The Supreme Court decision to remove limits on corporate spending in political elections has me reeling from the sheer scope of its implications. I’m not interested today in the constitutional justification for this move; today I’m simply trying to figure out what’s coming down the pike. Those furtive Capitol Hill townhouse parties for the purpose of lobbyist bundling will soon be beside the point. Corporations won’t have to push their employees into making coordinated political contributions any longer. They’ll simply be able to write checks for overwhelming pro-candidate or anti-candidate advertising campaigns, infomercials or even movies and let the candidates know who signed on the dotted line. This decision won’t simply overwhelm the typical individual person’s ability to contribute meaningfully to a campaign; for good or ill it will also weaken political parties, which until now were able to contribute relatively hefty sums to a candidate’s campaign. Contributions from political parties will soon look relatively meager.
How do we citizens not drown in the immensity of all those corporate dollars? For J. Clifford, the key is for the American people to stop being stupid and lazy, to uncover for themselves the sources of information about media campaigns and candidates:
The essential problem we face is that we, as a nation, are too damned stupid to distinguish a snake oil salesman from a physician. We can’t tell the difference between a genuine, issue-driven non-profit and a corporate shill. We’re too lazy as well – too lazy to do the research necessary to discover which advertisements come from profiteers, and which advertisements speak from honest principles.
But what is it that makes Americans so stupid? Stupid as an adjective used to refer to someone who was confounded, rendered senseless, put in a stupor. Part of what makes Americans stupid is a lack of practice (in and out of school) in research and critical analysis. But part of what confounds us and renders us senseless is that necessary information is made insensible or outright unavailable to us. You can’t tell whether someone is a physician or a a snake oil salesman if there’s no ingredient list for the medicines you’re given or no registry for practitioners. You can’t tell the difference between a sincere non-profit and a corporate astroturf campaign if you can’t research an organization’s funders or review the information behind the claims made in that organization’s press releases.
There’s a lot you can’t know about your government even if you want to know, and there’s a lot that your government does to make information hard to uncover. Did you know, for example, that if you search for congressional bills using the THOMAS system, your search results are rendered useless after just a few minutes? Did you know that if you want to browse through a list of bills before either the House or Senate, you have to click through two different layers of obscure links in the THOMAS system, neither of which says a word about lists of bills? Did you know that it is impossible to search for campaign expenses in the Federal Election Commission database? Did you know that the Senate has exempted itself from requirements that it file campaign finance reports electronically, which means that information on certain contributions to and expenditures by Senators is only available by tediously poring through PDF file after PDF file after PDF file and personally retyping the results by hand? Did you know the IRS’ disclosure reporting system for non-electoral political organizations similarly limit contribution and expenditure disclosure to PDF files, requiring tedious data re-entry for any analysis? Did you know that when the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General finally released a report this week revealing that the FBI had lied and illegally collected phone records for journalists and entire news bureaus of major newspapers in order to find the source of embarrassing leaks, the entire 306 page-long report was released in a PDF format so old that passages of text could neither be searched for within a PDF reader nor indexed by search engines? Do you think this is a coincidence? Why, it’s enough to render the American people stuporous and senseless!
Did you know that the government’s new and ballyhooed “open-government” data.gov public information retrieval system does NOT contain congressional voting records, does not contain information about congressional earmarks, does NOT contain information on senators and representatives or their district assignments or their committee assignments, does NOT contain information about direct campaign contributions, does NOT contain information about soft money spending, does NOT include lobbyist filings, does NOT contain information about the characteristics of congressional districts, does not include information regarding executive orders, does NOT contain information about suspicious activity reports generated without warrants, does NOT contain statistics about the use of other warrantless search and surveillance capabilities? Did you know that thousands of hours of House and Senate video recordings of committee hearings exist online, but that the Congress provides no online index by which these hearings can be searched? Did you know that you actually have to pay money to access public court records in matters of election law? Why, it’s enough to make me downright ignorant!
These are not personal problems of Americans — they’re problems with the way our national government is set up, and they need to change.
Now that the Supreme Court has removed limits on corporate spending in political elections (and treating that as a fait accompli), it is vital that corporate spending in political campaigns is not just documented but itemized per expenditure rather than aggregated, freely available to the American public rather than hidden or placed behind a fee barrier, and legible not just to human eyes willing to scan through grainy page after grainy page but also to text engines like Ixquick and database systems like spreadsheets, statistical packages, sql servers and rss readers. These government databases must also be directly searchable by each and every sort of variable contained in the original documentation. By meeting these standards the American people are provided with the full opportunity to act as informed and informing citizens. A government that fails to make data on corporate political contributions fully documented, itemized, legible and searchable is a government that ensures its citizens remain stupid.
Jim, I agree with you that we need more government transparency. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t even come close to the place you’re talking about in terms of awareness of government and public issues. Many Americans don’t even know who their senators are, who represents them in the House. They don’t take in even the information that’s readily available. Furthermore, many of the activities that are taking place openly in Congress, well documented, aren’t covered one bit by either corporate journalists or independent writers. Lack of awareness can’t all be blamed on government obfuscation.
