How Bad Is The Comcast Acquisition Of TimeWarner For Society?

In his 1995 article for Business On A Small Planet, Corporations and the Public Interest, Jonathan Rowe helped put the intent behind the rise of corporations into a perspective that has been lost over the decades. "When I was a law student in Philadelphia," he writes, "I was hired by the owner of a small local radio station to look into the original corporate charters of the Penn Central Railroad (originally the Pennsylvania Railroad). The Penn Central was in the process of ending its passenger service, and the man who hired me wondered if the railroad didn’t have a legal duty of some kind to continue it. What I found truly surprised me. The charter spelled out clearly that the corporation had an obligation to serve the public by providing passenger service. That was the condition for the privilege of operating in the corporate form, and also for the generous grants of land it received from the legislature."

This was true of the early corporations generally. Their charters asserted that they existed first and foremost to serve the public. That was their reason for being.

In fact, the first corporations in the Anglo-American tradition had nothing to do with profits. Much as it might cause free market fundamentalists to squirm, the original corporations were actually regulatory agencies, such as guilds, or local governments such as townships. (In New England, when you drive from one town into another you pass a sign that announces the year in which the town you are entering was "incorporated.")

Later, the British Crown adapted the corporate form to what we would call today a "public-private partnership." The Queen wanted to lay claim to the New World, but such ventures required huge amounts of capital, and were risky in the extreme. To amass the capital, there was a need to insulate investors from responsibility for the undertaking, beyond the amount of their investment. Thus the "joint stock company" was born.

Individual responsibility is one of the bedrock principles of common law. To dilute this principle was an extraordinary step, one that was conceivable only for a mission that presumably served the public good. In other words, there was a direct link between the exemption from individual responsibility for corporate investors (and later officers), and the public good that the corporation was chartered to carry out.

This legal tradition carried over to the American colonies. It gave rise to the corporate charters that the state legislatures bestowed one by one, and only for specific undertakings. (Think of Amtrak as a rough modern-day equivalent, including the subsidy.) This was the form of corporation the framers of the Constitution had experienced. It was totally a state matter, and nothing for the new federal Congress to worry about.

Predictably, there was a lot of patronage and corruption in the granting of charters, which in effect were private monopolies. There also were boondoggles of the first order, the railroad land grants being a prime example.

By the middle years of the 19th century, the nation’s commerce was bursting at the seams. What historians now call "Jacksonian Democracy" gave political expression to these impulses-- the resentment of special privilege and the explosive growth of commerce. Corporations became a prime target of political attack; not to curtail or abolish them, or to reinforce the original bargain, but rather to extend the privileges of incorporation to everyone.

Up close, this Jacksonian Democracy could look a lot like an S&L convention in the ’80s. One after another, the state legislatures enacted "free incorporation laws," which democratized the corporate form. No longer did legislatures have to charter corporations by special act. No longer were corporations limited to specific activities that served the public. Now anyone could form one, to do anything they wished. Market ideology said that simply seeking gain would, under the dispensation of the Invisible Hand, serve the public good.

Thus US Steel and Standard Oil and the like were born on a wave of what might be called today "liberal permissiveness." Several decades later, the Supreme Court completed the coup by declaring, with little basis in law or history, that the Fourteenth Amendment applied equally to corporations, making them legal "persons" with all the Constitutional rights and privileges of human beings.

The important point is that the free incorporation laws tore up the original bargain that was the basis of the corporate form. Corporations no longer had to serve the public. They could do anything they wanted. But they still enjoyed the extraordinary exemption from individual responsibility that they had obtained historically only because they would serve the public.

More recently, writing for Alternet, Thom Hartmann, an expert on the depredations of corporations-run-amuck, reminds us that doing business is a privilege, not a right: "In order to do business you, or you and a group of participants, must petition a Secretary of State for a business license."

If your petition is granted, you will be given to set of privileges ranging from the ability to deduct from your income taxes the costs of your meals (if you discuss business), to a whole variety of special tax breaks, incentives, and immunities from prosecution for things that, had you done them as an individual, you might otherwise go to prison for.

When we set up this country more than 200 years ago, we established some of these privileges, and associated with them some pretty heavy responsibilities.

Up until the 1890s, a corporation couldn’t last more than 40 years in any state-- which prevented them from being used as a tool to accumulate massive and multigenerational wealth. A corporation had to behave in the public interest, and when they weren’t, thousands of them every year were given the corporate death penalty, their assets dissolved and their stockholders losing everything (but nothing more than) they had invested.

Over the years, as the Supreme Court has given more and more power to wealthy individuals and corporations, these responsibilities receded so far into the background that in one state, Delaware, your articles of incorporation can be a single sentence stating that you intend to “Do whatever is legal in the state of Delaware.” Which is probably why more than half of all the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange are Delaware corporations.

The reason we originally allowed businesses to do business in this country was that some benefit would come to society from it. But since the era of New Deal economics was replaced by Reaganomics, the principal rationalization we use to give limitations of liability and privileges to corporations and their masters has changed from, “What is best for society?” to, “How can somebody best get rich quick?”

This is a perversion of the entire concept of why nations allowed people and corporations to do business, and why we facilitate that activity by providing at public expense: stable currencies and a stable banking system; predictable and fair court systems; transportation, electrical, water, septic, and communications infrastructure; a criminal justice system to enforce the rules of the game of business; and a workforce educated at the public expense and protected with a public pension called Social Security. We do all these things so the business will provide some good to the public while, in the meantime, enriching its owners.

But a new business model has emerged in the United States. Companies still get the privileges, but they no longer have to conduct themselves in ways that inure a net positive to the public.

On Friday, Ken examined the TimeWarner/Comcast merger from the perspective of an intended victim of the deal: "My first thought," he wrote, "on hearing of Comcast's acquisition Time Warner Cable (which as far as I can tell is a more accurate description than a 'merger' of the country's no. 1 and no. 2 cable-TV companies) was: They're not gonna let that happen, are they? By 'they,' I guess I meant the FCC, the FTC, the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division-- whoever would have to sign off on a corporate conglomeration that would turn two pretty powerful players in the cable industry into one behemoth. It's just not possible, is it? My second thought was: Well, they spent a lot of time and billable lawyer hours negotiating the deal, so they must think they can somehow slip it past the regulators?" Ken forgot to mention that the cable companies are determined to charge $200/month by 2020 and the merger will make that even easier.

As Ken pointed out, he's an East Coast victim of TimeWarner Cable; I'm a West Coast victim of TimeWarner Cable. I'm also a former divisional president of TimeWarner. In its heyday, employees had every reason in the world to be proud of the company, it's commitment to serving its employees, its customers and the public. The father of the company, Steve Ross, who died in 1992, was considered a visionary. He was also a sharp businessman who made his shareholders gigantic returns on their investments and built a gigantic company with an eye on sustainability. And for the people who worked for him, he had a very clear message. We would prosper so long as we took the interests of our shareholders, our employees, our artists, our customers and the society around us into account. I heard about the concept of stakeholders from Steve. And we took that seriously. His vision ended on January 10, 2000 when Jerry Levin and Dick Parsons sold the company to huckster and financial predator Steve Case of AOL. An aggressive gnat swallowed a whale and the stakeholders were suddenly the enemy. Within 15 minutes of meeting Steve Case for the first time I decided to retire at the ripe old age of 52. He had a vision too-- screwing the shareholders, the employees, the artists, the customers and society. Gone were the days that TimeWarner was the biggest contributor to the Democratic Party and to progressive initiatives in the United States. TimeWarner would never again be a force for good-- just a force for ripping off everyone it came in contact with. Last week a supervisor suggested to one of my neighbors that she dump her cable system and get DirectTV.

