube address on Saturday, blasted the court's decision, saying that it "strikes at our democracy itself." He has ordered Congress to "develop a forceful response" to the court's move, but Newsweek notes that a significant reformation of U.S. election law may not be in place before the 2010 mid-term elections.

"If we do nothing then I think you can kiss your country goodbye," Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) told RAW STORY hours after the court's decision was announced. "You won't have any more senators from Kansas or Oregon, you'll have senators from Cheekies and Exxon. Maybe we'll have to wear corporate logos like Nascar drivers."

Anticipating the court's decision, Grayson has filed six bills to reform campaign finance.

The bills have names like the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act and the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act. The first slaps a 500 percent excise tax on corporate spending on elections, and the second mandates businesses to disclose their attempts to influence elections. More details are available on the congressman's Web site.

A prior version of this story misattributed a quote from The Sunlight Foundation.

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/blogger-the-corporate-globalization-electoral-system/

A partisan Supreme Court

The decision on campaign finance points to something more troubling than unlimited corporate contributions.

Tim Rutten

January 23, 2010

This week's Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections is so strained in its reasoning and so removed from the realities of American life that it would be grotesquely comedic, were its implications not so dire.

We're all familiar, of course, with the disenfranchisement of corporate America. It's common knowledge that the interests of big business are routinely ignored at every level of society, and that the deprivation of rights suffered by those unfortunates who populate its executive suites is a continuing affront to the national conscience. That, at least, was the suggestion of the strident tone taken by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. "If the 1st Amendment has any force," he wrote, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens for simply engaging in political speech."

You would think that the federal prisons were overflowing with corporate martyrs to freedom of expression. This is reasoning ludicrous on its face and radical in its dismissal of judicial decisions stretching back to Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. The notion that corporate rights and individual rights -- particularly those recognized by the 1st Amendment -- are congruent is absurd. Do corporations have a right to freedom of religion, or just to those liberties that advance commercial interests?

As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent: "If taken seriously, our colleagues' assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the government's ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions. Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by 'Tokyo Rose' during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."

That's hardly the end of this decision's implications. Over time, it's bound to provide the rationale for overturning state and local electoral regulations based on federal law -- as those in Los Angeles are -- and will further undermine the influence of the parties at a time when U.S. politics seem increasingly chaotic.

That's true because, though corporate contributions to the parties continue to be regulated, expenditures made outside the parties on behalf of candidates now are unlimited. The predictable effect on parties is particularly odd from this court, given that one of the most distressing things about this decision -- considered in a sequence stretching back to Bush vs. Gore -- is that it demonstrates that this is a partisan court, willing to hand down sweeping decisions that ignore decades of jurisprudence based on five Republican votes.

That was not true of the activist court over which Chief Justice Earl Warren presided. At the time he was sworn in, Warren was the only member of the court appointed by a Republican president. Still, he inherited a group of justices deeply split over the overriding question of the day -- segregation -- and fashioned a unanimous rejection of legalized racial separation in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. As The Times' Jim Newton -- Warren's biographer (and also my editor) -- has pointed out, "Before Fred Vinson, Warren's predecessor, died, the court was deeply split over Brown. At least three justices (Tom Clark, Stanley Reed and Vinson) were inclined to uphold Plessy vs. Ferguson in defense of segregation, and two others (Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson) were stymied by the question of how to overturn such a long-standing precedent. Vinson's death, which Frankfurter referred to as his first solid evidence of the existence of God, cleared the way for that impasse to be broken. Thus Warren achieved a unanimity that elevated the opinion above partisan or sectional politics." Can that be said of any major decision handed down by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s court?

That nonpartisan character survived throughout Warren's tenure and that of his successor, the Republican Warren E. Burger. Two other landmark decisions of that period -- Griswold vs. Connecticut, which recognized a constitutional right to privacy, and Roe vs. Wade -- were decided by 7-2 majorities. In the former, one of the dissenters, Hugo Black, was a Democrat; the other, Potter Stewart, a Republican. In the latter, one of the minority justices, Byron R. White, was a Democrat, and the other, William H. Rehnquist, a Republican.

Our current ability to predict Supreme Court decisions by weighing the issues against the two parties' programs is worse than melancholy. It marks a new low in our nation's descent into corrosive partisanship.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten23-2010jan23,0,7043674,print.column

Expert lawyers to declare Iraq war illegal: reports

LONDON (AFP) – Two former government lawyers involved in the preparations for Britain's invasion of Iraq will testify at a public inquiry this week that the March 2003 conflict was illegal, reports said Sunday.

Their evidence will kick-start what was already expected to be an explosive few days at the Chilcot inquiry into the war, thanks to the appearance Friday of former prime minister Tony Blair, who led Britain into the conflict.

Michael Wood, the top legal advisor to the Foreign Office at the time, and his then deputy Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who quit her job in protest at the invasion, are both due to give evidence Tuesday.

