Fight Back Against Citizens United

On the second anniversary of Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, there’s bad news and good news.

The bad news: we’re seeing the full impact of the ruling, with the creation of PACs --- political action committees -- with innocuous Mom and apple pie-sounding names, like Make Us Great Again and Winning Our Future, funded by unlimited anonymous corporate contributions.

The good news is that the ruling has galvanized a grassroots backlash: if you’re mad as hell and want to join the fight to rid our democracy of toxic big money, there’s an explosion of grassroots opposition for you to plug into today, or whenever you’re ready.

First, a little history. Corporate political contributions have been stirring outrage for more than 100 years, since they helped elect Teddy Roosevelt in 1904. Once elected, the savvy Roosevelt got in front of a movement to outlaw those contributions, resulting in passage of the Tillman Act.

But the corporations didn’t just slink away in defeat; they developed ever more creative ways to skirt the law and influence elections.

In Citizens United, eight Supreme Court justices ruled in 2010 that while corporations couldn’t contribute to individual candidates they could give to political action committees that do not, supposedly, have formal ties to a particular candidate.

In their ruling, the justices took a flawed, too narrow view of the way in which money corrupts politics. First, they said that since the PACs aren’t linked to individual candidates, the contributions couldn’t be used to bribe the candidates, or extract a quid pro quo.

The court ignored the well-known fact that the monster PACs do establish informal but strong ties to individual candidates.

In addition, the court misstates the more insidious way massive corporate cash corrupts our government. As Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig points out, large corporate contributions ensure that only those candidates, regardless of party, who can collect those contributions, and espouse a corporate-friendly political agenda, stand any chance.

This creates a political system that thwarts goals of left and right.

If we don’t reverse Citizens United and confront corporate power, we can expect more corporate bailouts with no questions asked, and fewer consumer, environmental, employee and investor protections. We can expect more tax breaks for the 1 percent and more austerity for the 99 percent.

At WheresOurMoney, my colleague Harvey Rosenfield has proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United that is easily understood and will withstand any legal challenge. You can read more about it here. There’s a great video with background and ideas about fighting Citizens United here.

You can find groups taking a variety of actions against Citizens United across the country here and here.

 

 

 

 

Action / Citizens United / Martin Column - 01/21/2012

The Top 10 Reasons Not to Call Your Senator Now

I’m in beautiful Glenwood Springs, Colorado with wife Stacie and dog Billie in front of the fireplace in the lobby of the historic Hotel Colorado, which Teddy Roosevelt used as his western White House. There’s the Roosevelt Suite on the second floor, leading out to the grand balcony from which he addressed the masses.  Pictures and cartoons of him line the hallways.

I wish our president was more inspired by TR. He tackled the economic powers of his day—the railroads—with tough regulation, using existing antitrust laws to bust them up. Our political leaders don’t have the stomach for tough regulations or antitrust crackdown on too-big-to-fail financial institutions, let alone insisting on accountability for those bankers and politicians whose greed and carelessness actually caused the crash.

There’s wireless Internet, in the lobby of the Hotel Colorado. Barely. It’s so slow that I imagine overworked employees at Google receiving my page request, then sifting through voluminous files to find the page, then ambling back to their desks, where they stuff it into a pneumatic tube to my Macbook.

We’ve been talking to people who are weathering the economic storm. One waitress told us tourists used to line up four-deep at local bars. They’re still at the bars, but they’re not coming in the crowds they used to. Not a biggie for her: She’s third-generation Coloradoan. People here are used to a boom-and-bust economy: There was a silver crash in 1893; nearly a hundred years later, Black Sunday, May 2, 1982, Exxon pulled out and took a big chunk of the state’s economy with it.  She says her people are ranchers and live within their means: They save, pay cash and know how to live lean, when they have to.

The battle over financial reform is hot and heavy in the U.S. Senate. Looks like the best we’re going to get out of this president and Congress is a series of baby steps—as “Baseline Scenario’s” Simon Johnson describes them—that leave the status quo in place. But even these baby steps are better than the alternative: giving the bankers and their lobbyists a complete victory.

Contact your senators. Tell them you’re paying attention to financial reform. You’re keeping track of how they vote. Tell them not to water down financial reform any more. Ask them to support the Merkley-Levin amendment, the Volcker rule and Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives reform plan.

Unless, of course, you believe the following top-ten reasons for apathy, in which case, do nothing, and things will stay exactly as they are now:

One. You like it when banks gouge you on credit card and bank fees.

Two. You think the poor banks have suffered enough.

Three. You believe the banks’ propaganda that new proposals to rein in credit card fees will cost them $5 billion and cause them to extend less credit.

Four. You believe that the Obama administration’s toothless foreclosure prevention program has been a whopping success.

Five. You’re convinced that banks do need to continue the secret high-risk trading that caused disaster for the economy.

Six. You agree with the bailed-out bankers that their bonuses are none of our business.

Seven. You agree with the Federal Reserve that their secret handouts to banks shouldn’t be any of your business.

Eight. You agree with the bankers that they can protect consumers’ interests just fine without interference from any regulators.

Nine. You agree that the bailout really did work well for Main Street as well as Wall Street.

Ten. You’re convinced Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual did nothing wrong when they cooked their books to hide their bad loans from investors and the public.

Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column - 05/20/2010

Just Who is Us, Mr. President?

President Obama went down to the playground where Wall Street bullies have been beating up kids and taking their lunch money. He suggested that the bullies should help create rules that would stop them from beating up kids.

How lame is that?

One blogger compared Obama’s timid performance to FDR’s attack on Wall Street for its rabid opposition to the New Deal. But I kept thinking about the other Roosevelt, the one who took on the railroad trusts.

While Teddy Roosevelt was far from perfect, he had his moments: “A typical vice of American politics,” he said, “is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.” He could have been talking about Obama.

What we saw on Thursday was a terrible thing: a brilliant and articulate president of the United States unwilling or afraid to tell it like it is.

It’s not the Republican minority who pose the greatest danger to real financial reform. It’s the powerful Wall Street wing of the majority Democrats who don’t want to offend the bankers. Our representatives need to know we want real reform, not just lip service that basically preserves the status quo. Our representatives need to have the courage to support the stronger proposals by Sens. Kaufman, Brown, Shaheen, and Merkley that would do more to actually break up the big banks and put limits on their risky gambling.

Mr. President: Let’s get real. Let’s say out loud that banks and bankers have grown too powerful.

Let’s get real. It’s absolutely not in the banks’ interest to “join us” in supporting reform. By suggesting that as the solution, you abandon your own credibility and avoid the “real issues” of a government corrupted by those bankers’ money.

Stop negotiating with Wall Street. Cop to their massive financial support for your campaign, and those of your colleagues in Congress. And tell Wall Street change is coming whether they like it or not.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 04/23/2010