Friday, writing for AP, Ryan Nakashima explained the consumer outrage around the Comcast acquisition of TimeWarner Cable. "Comcast and Time Warner Cable regularly rank at the bottom of the pay TV industry when it comes to customer satisfaction. So it didn't take long for customers to vent frustrations online over high prices, spotty service and fears of a monopoly after Comcast announced its $45 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable… Consumers [and not just Ken] weren't buying the assertion of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts that the combination, which will have 30 million TV and Internet subscribers, would be 'pro-consumer and pro-competitive.'"

Using a contorted logic, the two companies are expected to argue to anti-trust regulators that the fact they don't directly compete against each other in many parts of America shows the deal won't reduce competition and therefore should be approved.

But it is that lack of overlap, and lack of choice, which is at the root of customer frustration, according America Customer Satisfaction Index managing director David VanAmburg. Cable companies that purposely don't compete against each other to provide fast Internet or reliable TV service can get away with not fully meeting customer needs in markets where they dominate.

"It's almost subconsciously built into their business model that they don't have to worry so much you're going to leave for a competitor," said VanAmburg. "It's definitely a big factor."

Most people think the Justice Department shouldn't allow the merger. Most people are right-- but that won't matter one jot. Michael Noll at cnet.com seemed more fatalistic about the ability to stop it and is hoping the Feds at least force a spin-off of the content business. Like everyone who doesn't get a fat paycheck from one of the two companies, he asserts that the claim that the merger will benefit consumers is "nonsense." That's got to be a contender for 2014's understatement of the year. "One perspective on this is the distinction between conduit and content. Verizon's optical fiber or Comcast's coaxial cable is the conduit over which video, Internet, and telephone services are carried to our homes. The television programs we watch are the video content.

At the local level, there is conduit competition between the cable company (Comcast or Time Warner Cable) and the telephone company (Verizon or AT&T). But there's no competition between Comcast and Time Warner Cable or between Verizon and AT&T. These supersize firms have carved up the United States, with each sharing the provision of the conduit with the other-- what is called a duopoly. Government believes duopoly is better than monopoly.

The problem is that the cable companies own content-- the telephone companies do not. For example, Comcast owns NBC, Universal Pictures, and cable networks; Time Warner Cable owns CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers. An acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast would create a gigantic content business with incredible control over content pricing, packaging, and programming. And this supercontent is what the telephone companies would be forced to purchase to resell to their customers.

Decades ago the cable television companies were allowed to own both the cable conduit and also content providers. Government allowed this as an incentive to the fledgling cable companies. But today cable companies are far from fledgling, and past polices need to be revisited in light of today's realities.

Another perspective on this is the use of the Internet to go directly to video content providers, thereby bypassing the video provided by the cable company. This is a threat to the lucrative video business of the cable company. One way to counter this threat is to own as many content providers as possible and stipulate and control access to the content. This proposed acquisition would create a supersize content provider with tremendous market domination and control.

Monopoly might be evil and duopoly a little better. But the combination of conduit and content on the scale of this proposed acquisition would truly be evil squared. Decades ago, movie theaters (the conduit) and movie producers (the content) had to be separated and broken apart. It is time again for government to separate conduit from content and break up the power of the cable companies. If government allows this acquisition, as a condition the content business must be spun off.

In Willard's world, says Amy Davidson, women always seem to be missing where you expect them and to turn up where you don't

[Click to enlarge.]

"Romney was fifty-six when he became governor, with decades spent in business during which he could have made the sort of contacts that would have turned him into a resource for others looking for qualified women."

-- Amy Davidson, in her newyorker.com blogpost
today, "Mitt's Binders and the Missing Women"

by Ken

It could be that Republican presidential candidate Willard Inc. isn't really clueless but merely plays clueless in his, you know, presidential campaign.

Poor Willard is encountering concentrated hanging driblets of grief for that peculiar debate reference to "bindersful of women" (that's how I would spell "bindersful," anyway -- as the plural of a unit of measurement for an unknown but presumably sizable quantity of women). I think this is unfair, when he made it so clear that he thinks of bindersful of women a good thing -- in the same way that he considers bindersful of anything a good thing.

It's like the unfortunate misunderstanding of would be Sen. Todd Akin over that "legitimate rape" business, when it was clear that he didn't mean there's such a thing as "legal" rape but was only trying to distinguish real rapes -- you know, the occasional "forcible" kind that can be, well, legitimately classified as an honest-to-gosh rape, and not to be confused with all those other phony-baloney-type rapes, which is when those damned uppity-bitch wimmins lead good mens on and then afterwards cry rape.

Is that really so hard to understand?

Sort of the same thing with Willard's binders. Remember, Willard is a person, or corporate entity, that believes not so much that corproations should have the rights of people but that people, if they're really deserving, might be allowed the rigths of corporations. Now we have this wonderful binder image to flesh out the image our boy carries around in his head. If you can put it in a binder, he seems to be telling us, it's real, it's legitimate.

From such understanding as I've been able to piece together of the view from inside Willard's brain, this strikes me as eminently sensible. However, The New Yorker's Amy Davidson came away with an interestingly less forgiving take on where and how Willard sees them wimmins, in a blogpost today called "Mitt's Binders and the Missing Women."

One of the stories that Romney's campaign has told to humanize him is about how, at Bain Capital, he once shut down the office to lead a search for the daughter of a partner after she had gone missing in New York. When he talked, on Tuesday night, about how he had "the chance to pull together a cabinet" as the governor of Massachusetts and wanted to add women, the imagery was similar, and the targets also maddeningly elusive: "all the applicants seemed to be men," he explained. It was as if the women were runaways, deliberately hiding themselves:

And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, how come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men? They said, well, these are the people that have the qualifications. And I said, well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?

And so off they set. Romney did not say if his staff members were all men, but they became determined pursuers of mystery women -- "we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet"; "I brought us whole binders full of -- of women." "Binders full of women" is a phrase that provoked instant fascination, because it is so strange, and, as a prop and a concept, so vivid. One saw a table at which middle-aged men sat slowly leafing through pages of plastic sleeves with photographs of women tucked inside. Or, more concretely, trapped between covers, battling with metal rings.

One got the sense of Mitt Romney coming from a place where women were generally in the other room, waiting to be invited in only when the moment -- or the visibility of the job -- called for it. Romney was fifty-six when he became governor, with decades spent in business during which he could have made the sort of contacts that would have turned him into a resource for others looking for qualified women. The Boston Globe pointed out that Romney "did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s." Where were the binders then? The Globe added that even today, only four of Bain's forty-nine partners are women. This is a firm he built and a culture he controlled.

Amy adds this parenthetical note about Willard & Co.'s binders and the search for the missing wimmins.