According to The Independent on Sunday, Wilmshurst will reveal infighting between officials and ministers over the legality of deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein without explicit United Nations support.

She will say she was far from alone in having doubts about the case and say her boss, Wood, "clearly advised" that the war was illegal under international law, the paper said. He did not make this view public at the time.

A report in The Observer weekly confirmed that Wood was planning to tell the inquiry that the war was illegal because of the absence of a second resolution from the UN Security Council explicitly authorising the use of force in Iraq.

Britain's top legal advisor at the time, attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith, gave the green light for military action under a UN resolution passed in November 2002, but critics claim he was pressured into it.

Goldsmith is due to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on Wednesday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100124/wl_mideast_afp/britainiraqmilitarypoliticsinquiry/print

Olbermann on Supreme Court Campaign Finance Ruling






Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy



For more, visit the MSNBC Countdown page.


Transcript:


Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the Supreme Court's ruling today in the case titled "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission."


On the cold morning of Friday, March 6th, 1857, a very old man who was born just eight months and thirteen days after the Declaration of Independence was adopted; a man who was married to the sister of the man who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner;" a man who was enlightened enough to have freed his own slaves and given pensions to the ones who had become too old to work read aloud, in a reed-thin voice, a very long document.


In it, he ruled on a legal case involving a slave, brought by his owner to live in a free state; yet to remain a slave.


The slave sought his freedom, and sued. And looking back over legal precedent, and the Constitution, and the America in which it was created, this judge ruled that no black man could ever be considered an actual citizen of the United States.


"They had for more than a century before been, regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."



The case, of course, was Dred Scott. The old man was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States of America, Roger Brooke Tawney. And the outcome, he believed, would be to remove the burning question of the abolition of slavery from the political arena for once and for all.


The outcome, in fact, was the Civil War. No American ever made a single bigger misjudgment. No American ever carried the responsibility for the deaths and suffering of more Americans. No American ever was more quickly vilified. Within four years Chief Justice Tawney's rulings were being ignored in the South and the North.


Within five, President Lincoln at minimum contemplated arresting him. Within seven, he died, in poverty, while still Chief Justice. Within eight, Congress had voted to not place a bust of him alongside those of the other former Chief Justices.


But good news tonight, Roger B. Tawney is off the hook.


Today, the Supreme Court, of Chief Justice John Roberts, in a decision that might actually have more dire implications than "Dred Scott v Sandford," declared that because of the alchemy of its 19th Century predecessors in deciding that corporations had all the rights of people, any restrictions on how these corporate-beings spend their money on political advertising, are unconstitutional.


In short, the first amendment - free speech for persons - which went into affect in 1791, applies to corporations, which were not recognized as the equivalents of persons until 1886. In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections.


None. They can spend all the money they want. And if they can spend all the money they want - sooner, rather than later - they will implant the legislators of their choice in every office from President to head of the Visiting Nurse Service.


And if senators and congressmen and governors and mayors and councilmen and everyone in between are entirely beholden to the corporations for election and re-election to office soon they will erase whatever checks there might still exist to just slow down the ability of corporations to decide the laws.


It is almost literally true that any political science fiction nightmare you can now dream up, no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, it is now legal. Because the people who can make it legal, can now be entirely bought and sold, no actual citizens required in the campaign-fund-raising process.



And the entirely bought and sold politicians, can change any laws. And any legal defense you can structure now, can be undone by the politicians who will be bought and sold into office this November, or two years from now.


And any legal defense which honest politicians can somehow wedge up against them this November, or two years from now, can be undone by the next even larger set of politicians who will be bought and sold into office in 2014, or 2016, or 2018.


Mentioning Lincoln's supposed ruminations about arresting Roger B. Tawney, he didn't say the original of this, but what the hell:


Right now, you can prostitute all of the politicians some of the time, and prostitute some of the politicians all the time, but you cannot prostitute all the politicians all the time. Thanks to Chief Justice Roberts this will change. Unless this mortal blow is somehow undone, within ten years, every politician in this country will be a prostitute.


And now let's contemplate what that perfectly symmetrical, money-driven world might look like. Be prepared, first, for laws criminalizing or at least neutering unions. In today's Court Decision, they are the weaker of the non-human sisters unfettered by the Court. So, like in ancient Rome or medieval England, they will necessarily be strangled by the stronger sibling, the corporations, so they pose no further threat to the Corporations' total control of our political system.


Be prepared, then, for the reduction of taxes for the wealth, and for the corporations, and the elimination of the social safety nets for everybody else, because money spent on the poor means less money left for the corporations.


Be prepared, then, for wars sold as the "new products" which Andy Card once described them as, year-after-year, as if they were new Fox Reality Shows, because Military Industrial Complex Corporations are still corporations. Be prepared, then, for the ban on same-sex marriage, on abortion, on evolution, on separation of church and state. The most politically agitated group of citizens left are the evangelicals, throw them some red meat to feed their holier-than-thou rationalizations, and they won't care what else you do to this corporate nation.


