If you are concerned about the collapse of the middle class, you should be concerned about how American campaigns are financed. If you wonder why the United States is the only country in the industrialized world not to have a national health care program, if you're asking why we pay the highest price in the world for prescription drugs, or why we spend more money on the military than the rest of the world combined, you are talking about campaign finance. You are talking about the unbelievable power that big-money interests have over every legislative decision.
An already horrendous situation was made much worse two years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission that multinational corporations have a constitutional right to spend whatever they want to influence election outcomes. A bare 5-4 majority lowered the floodgates on unchecked, unlimited, unaccountable corporate cash in political campaigns. Corporations were equated with people. A century of laws regulating business spending on elections were upended. In one fell swoop, five justices fantasized for corporations a right never conceived by the founders whose preamble to our Constitution begins with the words, "We the people..."
The ruling not only poisoned our political process. It contaminated the legislative process. It cast a permanent chill over all policymaking. Will the merits or the money tip the balance when an issue comes before Congress? What do you think? If the question is on breaking up huge banks, for example, every member of the Senate and the House, in the back of their minds, will ask themselves what the personal price would be for taking on Wall Street. Am I going to be punished? Will a huge amount of money be unleashed in my state? They're going to think twice about how to cast that vote. Not to put too fine a point on it, you will see politicians being adopted by corporations and becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate entities.
We already have seen what kind of damage Citizens United can cause. In the first election after the decision was handed down, corporations in 2010 poured hundreds of millions of dollars into independent organizations not formally affiliated with parties or candidates. About half of the $300 million spent by independent organizations came from undisclosed sources. In 60 of the 75 congressional races in which power changed hands, the unaccountable outside groups backed the winners. They spent freely and overwhelmingly on negative ads. The early phases of this year's elections bear witness to projections that the Citizens United effect will be much worse. Karl Rove has announced plans to raise $240 million. The Koch brothers promise to spend $200 million. It's fair to assume the Chamber of Commerce will spend at least as much. The Super PAC supporting President Obama, Priorities USA Action, aims to play in the same league. Hundreds of millions more will be in play.
It's a virtual certainty that all of this spending will fundamentally distort our democracy, tilting the playing field to favor corporate interests, discouraging new candidates, chilling elected officials and shifting the overall policymaking debate even further in the direction of giant corporate interests and the super-wealthy.
So now we face a choice. Americans can let Citizens United remain the law of the land, or we can have a functioning democracy. We can't have both. We choose democracy. With no reason to think that this court will reconsider its decision, we need a constitutional amendment.
Yes, legislative reforms could mitigate the damage. We should require better disclosure rules. We should make shareholders approve corporations' political spending. We should provide public financing of elections, but entrenched money interests have thwarted that for decades.
But nothing can truly cure the problem unless Citizens United is overturned with a constitutional amendment.
The Saving American Democracy Amendment in the Senate and a companion proposed in the House by Florida Representative Ted Deutch would do just that. The amendment would establish that constitutional rights belong to real people, not for-profit corporations. The amendment would prohibit corporations from making election-related expenditures. It would clarify that Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign spending, overturning the doctrine that election contributions and expenditures constitute First Amendment-protected speech and therefore may be subject only to limited restrictions. And it would affirm that nothing in the amendment limits freedom of press.
It's no easy thing to enact a constitutional amendment, but momentum for an amendment is building. People who have honest differences of opinion understand that there is something profoundly disgusting with what is happening in Washington and that there is something wrong with American democracy when you have a handful of billionaires and businesses putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process. Very few people think that has anything to do with American democracy. The American people desperately want to restore our democracy and return to rule by all of the people, not corporations and the superrich.
Bernie Sanders is a United States Senator from Vermont. Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.
Sign the petition to support Sen. Sanders' Saving American Democracy Amendment.
Follow Sen. Bernie Sanders on Twitter: www.twitter.com/senatorsanders
Nick Penniman and Josh Silver: Stupid Debate Questions
Joe Peyronnin: Here Comes Newt!
Stewart J. Lawrence: Is Mitt Romney's Presidential Campaign About to Go South?
Campaign Finance News - The New York Times
Super PACs Influencing Early Primary Elections More Than Retail ...
It is our Constitutional right to choose to be represented by people who truly share our values, concerns, and experiences -- real people like us. We need to work to elect passionate, honest, and open-minded members from our communities to the highest offices of federal government. In order to do this, we need show our numbers so that we cannot be ignored any more.
I urge those of you who support the rights of all citizens to live in dignity, security, and freedom to contact a few of their Facebook friends, even if they are not registered Massachusetts voters, and ask them to also like my Facebook page by going to http://www.rickschober.com/, and by liking the pages of other independent working-class candidates for public office. With enough support, the mainstream media will have to take notice of the real will of the people.
I refuse to let my children become enslaved by the greedy. We should be frog-walking the banksters and the politicians that passed their laws that the politicians profitted from, the same as the attorney-lobbyists.
How much does your neighbor get if he decides to run?
"An already horrendous situation was made much worse two years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission that multinational corporations have a constitutional right to spend whatever they want to influence election outcomes."
Labor unions should have a constitutional right to spend whatever they want?
Why do you only want corporations banned? And not 'your friends'?
Isn't Kucinich's bill more to the point?
http://kucinich.us/
Sign and share the petition today to support H.J. Res 100. Let us change our campaign financing system so that we can truly claim to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Our Constitutional Amendment, H.J. Res 100 would also prohibit independent expenditures on behalf of or against any candidate to further protect our democratic process from private influence, while safeguarding our First Amendment rights.
Public financing of federal elections is critical to the restoration of our American democracy. How we fund our elections is not an academic argument. Progress on every important issue in American society today - economic, social and political - will not be achieved until we use the vehicle of a Constitutional Amendment to gain public control of the financing of campaigns. We cannot wait. We must declare and enshrine the public interest: Please sign the petition today.
The problems we face right now are too serious to allow our government to keep drifting towards a plutocracy. We must begin NOW the long, difficult process of amending the Constitution. The Constitution is a living, breathing document and it is up to us to claim its power to deal with the threat which Citizens United brings to our government, our nation and our way of life.
Courage,
Dennis J. Kucinich
ANY professional politician who is NOT supporting this amendment….
shall NEVER receive MY vote for election.
PERIOD!
Yes I believe it is THAT important.
Section 1. No Corporation shall: 1) make any financial contribution to the campaign of any person seeking election to the office of President, Vice-President or Congress; 2) make any financial contribution to any organization or committee supporting or opposing any person seeking election to the office of President, Vice-President or Congress; or 3) engage in any “political activity.”
Section 2. No person shall contribute more than $100 to any candidate for President, Vice-President or Congress, or any organization or committee supporting or opposing any person seeking election to such office, in any one calendar year.
Section 3. “Political Activity” shall include: 1) supporting or opposing candidates for election to the office of President, Vice-President or U.S. Congress; 2) supporting or opposing legislation in Congress: or 3) supporting or opposing policies or regulations of the Executive Branch or any of its agencies.
The East India Trading Company was a global corporation in cahoots with the British crown. It functioned as a private state-within-a-state, making its own laws, and having its own military forces and prisons, in British possessions across the world.
In other words, the Founding Fathers were explicitly against the tyranny that results from the alliance of big government with big business. An alliance which inevitably promotes its own special interests against the interests of the general population.
According to Bernie, special interest money does not mean union money.