The story, according to the Boston Phoenix, was also not quite true. An outside group put together the binder. Romney didn't put women in the most important cabinet jobs. And he had fewer and fewer working for him as time went on.

Oops!

Amy also points out that when Willard actually talked, or tried to talk, about the subject of the question, which was about the inequality of pay for comparable jobs between men and women, he went straight to talking about women wanting to leave the office early to make dinner. Amy agrees with the candidate that employers should help women by making schedules more flexible, but notes:

it is striking that, given an opening to talk about women in the workforce, Romney described people who either had to be dragged on to the stage or would run off of it as soon as they could. They start as a rumor and end up as an echo.

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How much clearer does the Supreme Court have to tell us that Citizens United is done, decided, here to stay -- and STFU, why dontcha?

"The movement for a constitutional amendment is spreading like a Montana prairie fire," says Montana's Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, with Republican Lt. Gov. John Bolinger looking on. A constitutional amendment, eh? That's the ticket. And the day the 38th state ratifies the congressionally approved amendment, it's hot-fudge sundaes for everyone, on me! With nuts and sprinkles -- the works!

by Ken

I think a lot of people aren't getting the message of the Supreme Court's decision yesterday on the Montana Supreme Court's attempt to limit the reach of the High Court's Citizens United decision permitting pretty much unchecked flow of cash into election campaigns.

Citizens United is a lot of things: a brazen blow for the dismantling of democracy, obviously, and a stinking cesspool of ignorance, extremist ideological mayhem, and judicial thuggery (if not outright misconduct) -- and some of those things I want to come back and talk about another time. They don't really matter this second, because Citizens United is one other thing, as the Court told us yesterday in slapping down the Montana Supreme Court in its attempt to allow the state's century-plus ban on corporate campaign contributions to remain in force. The message was: It's over, people. Decided, finished, not subject to further discussion, and if we here on the High Court have to keep issuing more decisions to get the point across, well, we're not going anywhere.

Instead, I'm hearing people all over the place arguing! As if the Court had left any room for argument. But then, I can't imagine why anyone expected any different outcome to what I described back in February as "a Citizens United sequel," wondering why Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer appeared so eager to give their colleagues a second crack at the issue of corporate campaign cash. (I asked, "Do Justices Ruth and Steve know something about their Supreme Court thug-colleagues that we don't?")

Looking back, it seems less likely that any justices really thought the Court was going to backtrack on Citizens United. I'm guessing the interest in taking the case may have come from the other way side. The right-wing thug-justices needed to do so, becauseotherwise the Montana Supreme Court's decision affirming the ban on corporate election giving would have stood. It seems unarguably clear that the Fab Five never had any intention of letting that happen.

It seems to me that Rachel Weiner got the basic point more or less right in her morning post for washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog: "Supreme Court’s Montana decision strengthens Citizens United."

"The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law," the majority wrote. "There can be no serious doubt that it does."

No arguments were heard; it was a summary reversal.

"To the extent that there was any doubt from the original Citizens United decision broadly applies to state and local laws, that doubt is now gone," said Marc Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer. "To whatever extent that door was open a crack, that door is now closed."

A 1912 Montana law barred direct corporate contributions to political parties and candidates -- a response to the election interference of "copper kings." Mark Twain wrote of one such mining giant in 1907, Sen. William Clark (D), "He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell."

The state supreme court upheld that ban late last year in spite of Citizens United, saying Montana’s history of "rough contests for political and economic domination" gave the state a "unique and compelling interests" in limiting corporate influence on elections.

In fact, the "dismissal" went beyond "summary" to virtually derisive. Let's continue on in the ruling right after the Court declares that "there can be no serious doubt" that "the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law." Says the opinion: "Montana’s arguments in support of the judgment below either were already rejected in Citizens United, or fail to meaningfully distinguish that case."

And this is the crux of it, as a crackerjack-constitutionalist colleague explained today. What the Montana Supreme Court did, he suggests, was to assume that Citizens United wasn't an absolute declaration that under no circumstances could it ever be imagined that some restriction on corporate cash dispersal might pass constitutional muster; it was just establishing that the bar was going to be set really, really, really high. And the idea wasn't entirely implausible. As Rachel Weiner reminds us, in the Citizens United ruling, by none other than our old friend "Slow Anthony" Kennedy, the impaired justice --

argued that independent campaign expenditures by corporations "do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." [Justice] Ginsberg argued that the Montana case was an opportunity to reconsider "in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance."

"Today's ruling," she writes, "shows that the five justices who supported the original ruling have not budged."

True enough, but as my crackerjack constitutionalist points out, it says something more. It says that no, there aren't any circumstances under which any restriction on corporate "free speech," which is to say disbursing campaign cash, could conceivably pass constitutional muster, at least in the currently controlling judgment of the Fab Five.

CC draws a fascinating analogy: with the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling turning thumbs down on segregation in the schools, arguing that "separate but equal" isn't "equal." On its face the ruling, historic as it was, didn't dismantle the entire embedded system of segregation in American public life, and proponents of segregation knew it. No, it required a series of follow-up, clean-up decisions to establish beyond any doubt that the fairly absolute position the segregationists feared the Court was setting out was in fact now the law of the land. (CC points out that a good portion of the Brown opinion did in fact deal specifically with education.)

The 2012 Court majority, CC argues, sees its mission with equal righteousness and equal absoluteness, and it doesn't matter that they're wrong. What they say, goes.

Those are the facts on the ground, and it's occurred to most observers of the contemporary Supreme Court that the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. One can never be sure about such things, and while I wish Justice Ginsburg many more years of health and service, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that she will be the next sitting justice to depart, which means that we will need a sane appointee just to maintain the present right-wing balance. Does anyone expect President Romney to come up with a remotely sane appointee?

OKAY, SO THERE'S A LOT OF UNHAPPINESS, BUT . . .

TPM's Benjy Sarlin, in his post today, "Justice Breyer: Montana Case Shows Citizens United Was Wrong," in addition to quoting from Justice Breyer's dissent, quotes a couple of interested congressional Democrats

In a statement condemning the Montana ruling, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), called for a four-part strategy "to fight for disclosure and shine a bright light on secret donations; to amend the Constitution to overturn the crushing Citizens United ruling; to reform the system and empower small donors and the grassroots; and to elect reform-minded candidates and leaders to office."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who joined with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in backing Montana’s anti-corruption law, said the ruling should spur Congress to pass the DISCLOSE Act, which would require greater transparency for big money donors. It was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate in 2010.

"The conservative justices' desire to double down in the face of this and keep the corporate money flowing represents a sad day in the history of the Court," Whitehouse said in a statement. "It appears to be yet another demonstration of the politicization of the Court by the right-wing justices."

Now here's a statement issued today by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison:

Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs Slam Roberts Court Decision on Montana Campaign Finance Law
Say Citizens United is Rapidly Eroding Foundation of Our Democracy

Today the Supreme Court went against the will of 75 percent of the American people to overturn an effective 100-year-old state precedent that had protected Montana elections from corporate money in politics. This ruling compounds the damage to our democracy already done by the Citizens United v. FEC decision, which has allowed millions of untraceable dollars to overwhelm our federal, state, and local elections.

