Saturday marked the second anniversary of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision. This decision allows corporations to use their general treasury funds to pay for political advertisements that expressly call for the defeat or election of a candidate.
The ruling also means corporations can donate large amounts of money--even up to the last day of an election--and it has dramatically increased corporate money's influence in our political process.
By a 5-4 decision, the largely conservative court rejected a 63-year-old ban on use of direct corporate money in federal elections and reversed 20 years of precedent supporting this ban. As dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "The Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense."
It's no surprise then that corporate money has flooded our elections. Super PACs have been formed that can legally raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, and other groups and spend that money on political messages. Between the 2008 and 2010 elections, spending by independent groups, including corporations, increased approximately 130% from $119.9 million to $280 million, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. Almost 80 super PACs spent more than $60 million calling for election or defeat of federal candidates. Keep in mind that Super PACs weren't even formed until the summer of 2010 and it wasn't even a presidential election year.
In fact, OpenSecrets.org reports that just since the GOP presidential primaries have begun, 12 super PACs operated by supporters of a specific presidential candidate have spent more than $22 million on ads and other expenditures.
Corporate money in politics is one of the biggest threats to our democracy. For these reasons, I introduced the Get Corporate Money out of Politics Constitutional Amendment (H. J. RES. 92). The bill reaffirms the importance of a level playing field and authorizes Congress and the States to regulate election contributions of for-profit corporations. While protecting the freedom of the press, the Get Corporate Money out of Politics Amendment clearly states that corporations are not people. They do not vote, they do not serve in office, and they should not be able to buy our elections.
Watch my video announcing the amendment below:
Follow Rep. Keith Ellison on Twitter: www.twitter.com/keithellison
This move to amend the 1st Amendment is flawed because it uses "corporations are evil doers" as its basis.
I understand the argument about big money. But I want to hear what corporations (and the people running them) have to say. I don't want some politician passing a law that is intented to prevent me from hearing that message or any other. I'd rather navigate the slanted and often-times misleading messaging out there than worry that what I'm hearing is only part of the story, the other part having been suppressed. And that's exactly what you are proposing.
Try not watching the ads, silly. Problem over.
He is just a joke, but an arrogant and insulated one.....See http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-240-max-keiser....
1. A pro Citizens United Judge needs to leave the bench (that can take a while).
2. The existing judges against the decision and the new one would have to say the result is worth going against Stare Decisis. Believe it or not, there are times the Supreme Court justices rule against their own opinions or refuse to hear cases that have an existing similar case. The Supreme Court does things a lot by precedent.
Lobbyists infest Washington like locusts in a cornfield.
http://napoleonlive.info/what-i-think/occupy-wall-street-get-the-money-out-of-politics/
One thing they were terrified of was government creating laws that restricted free speech. They made the 1st amendment free speech clause intentionally non-specific. They didn't say it applied to "persons" or "human beings' or "entities" etc - they left that out because they wanted it to be difficult for government to create laws that restricted speech. Period. When you give the government (eg., Keith Ellison) the power to write laws that restrict free expression, whether it be advocacy by corporations (ie., the people who guide the corporation) or by individual humans, you've defined "tyranny" as the founders might have understood it.
The bottom line is, Corporations do not have a vote. People do. The individual "natural person" does. That means that, no matter how much noise corporations or other big-money interests make, the individual voter has the power - if only the voter would use it.
Other organizations represent the will of the members of those organizations, potentially across a wide spectrum of interests. Whereas corps have one interest and one interest only. Profit. If a corp could show a profit blowing up the planet, they'd do it. So their input into any field of interest outside of their own profit making is pointless, i.e. they have no actual inherent interest in the well being of the society they claim to be participating in.
I'll grant you I'd be happy to see all organized money out of politics, but to answer your question, their is a difference.
They actually do. One example: Political stability, whether it be domestically or in other countries they operate in.
Beyond just that example, your demonization of the profit motive ignores the result as seen in regimes (such as the Soviet Union and East European countries prior to 1989) when profits were viewed as mere expressions of the greedy and counter to the interests of the collective. We saw how that ended - in moribund decay.