I agree with you that these structural changes in the ready availability of information are necessary but not sufficient. But that still makes them necessary.
believe it or not, these stupid american citizens, for the most part, believe the guy they vote into office is working for them, he’s going to lower their taxes, he’s going to save that fetus, he’s going to win the war on terror, he’s going to save the economy, he’s going to do it all just like he said he would and they don’t have to do anything but vote and bitch. ignorance and apathy are pandemic and with an unlimited barrage of dollars about to be spent on negative, slanderous and misinforming campaign advertisements, the ignorant and apathetic citizens will be allowed to vote for the corporate candidate of exon/mobil’s choice. don’t expect the goverment to let you know the corporate candidate is exon/mobil’s choice. this supreme court decision should make it perfectly clear, the corporations own the government. lock, stock, and barrel.
i hear ya ramone, but it’s all about “free speech” for corporations now. i can’t see much getting any better politically (and therefore economically, or for foreign and domestic policy either) now that this ruling has passed. Maybe when a quarter of the population is homeless and sleeping on the street, or when 10 – 20 states are effectively bankrupt (and we’re on the way to that now), some kind of revolution will take place overthrowing the corporatocracy. i see an increase in crime on the horizon as a result of stagnant wages, desperation, and the inability of people to cope with what’s coming down the pike (food shortages, floods and droughts, lack of employment, unaffordable healthcare, environmental degradation and the inability of the insurance industry and the government to keep up, etc). Ironic that the corporations have effectively brought back slavery to us, eh? Yeah, we’re all slaves now, and the noose will only tighten every year. How much are we gonna put up with?
Here, check this out (parody, ala the onion or real?):
http://www.predatorylendingassociation.com/
ramone, a little comment on the ruling:
http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia01222010.html
talk about activist judges! will obama get a chance to get rid of one of these right wing supreme court jesters? garcia nailed it with that commentary. he brought up something that is even more worrisome than raping of the first and fourteenth amendments. given the protection of the fifth amendment will make it nearly impossible to hold corporations liable for any wrong doing, regardless of the severity. they are already killing (figuratively) competition, but now they can get away with murder(literally). not that they worried about such trival problems before.
about the predatory lending, that rates right up there with the how to build a better bomb site, or the how to shoot up safely pamphet. got to be a joke, right? please, say it’s a joke.
What a howl of indignation from the politicians at the Supreme Court’s decision to let the executive suite weigh in on the executive branch. I, for one, would like to hear what the corporate bosses have to say about their employees in the halls of Congress.
Let’s remember that back in 1974, Congress watched The Washington Post flick Richard Nixon out of the White House shouting, “Follow the money!” But they were not about to give up selling legislation, regulation, and foreign policy so they created rules for taking the money, legalized this theft of honest services, and called the institutionalized corruption, “Reform.” Now these cockroaches who love to be influenced with money, don’t want their paymasters to talk directly to the public about them, especially at such a sensitive time as before an election. That’s “Too much” influence!
I think that American voters are smart enough to judge the content of a political ad. America needs a new set of people with enough freedom and means to step up to the mike to put these crooks in their place. Yes, the Wall Street gang are greedy enough to hound a politician who thwarts their schemes but they are also arrogant enough to to bring America’s attention to the problem that we have with our government. Do you suppose that they can get away with a deception or wrongdoing with the heat that is going to be on them?
The notion that it is a fine and natural thing for a corporate exec to put a million dollars into a politician’s peronal legal defence trust fund but not to create an ad that extols or vilifies him is ridiculous. The ad, we all get to see, talk about, and judge. The bribe works in the dark.
What we are going to have to do is stop ALL giving – any amount. Yes, even individual giving. It’s just providing an excuse for the bribery. “If individuals, why not groups?” “Why only $2000; why not more?” It’s also a cover for party extortion of government employees and contractors and a beard for PAC money. Which no longer comes in bundles of checks but is given and recorded on-line – who gave, how much, and to whom; and the politician says, “I took no PAC money.”
Let’s just cut our politicians off from the money – cold turkey, and let’s ALL just talk about them.
I am disappointed with this recent decision in ways I can’t fully explain. Courts generally make decisions based on black letter law by applying new fact patterns to the rules. The court also looks at precedent, sometimes, however, courts make decisions based on public policy. This is done to preserve justice when sometimes precedent or black letter law doesn’t allow flexibility. This court, specifically the majority has spat in the face of common sense. The time when a decision should have been made on the grounds of public policy to protect the integrity of this county, we have justices who unfortunately made self interest get in the way of common sense, and now the whole country has to pay for their mistake, what a sad day.
The Supreme Court justices…..right it’s a reinforcement for more bribery. They should all be fired because of having no common sense! …Public Policy to protect the integrity of the Country is lost forever!…..WHAT A BITCH!!!! It’s all about big money and the big money rules the World!