The precedent set by that decision and reaffirmed today allows outside groups to trump popular state and federal laws that keep elections in the hands of the people. Montana's campaign finance law kept campaigning costs low for candidates and ensured that voters had the most powerful voice in politics. The average Senate race in Montana costs only $17,000.

We've seen this same story all over the country, and we know what happens next. Wealthy donors, corporations and special interests will now have unchecked influence over Montana's political process. Citizens United is rapidly eroding the foundation of our democracy. The decision announced today is a squandered opportunity to repair that damage.

Public opinion continues to favor overturning Citizens United. What happens next in Montana will provide a powerful example of how political conversation changes when corporations are allowed to sway campaigns. The Congressional Progressive Caucus will continue to fight for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and put democracy back in the hands of the American people.

I don't dismiss what Leader Pelosi has to say. Certainly pressure has to be put on contribution disclosure, because we're learning just how much the Richie Riches don't like having their "free speech" made public, and we also know that among the Supreme Court's thug-justices, Nino Scalia apparently has no problem with requiring disclosure. Enforcement is going to be tough, though. When it comes to election law, corporations have a lot of practice at tapdancing around oversight that doesn't have a lot of will (or weapons) behind it.

Similarly, I think it's important that there be a lot of talk about the issue. Maybe somebody will figure out how to make Americans give a damn about what's being done to their elections by the megadonors clogging up the system with their cash. I'm not optimistic, but as I said, maybe somebody can figure out how to message this so people finally get it.

Which brings us to the matter mentioned by Pelosi and emphasized by Senator Whitehouse and the CPC: overturning the concept of corporate personhood via constitutional amendment. Is there anyone here who believes there's even the slightest possibility of a constitutional amendment? I doubt very strongly, given the evolution of our political system and weighing that against the stringent requirements for adopting one, that we're ever going to have another constitutional amendment?

Don't get me arong: I have no question about the justice of the cause. Let's turn the floor over to Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. Here's the statement he issued today:

I am extremely disappointed but not surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Montana court ruling that would have allowed limits on campaign contributions.

The U.S. Supreme Court's absurd 5-4 ruling two years ago in Citizens United was a major blow to American democratic traditions. Sadly, despite all of the evidence that Americans see every day, the court continues to believe that its decision makes sense.

In recent weeks, multi-billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have made it clear that, as a result of the Citizens United decision, they intend to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy this election for candidates who support the super-wealthy. This is not democracy. This is plutocracy. And that is why we must overturn Citizens United if we are serious about maintaining the foundations of American democracy.

I intend to work as hard as I can for a constitutional amendment to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision.

In his famous speech at Gettysburg during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln talked about America as a country ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.' Today, as a result of the Supreme Court's refusal to reconsider its decision in Citizens United, we are rapidly moving toward a nation of the super-rich, by the super-rich and for the super-rich. That is not what America is supposed to be about. This Supreme Court decision must be overturned.

Here's the text of the proposed amendment Senator Sanders is supporting:

SECTION 1.
The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

SECTION 2.
Such corporate and other private entities established under law are subject to regulation by the people through the legislative process so long as such regulations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the States and do not limit the freedom of the press.

SECTION 3.
Such corporate and other private entities shall be prohibited from making contributions or expenditures in any election of any candidate for public office or the vote upon any ballot measure submitted to the people.

SECTION 4.
Congress and the States shall have the power to regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own spending, and to authorize the establishment of political committees to receive, spend, and publicly disclose the sources of those contributions and expenditures.

There is, by the way, one more point I want to make about this constitutional matter of corporate personhood, which I learned from Jeffrey Toobin's May 21 [update: sorry about the typo!] New Yorker piece, "Money Unlimited," which I've also been meaning to write about lo these many weeks. How many people know how the Supreme Court's assumption of corporate personhood came about? It's kind of a funny story, if you have a macabre sense of humor.

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Right-Wing Paradise

Over the weekend I was disgruntled that the media-- particularly Fox, where Paul Babeu is a regular contributor ("border expert")-- chose to ignore my favorite news story, the outing of Republican hypocrite, Sheriff Paul Babeu. Babeu, an anti-immigrant fanatic who went from being the headmaster of a troubled-- now shuttered-- boarding school in Massachusetts to a right-wing political icon in Pinal County, Arizona, is running for Congress. Or was. The story was made for sensationalistic TV and, had Babeu not been a Republican, it is all Fox would have broadcast all day Saturday and all day Sunday. (As Andy Borowitz pointed at on Twitter, not even a nuclear attack by North Korea could have pulled that network away from its Whitney Houston funeral coverage.)

Of course, thinking about it more closely, it isn't inconsequential to realize that the corporate media gets its walking orders from interests that not only don't want to see Babeu destroyed the way they made sure Anthony Weiner was destroyed but that don't want anything of real importance that might spark critical thought, covered on their networks.

Late last week Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America-- yes, he's someone you can think of as a literary Green Day-- published an essay, Livin' In A Bankster's Paradise, in Esquire, that should have attracted massive media coverage. But it's precisely what our corporate media avoids like the plague. Holding banksters accountable is not something corporate media is pushing... or mentioning. Pierce absolutely loathes "the notion that the best way to deal with things is to 'look forward, not back'."

This is especially true as regards the undeniable fact that, over the course of a decade, a bunch of cheats, thieves, and suited mountebanks stole most of the national economy and then wrecked whatever was left of it. But what's most extraordinary about the whole thing is that, after they swindled their swindles and heisted their heists, and got paid off by the rest of us for having looted our naional economy, they all kept doing the same things they were doing before. These included extravagant bonuses and, of course, continued crimes of capital that ought to be capital crimes.

This is extraordinary. All this Citigroup fraud and thuggery took place after the events of the great meltdown had taken place. This whisteblower's co-workers, instead of checking for fraud or making reports about underwriting defects to the FHA as required, argued with her over the soundness of the loans, she said. Employees who acted as "gatekeepers" applied "what they describe as 'brute force' to pressure Citi's quality control managers" into downplaying defects, according to the government's complaint.

Some colleagues had pay incentives tied to reducing the number of reported problems, and they spent hours trying to get her to relax her warnings, including those about the most basic deficiencies, Hunt said. "They started beating us up over the quality-control reports," she said. Last year, she said, she became convinced she was being asked to look the other way on serious flaws. That's when she decided to become a whistle-blower.

Last year. The more I think about it, the more I believe that we, as a society, gave up on the pillory too soon. And $158.3 million is tip money for CitiGroup.

This is what happens when real punishment for real crimes is considered to be too inconvenient, or too difficult, or too traumatic for the nation, which is made up completely of candyglass children incapable of existing with the knowledge that their financial lords of the universe are really no different from stick-up kids in a bodega. This is what happens when nobody goes to jail. This is what happens today.

And it's what happens when real journalism-- an actual 4th estate-- is tossed away and replaced with the corporate media, feeding us a steady diet of... Whitney Houston funerals and whatever else it deals appropriate to take our minds off the crime spree the corporations that own them are engaged in or complicit with. Joshua Holland addressed this phenomenon in the introduction to his enlightening book, The 15 Biggest Lies About The Economy as a way of explaining why Americans seem so complacent "in the face of the tectonic shift in their economic fortunes." He dissects the highly influential message machine built by all the tremendous plutocratic money behind the so-called “New Conservative Movement” which works so tirelessly to "obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself."