Be prepared, then, for racial and religious profiling, because you've got to blame somebody for all the reductions in domestic spending and civil liberties, just to make sure the agitators against the United Corporate States of America are kept unheard.


Be prepared for those poor dumb manipulated bastards, the Tea Partiers, to have a glorious few years as the front men as the corporations that bankroll them slowly unroll their total control of our political system. And then be prepared to watch them be banished, maybe outlawed, when a few of the brighter ones suddenly realize that the corporations have made them the Judas Goats of American Freedom.



And be prepared, then, for the bank reforms that President Obama has just this day vowed to enable, to be rolled back by his successor purchased by the banks, with the money President Bush gave them his successor, presumably President Palin, because if you need a friendly face of fascism, you might as well get one that can wink, and if you need a tool of whichever large industries buy her first, you might as well get somebody who lives up to that word "tool."


Be prepared for the little changes, too. If there are any small towns left to take-over, Wal-Mart can now soften them up with carpet advertising for their Wal-Mart town council candidates, brought to you by Wal-Mart.


Be prepared for the Richard Mellon Scaifes to drop such inefficiencies as vanity newspapers and simply buy and install their own city governments in the Pittsburghs. Be prepared for the personally wealthy men like John Kerry to become the paupers of the Senate, or the ones like Mike Bloomberg not even surviving the primary against Halliburton's choice for Mayor of New York City.


Be prepared for the end of what you're watching now. I don't just mean me, or this program, or this network. I mean all the independent news organizations, and the propagandists like Fox for that matter, because Fox inflames people against the state, and after today's ruling, the corporations will only need a few more years of inflaming people, before the message suddenly shifts to "everything's great."


Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don't even realize it: today, John Roberts just cut their throats too. So, with critics silenced or bought off, and even the town assessor who lives next door to you elected to office with campaign funds 99.9 percent drawn from corporate coffers - what are you going to do about it? The Internet!


The Internet? Ask them about the Internet in China. Kiss net neutrality goodbye. Kiss whatever right to privacy you think you currently have, goodbye. And anyway, what are you going to complain about, if you don't even know it happened? In the new world unveiled this morning by John Roberts, who stops Rupert Murdoch from buying the Associated Press?


This decision, which in mythology would rank somewhere between "The Bottomless Pit" and "The Opening Of Pandora's Box," got next to no coverage in the right-wing media today, almost nothing in the middle, and a lot less than necessary on the left.


The right wing won't even tell their constituents that they are being sold into bondage alongside the rest of us. And why should they? For them, the start of this will be wonderful.


The Republicans, Conservatives, Joe Liebermans, and Tea Partiers are in the front aisle at the political prostitution store. They are specially discounted old favorites for their Corporate Masters. Like the first years of irreversible climate change, for the conservatives the previously cold winter will grow delightfully warm. Only later will it be hot. Then unbearable. Then flames.



And the conservatives will burn with the rest of us. And they'll never know it happened. So, what are you going to do about it? Turn to free speech advocates? These were the free speech advocates! The lawyer for that Humunculous who filed this suit, Dave Bossie, is Floyd Abrams.


Floyd Abrams, who has spent his life defending American freedoms, especially freedom of speech. Apparently this life was spent this way in order to guarantee that when it really counted, he could help the corporations destroy free speech.


His argument, translated from self-satisfied legal jargon, is that as a function of the First Amendment, you must allow for the raping and pillaging of the First Amendment, by people who can buy the First Amendment.


He will go down in the history books as the Quisling of freedom of speech in this country. That is if the corporations who now buy the school boards which decide which history books get printed, approve. If there are still history books. So, what are you going to do about it?


Russ Feingold told me today there might yet be ways to work around this, to restrict corporate governance, and how corporations make and spend their money. I pointed out that any such legislation, even if it somehow sneaked past the last U.S. Senate not funded by a generous gift from the Chubb Group would eventually wind up in front of a Supreme Court, and whether or not John Roberts is still at its head would be irrelevant.


The next nine men and women on the Supreme Court will get there not because of their judgement nor even their politics. They will get there because they were appointed by purchased presidents and confirmed by purchased Senators.


This is what John Roberts did today. This is a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little actual Democracy is left in this Democracy. It is government of the people by the corporations for the corporations. It is the Dark Ages. It is our Dred Scott. I would suggest a revolution but a revolution against the corporations? The corporations that make all the guns and the bullets?


Maybe it won't be this bad. Maybe the corporations legally defined as human beings, but without the pesky occasional human attributes of conscience and compassion maybe when handed the only keys to the electoral machine, they will simply not re-design America in their own corporate image.


But let me leave you with this final question: After today who's going to stop them?


FreeSpeechforPeople.org kickoff video