The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let’s return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that’s more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that-- a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there’s a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn’t reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We’ve all grown accustomed to conservatives’ conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call “intellectual infrastructure” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

That's why media consumers will never forget who Anthony Weiner is and will never even hear of Paul Babeu. And it's why the banksters will continue living-- along with the rest of us-- in a Bankster's Paradise.




UPDATE: More-On Media

Afer I finished writing the post above, a friend spent me, coincidentally, a pst by John Cory from RSN called The Ugly Circus, which I'd like to recommend. He starts my mentioning a question from Barbra Sreisand asking where the hell the fourth estate is when we need them most. "Well Ms Streisand," he replies, "they ran away from home and joined the ugly circus of pundit shows and cable news, with big floppy shoes and red rubber-ball noses and lots of money in the trunks of their clown cars.

The fact that news has become a product for sale is not new, nor is the fact that media has embraced celebrity over content and corporate sponsors over substance, and mindless entertainment over education and illumination. Edward R. Murrow warned of these things in his RTNDA Convention speech in 1958. And now, 54 years later, it echoes with immediacy as though written yesterday.

Television news is an ugly circus of innuendo, gossip and tabloid sensationalism. Whether ABC or CBS or NBC, the news is read by celebrity personalities between self-promotional appearances on late-night talk shows.

The nightly news is anything but news. Seven minutes of shallowness, two car chases, the latest celebrity divorce/trial/book/or murder-mystery followed by a feel good human-interest story. Information, elucidation and perspective are sacrificed for pharmaceutical elixirs of youth and sex, insurance lizards, and the latest in-dash tracking system that monitors and synchs up with your Blackberry/iPhone with a voice that guides your every waking movement and thought. Everything you don't need and can't possibly afford but must have.

Cable news is nothing more than nightly WWE cage matches between hot-air blowhards and giggling snark. Yes, I'm talking liberal and conservative programming.

I don't want to be entertained. I read books or go to the movies for that. And, I might add, they do a much better job than anything on cable news. Why sometimes, movies and books even make me think.

FOX News Channel is pure unadulterated propaganda for the far right. I don't care whether it's morning, noon or night, that's what I see and hear. And that is certainly their right, as it is my right to dislike their product and not watch.

...Where is the liberal host that offers an in-depth examination as to why Americans pay $7800 per person for healthcare with the same or worse results of other OECD countries that pay $2800-$4800 per person per year? Are Americans being ripped off? Where does all that money go? Why do Americans pay double or three times the amount other countries pay for the same pills and procedures?

Surely there are real experts for a panel to discuss these issues, and I don't mean talking-head partisans or corporate shills. How about a panel consisting of Maggie Mahaar, author of Money-Driven Medicine, Jonathon Cohn, author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis, and others who would deal with why America is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not offer its citizens universal healthcare. And how much could we save through preventative care?

Does being born in the wealthiest country in the world simply mean: Welcome to the world. You're on your own now so goodbye and good luck! Sickness is a profit center with potentially high profit margins. Do your part and shop well!

Of course this would require a network and sponsors willing to give us, the viewing public, credit for being interested in learning and understanding the issues. That would empower us and make us-- informed.

That's bad for corporate-owned pundits, bad for corporate-owned networks and their corporate sponsors, and even worse for corporate-owned politicians. An informed public is just plain bad all the way around for our would-be masters and their court jesters.

People say all the time that we are an Attention Deficit Disorder society. The media says that they only give the public what they want. None of that is true. The corporate media simply wants to think they have trained us to that end for their profit.

Murrow said: "One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of these is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles..."

Do yourself a favor... continue reading here.

India Commits A Big No-No-- Holds Elites Responsible For Something; West Virginia, On The Other Hand...

Personal responsibility is a cornerstone of conservative thinking, right? Well, yes-- for anyone not in the club. If you're part of the 1% the laws and mores of society dictate that you will almost never be held responsible for anything you do. That's just the way it works. And we're asked to suck it up. While demonstrators were marching in Moscow and New York City yesterday, protesting the one percenters stealing democracy in Russia and the U.S., India was actually doing something extraordinary: holding elites to account.

Six directors of a private hospital in Calcutta have appeared in court over a fire on Friday which killed 90 people.

The six face charges of culpable homicide and were refused bail. Officials have suggested the hospital did not meet safety regulations.

Most of the dead were patients trapped in the building, with many suffocated by smoke.

The fire is thought to have started in the hospital basement, where flammable materials were stored.

...Authorities had warned the hospital over inadequate safety standards in the hospital's basement in September, but no action was taken, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told AP.

The license of the six-storey hospital, considered one of Calcutta's most prestigious, had been cancelled, Ms Banerjee said.

She has said those responsible will receive the harshest punishment.

The hospital also did not have adequate firefighting equipment, despite being ordered to upgrade six months ago, Calcutta Joint Police Commissioner Damyani Sen told AP.

Here's what the David Uhlman, Bush's chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2007, wrote in the NY Times yesterday about a similar case to the Calcutta one-- in West Virginia. Although in West Virginia there will be no justice, no personal responsibility whatsoever.

Early on April 5, 2010, in the heart of West Virginia coal country, a huge explosion killed 29 workers at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine. Later that day, President Obama directed Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis to conduct “the most thorough and comprehensive investigation possible” and to work with the Justice Department to investigate any criminal violations.

On Tuesday, the Labor Department issued a 972-page report on the calamity-- the nation’s worst mining disaster in 40 years. It concluded that Massey’s “unlawful policies and practices” were the “root cause of this tragedy.” It identified over 300 violations of the Mine Safety and Health Act, including nine flagrant violations that contributed to the explosion.

The scathing findings probably came as no surprise in West Virginia, where Massey had a well-earned reputation for putting miners at risk, breaking unions and polluting the environment.

However, what jumped off the pages for me, as a former federal prosecutor, was the revelation that Massey had kept two sets of books at the mine: one for internal use, which recorded hazards, and a second for Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors, which did not. In addition, Massey routinely gave its facilities advance notice of inspections, which is a crime under federal law, and intimidated its workers so that they would not report safety and health violations.

Based on the Labor Department’s investigation, the Justice Department could have criminally prosecuted Massey under the Mine Safety and Health Act for the violations that caused the explosion. Prosecutors also could have charged the company with conspiracy and obstruction of justice for the ways it thwarted regulation.

Instead, on the same day the devastating report was released, the Justice Department announced that it would not criminally prosecute Massey. The news release issued by the United States attorney misleadingly described its nonprosecution agreement with Massey’s new owners as “the largest ever criminal resolution in a mining investigation.”

Let’s be clear: this is not a criminal resolution. Massey will not be charged with any crimes and will not plead guilty before a federal judge. Nor will there be a sentencing hearing where Massey apologizes to the families of the victims and is punished for its crimes.

The deal with Massey continues a disturbing trend whereby corporations can avoid criminal prosecution by entering deferred prosecution or nonprosecution agreements. Often the terms of these agreements are no better than what could have been achieved in a criminal case; worse, they create the appearance that justice can be bought.

Moreover, there is less to this settlement than meets the eye. The $209 million settlement requires payment of $35 million in previously assessed administrative penalties, but that sum includes just $10.8 million for the Upper Big Branch Mine tragedy. The remaining $174 million is likely to be tax deductible, including $80 million for investments in safety and infrastructure at Massey mines and an additional $48 million to establish a mine health and safety trust fund.

Even the most laudable aspect of the deal-- the agreement to pay $46.5 million in restitution to the families of the victims-- is illusory. Massey already had agreed to pay $16.5 million to settle lawsuits brought by the families. The remaining $30 million will be paid into a fund for future settlements, which effectively caps the amount the families can recover. And, to add insult to injury, the Justice Department agreed that Massey would admit no wrongdoing.

So why did the Justice Department respond so timidly?

Perhaps it felt hamstrung by the weakness of the criminal provisions of the Mine Safety and Health Act, which are misdemeanors and cover only willful violations of health and safety standards. It is long past time for Congress to update our mine safety laws so that violations can be prosecuted as felonies, particularly in cases where miners are killed.

Maybe the Justice Department wanted to reward the new owners, who appear to have made a greater commitment to safety. It may also have felt it would be enough to criminally prosecute Massey officials, which it can and should do if there is sufficient evidence.

We should not underestimate, however, the difficulty of prosecuting high-ranking officials in large corporations. This case may be an exception, but senior corporate officers rarely have sufficient personal involvement to be charged with crimes. To reach the boardroom, where policies are formed that can lead to tragedy, we must be willing to hold corporations criminally responsible.

During my 17 years at the Justice Department, we prosecuted corporations criminally in hundreds of cases that, while serious, did not involve the tragic loss of life at the Upper Big Branch Mine. The Justice Department did not live up to its name in agreeing not to prosecute Massey for its crimes. We can only hope that when it comes to the other unfathomable disaster that took place in April 2010, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, justice will be better served.

Bernie Sanders, like many Americans without the voice he has, is aware that it's time-- past time-- to start holding corporations responsible for their crimes and time to treat them the way the Founding Fathers demanded they be treated, as servants of the people, not masters over the people. Bernie's just introduced Saving American Democracy Amendment would make clear that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional rights as people and that corporations may be regulated by Congress and state legislatures.

Overturning Democracy... With Lots Of Cash

Yes, Mitt Romney is clueless

Below is an essay about Norman Solomon I found on the Campaign Watch Facebook page. Virtually every problem facing America today can be traced back to the sell-out of our democracy to plutocratic, corporate and fascist interests-- virtually identical-- since the forces of democracy ostensibly won, at least on the battlefield, World War II. I want to emphasize that when Blue America "vets" our candidates we want to make sure they stand for the same values and principles behind this statement. You can be sure that when you donate to Norman Solomon's campaign-- or to the campaigns of any of the Blue America-backed candidates-- you are voting for real campaign finance reform, the kind that will wrest our government out of the hands of, as George Bush put it, the evil doers... except, the real evil doers.

Big Corporate Campaign Contributions

A major problem that has crippled democracy in the U.S. is the unfair advantage that big-money corporations and individuals have in influencing political campaigns through large contributions to elected officials and candidates, as well as through their spending billions of dollars each year to lobby Congress and federal agencies. These special interests use their considerable wealth to influence the direction and scope of legislation and government regulations, at the expense of the rights and welfare of the rest of us.

Norman Solomon supports legislative efforts, such as government matching funds and public financing, to correct the problem of disproportionate funding of campaigns, reduce special interest influence on elections, and level the playing field in electoral politics. Norman Solomon supports legislative efforts to reduce the reliance of candidates for office on campaign cash and free them to spend time with constituents to learn about issues that matter to them. When the selected candidates enter office, they can consider legislation on the merits, without worrying about whether they are pleasing large campaign contributors and lobbyists. Norman Solomon wants a government that is of, by, and for the people-- not bought and paid for by big corporate campaign contributions.

Corporate Personhood

A central problem in campaign financing is that corporations are considered persons, and political spending is considered speech under the First Amendment. In January 2010, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which asserted that the Constitution bars Congress from limiting corporations to spend money, viewed as free speech, in independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. In the year after the ruling, corporations increased their role in our elections, and corporations and their CEOs have used non-profit groups to run multi-million dollar ad campaigns to influence elections and public policy without full disclosure of their financial interests. Norman Solomon stands with roughly 80% of Americans, including Democrats, Republicans and independents, who oppose to the Citizens United ruling.

Norman Solomon endorses the movement to reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. We need to have a national conversation about what to do about the problem of corporations having too much influence in our politics and policies.

The doctrine of corporate personhood has allowed corporations to enjoy other constitutional rights that were intended solely for human beings. This allows corporations to evade democratic control of their actions. Based on the doctrine of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has:

• prohibited routine inspections of corporate property without a warrant or prior permission, even to ensure public health and safety;

• struck down state laws requiring companies to disclose product origins, thus preventing us from knowing what’s in our food;

• prohibited citizens wanting to defend their local businesses and community from encroachment by corporate chain stores from enacting progressive taxes on chains;

• struck down state laws restricting corporate spending on ballot initiatives and referenda, enabling corporations to block citizen action.

Norman Solomon believes this form of corporate personhood corrupts our Constitution and must be corrected by amending the Constitution.

Norman Solomon agrees with the dissent of Justice Stevens in the Citizen United case that:

…The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.

In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.

Norman Solomon is committed to take those measures “designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”

Election Integrity

Free elections are a cornerstone of the American compact. Norman Solomon supports a national, uniform set of voting rules to make it easier to vote and easier to access ballots. Norman Solomon supports voter registration procedures which will create greater voter turnout, particularly among young people, such as registration on election day and convenient voter registration places like the local mall or supermarket. Norman Solomon supports alternative voting methods such as early voting and absentee voting.

Norman Solomon supports voting systems based on paper ballots that allow the voters to mark their own ballots and provide a permanent, visible record of every vote cast. Vote counting must be transparent and accountable to ensure every citizen’s right to vote. Norman Solomon supports ending the practice of contracting private corporations to carry out fundamental election functions, such as the maintenance of voter lists. In addition, Norman Solomon supports exit polling, complete sharing of data, statistical analysis and auditing to verify election results. Norman Solomon would support an initiative to make election day a national holiday, thereby increasing voter participation.

In addition, Norman Solomon supports organizations that track the influence of money on elections and public policy and make this information accessible to the public. As the influence of money becomes more transparent, Americans can become more informed about what their elected officials are doing and more involved in the process. As a consequence, government can become more accountable and responsive to the non-wealthy citizens of this country.

Judicial Accountability

Norman Solomon supports complete financial disclosure, disclosure of gifts, and recusal in the instances of actual and apparent conflict of interest for all federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices. There needs to be more transparency from all federal judges when their actions come under responsible criticism. Norman Solomon supports proposals to require justices to explain their decisions not to recuse themselves when parties file disqualification motions.

Agree? Please consider making a contribution to Norman's campaign-- or to the campaign of any of the Blue America candidates-- here on the 2012 congressional page. They've all enthusiastically agreed to co-sponsor John Larson's bill to take corrupt cash out of the driver's seat of politics.

Money Makes The World Go Round... And In An Information Society, It Can Also Define Truth, Facts Be Damned

So does it all just come down to a messaging problem? Obama has been out-messaged by the corporations whose interests he wasn't serving. A Bloomberg poll done earlier in the week shows that voters getting ready to head to the polls and reject Obama and his vision of governance, are loaded to the brim with carefully-manipulated misinformation. By overwhelming margins, two to one, in fact, voters think taxes have risen, the economy has shrunk, and billions have been lost on Obama-initiated bailouts. None of that is true but that is the information likely to determine the direction the country will be headed after Tuesday (backward-- and, knowing the cowardice of the Democrats-- at full speed).

The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past four quarters.

Most voters don’t believe it.

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered.

“The public view of the economy is at odds with the facts, and the blame has to go to the Democrats,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the nationwide survey. “It does not matter much if you make change, if you do not communicate change.”

The Obama administration has cut taxes-- largely for the middle class-- by $240 billion since taking office Jan. 20, 2009. A program aimed at families earning less than $150,000 that was contained in the stimulus package lowered the burden for 95 percent of working Americans by $116 billion, or about $400 per year for individuals and $800 for married couples. Other measures include breaks for college education, moderate- income families and the unemployed and incentives to promote renewable energy.

Still, the poll shows the message hasn’t gotten through to Americans, especially middle-income voters. By 52 percent to 19 percent, likely voters say federal income taxes have gone up for the middle class in the past two years.

As Robert Reich pointed out Wednesday, $4.2 billion can buy someone, oh, like say a self-serving bunch of billionaires and corporations and foreign powers with their own agendas-- a lot of conventional wisdom.

The number of dollars spent isn’t the issue; it’s the lopsidedness of where the dollars come from. Even if the total were only $1000, democracy would be endangered if $980 came from large corporations and wealthy individuals. The trend is clear and worrisome: The great bulk of campaign money is coming from a narrower and narrower circle of moneyed interests.

Anyone who doubts the corrupting effect has not been paying attention. Our elected representatives have been acutely sensitive to the needs of Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, and the executives of big pharma, big oil, and the largest health insurance companies. This is not because these individuals and interests are particularly worthy or specially deserving. It is because they are effectively bribing elected officials with their donations. Such donations are not made out of charitable impulse. They are calculated investments no less carefully considered than investments in particular shares of stock. They are shares in our democracy.

Why $4.2 billion and not ten times that amount? Because the high-rolling political investors don’t need to spend a dollar more in order to exert overwhelming influence.

This figure, by the way, leaves out the tens of billions of dollars dedicated to lobbying, lawyering, and public relations-- all of which deliver specific legislative outcomes the campaign money fuels. The economy of Washington, D.C. depends on this gigantic flow of funds (supporting the polished facades of refurbished hotels, fancy restaurants, trendy bistros, office complexes of glass and polished wood, well-appointed condos, hotels with marble-floored lobbies and thick rugs, restaurants serving $75 steaks and offering $400 magnums of vintage French wine.) Washington’s seven suburban counties are listed by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s twenty with the highest per-capital incomes.

In case anyone hadn't quite gotten the message, Reich followed up yesterday with an even more pointed warning: Halliburton and the Upcoming Election. And he's as clear as Paul Revere was: "Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America-- such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company." Thanks, teabaggers, for buying it:

Does This Narrow New Supreme Court Ruling Serve The Best Interests Of Anyone At All-- Other Than Republican Politicians?

Whizzer

If you listen to too much Tweety on TV-- why he's on MSNBC instead of Fox is beyond me-- you may have the idea that no one is upset about the ruling by the 5 corporate justices on the Supreme Court that corporations-- including foreign corporations-- can buy every American election they want and Congress has no say in the matter. But that's hardly the case. Yesterday we looked at President Obama's weekly speech to the nation, in which he focused on the clear and present dangers Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy have imposed on American democracy, to the cheers of Republicans and the clinking of champagne toasts by banksters, lobbyists and corporate management. Even if you watched the video yesterday, it is worth reading the transcript:

One of the reasons I ran for President was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington. And the result was a national agenda too often skewed in favor of those with the power to tilt the tables.

In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests. On my first day in office, we closed the revolving door between lobbying firms and the government so that no one in my administration would make decisions based on the interests of former or future employers. We barred gifts from federal lobbyists to executive branch officials. We imposed tough restrictions to prevent funds for our recovery from lining the pockets of the well-connected, instead of creating jobs for Americans. And for the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House-- the people’s house.

We’ve been making steady progress. But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists-- and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. By a 5-4 vote, the Court overturned more than a century of law-- including a bipartisan campaign finance law written by Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold that had barred corporations from using their financial clout to directly interfere with elections by running advertisements for or against candidates in the crucial closing weeks.

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way-– or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.
All of us, regardless of party, should be worried that it will be that much harder to get fair, common-sense financial reforms, or close unwarranted tax loopholes that reward corporations from sheltering their income or shipping American jobs off-shore.

It will make it more difficult to pass commonsense laws to promote energy independence because even foreign entities would be allowed to mix in our elections.

It would give the health insurance industry even more leverage to fend off reforms that would protect patients.
We don’t need to give any more voice to the powerful interests that already drown out the voices of everyday Americans.

And we don’t intend to. When this ruling came down, I instructed my administration to get to work immediately with Members of Congress willing to fight for the American people to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision. We have begun that work, and it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done.

A hundred years ago, one of the great Republican Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, fought to limit special interest spending and influence over American political campaigns and warned of the impact of unbridled, corporate spending. His message rings as true as ever today, in this age of mass communications, when the decks are too often stacked against ordinary Americans. And as long as I’m your President, I’ll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you.

Dave Johnson, over at Seeing The Forest isn't a politician; he's a businessman, but he sees the dangers as clearly as the president-- and worries that the Supreme Court has basically made Adam Smith's sanctified Marketplace just about irrelevant. The decision, he says, "shifts the business playing field away from competing in the marketplace with products and services, to purchasing government/legal/reguatory advantages, subsidies and monopolies." Now only size matters.

It is just more efficient to beat your competitors by buying legislation than it is by competing in the marketplace. When you can purchase $1 billion in tax breaks, subsidies, mandates, contracts, whatever by spending a few million on candidates/influence, etc. it just makes more sense to do so. The return on investment is just so much higher than building factories, spending on research, paying employees, and other tedious, time-consuming, capital-intensive work.

For some time companies have recognized that the rewards from lobbying outperform the rewards from competing in the marketplace, and this ruling just amplifies that. This 2006 New York Times article, Google Joins the Lobbying Herd, discussed how Google felt it had “no choice but to get into the arena” to start “spreading its lobbying dollars” around to politicians and quotes Lauren Maddox, a lobbyist for Google, saying the "policy process is an extension of the market battlefield." This supreme court ruling just clinches this shift away from markets.

The game is necessarily going to be to use the superior resources of larger companies to purchase barriers that block smaller, innovative companies from getting anywhere, and force them to be absorbed.

Companies that think they can opt out of this and continue to compete with innovation, superior products and services are just mistaken. Any company that doesn't see this change will find that their competitors are working to buy legislation/rulemaking against them, and won't last long.

It's going to take a little while for this to sink in, but it is inevitable now.

Unlike President Obama and, like the rest of us, Dave Johnson, Byron White has no stake in this fight. That's because the former All-American football halfback-- who played for the Colorado Buffaloes in college and then the Pittsburgh Pirates (Steelers) and the Detroit Lions, acquiring the nicknamed Whizzer-- passed away in 2002. Oh, and he served on the Supreme Court from 1962 to 1993. Many remember him as an anti-Choice defender of the unborn and a dissenter in the Roe v Wade decision. But he also dissented in the 1982 decision in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, in which he was very clear that corporate communications and individual freedom of speech were very different cups of tea indeed:

The governmental interest in regulating corporate political communications, especially those relating to electoral matters, also raises considerations which differ significantly from those governing the regulation of individual speech. Corporations are artificial entities created by law for the purpose of furthering certain economic goals. In order to facilitate the achievement of such ends, special rules relating to such matters as limited liability, perpetual life, and the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of assets are normally applied to them. States have provided corporations with such attributes in order to increase their economic viability and thus strengthen the economy generally. It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process. Although Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), provides support for the position that the desire to equalize the financial resources available to candidates does not justify the limitation upon the expression of support which a restriction upon individual contributions entails, 9 the interest of Massachusetts and the many other States which have restricted corporate political activity is quite different. It is not one of equalizing the resources of opposing candidates or opposing positions, but rather of preventing institutions which have been permitted to amass wealth as a result of special advantages extended by the State for certain economic purposes from using that wealth to acquire an unfair advantage in the political process, especially where, as here, the issue involved has no material connection with the business of the corporation. The State need not permit its own creation to consume it. Massachusetts could [435 U.S. 765, 810] permissibly conclude that not to impose limits upon the political activities of corporations would have placed it in a position of departing from neutrality and indirectly assisting the propagation of corporate views because of the advantages its laws give to the corporate acquisition of funds to finance such activities. Such expenditures may be viewed as seriously threatening the role of the First Amendment as a guarantor of a free marketplace of ideas. Ordinarily, the expenditure of funds to promote political causes may be assumed to bear some relation to the fervency with which they are held. Corporate political expression, however, is not only divorced from the convictions of individual corporate shareholders, but also, because of the ease with which corporations are permitted to accumulate capital, bears no relation to the conviction with which the ideas expressed are held by the communicator. ...

The Court assumes that the interest in preventing the use of corporate resources in furtherance of views which are irrelevant to the corporate business and with which some shareholders may disagree is a compelling one, but concludes that the Massachusetts statute is nevertheless invalid because the State has failed to adopt the means best suited, in its opinion, for achieving this end. Ante, at 792-795. It proposes that the aggrieved shareholder assert his interest in preventing the expenditure of funds for nonbusiness causes he finds unconscionable through the channels provided by "corporate democracy" and purports to be mystified as to "why the dissenting shareholder's wishes are entitled to such greater solicitude in this context than in many others where equally important and controversial corporate decisions are made by management or by a predetermined percentage of the shareholders." Ante, at 794, and n. 34. It should be obvious that the alternative means upon the adequacy of which the majority is willing to predicate a constitutional adjudication is no more able to satisfy the State's interest than a ruling in Street and Abood leaving aggrieved employees to the remedies provided by union democracy would have satisfied the demands of the First Amendment. The interest which the State wishes to protect here is identical to that which the Court has previously held to be protected by [435 U.S. 765, 816] the First Amendment: the right to adhere to one's own beliefs and to refuse to support the dissemination of the personal and political views of others, regardless of how large a majority they may compose. In most contexts, of course, the views of the dissenting shareholder have little, if any, First Amendment significance. By purchasing interests in corporations shareholders accept the fact that corporations are going to make decisions concerning matters such as advertising integrally related to their business operations according to the procedures set forth in their charters and bylaws. Otherwise, corporations could not function. First Amendment concerns of stockholders are directly implicated, however, when a corporation chooses to use its privileged status to finance ideological crusades which are unconnected with the corporate business or property and which some shareholders might not wish to support. Once again, we are provided no explanation whatsoever by the Court as to why the State's interest is of less constitutional weight than that of corporations to participate financially in the electoral process and as to why the balance between two First Amendment interests should be struck by this Court.

Will Sonia Sotomayor Surprise Everyone And Turn Out To Be The Best Justice Since William Douglas Or Felix Frankfurter?

Ken and I were both cheering for the confirmation of Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, despite the fact that we both looked her over and saw a moderate rather than the liberal we wished we could fight for. But maybe this "moderate" is just what the court needs. I'm pointing that out today because the first thing she's brought up on the bench could be the most important thing anyone has said from that bench-- important in a good way-- in decades! As Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, she "made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law."

In his film Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore, correctly, and effectively, points out that the corporate managers are the new American aristocracy in what CitiBank calls our "plutonomy." He doesn't really go into the source of the power that corporations have over democracy: the corporate personhood that Thom Hatmann has been railing against on the radio and in his book, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

Sonia Sotomayor is smart enough to know that's pretty close to the root of all political evil and she's... on the case. When the 5 corporate shills who make up the Supreme Court majority started discussing overturning McCain-Feingold based on how "corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled," Sotomayor brought up the biggest fear the right has, bigger than race, bigger than choice, bigger than... anything.

Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong-- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

After a confirmation process that revealed little of her legal philosophy, the remark offered an early hint of the direction Justice Sotomayor might want to take the court.

"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center.

"I don't want to draw too much from one comment," says Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But it "doesn't give me a lot of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of rights that it should be afforded."

For centuries, corporations have been considered beings apart from their human owners, yet sharing with them some attributes, such as the right to make contracts and own property. Originally, corporations were a relatively rare form of organization. The government granted charters to corporations, delineating their specific functions. Their powers were presumed limited to those their charter spelled out.

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in an 1819 case. "It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it."
But as the Industrial Revolution took hold, corporations proliferated and views of their functions began to evolve.

In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, the court reporter quoted Chief Justice Morrison Waite telling attorneys to skip arguments over whether the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause applied to corporations, because "we are all of opinion that it does."

That seemingly off-hand comment reflected an "impulse to shield business activity from certain government regulation," says David Millon, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.

"A positive way to put it is that the economy is booming, American production is leading the world and the courts want to promote that," Mr. Millon says. Less charitably, "it's all about protecting corporate wealth" from taxes, regulations or other legislative initiatives.

Subsequent opinions expanded corporate rights. In 1928, the court struck down a Pennsylvania tax on transportation corporations because individual taxicab drivers were exempt. Corporations get "the same protection of equal laws that natural persons" have, Justice Pierce Butler wrote.

...Justice Sotomayor may have found a like mind in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights," Justice Ginsburg said, evoking the Declaration of Independence.

How far Justice Sotomayor pursues the theme could become clearer when the campaign-finance decision is delivered, probably by year's end.

It's going to take a lot more than Sotomayor and Ginsburg to turn that ship around and prospects, short of a real revolution, are dim. You think the forces of the status quo are oinking up a storm now-- over health care? The astroturfing operations on anything like this would make the Nuremberg rallies look like elementary school civics classes!