There's nothing original about them. They've all been with us a good long while. But there are three big lies wrapped up in the Citizens United decision. Take them away, and there's nothing left. They are:
(1) Money is speech.
(2) Corporations are people.
(3) Lies (1) and (2) are not the inventions of conservative judicial activism.
I wrote an earlier diary that was critical of Glenn Greenwald's take on the decision, but the basic thing wrong with Greenwald's approach was that it flat out ignored the fundamental mendacity involved-not to mention what was going on behind the mendacity, what virtually everyone knows this decision is really about: brute power, not speech. Indeed, brute power that has the inherent ability to stiffle speech.
On Friday, it didn't take more than a minute or so for guest, Monica Youn--who directs the money in politics project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice--to set the record straight:
BILL MOYERS: Now, comedians can be funny and journalists can be facetious, but in very plain language, who won the Supreme Court decision?
MONICA YOUN: Well, corporations clearly won this decision. I mean, essentially, what the court does is it awards monopoly power over the First Amendment to corporations. You can think about the last couple of elections as, you know, the slow rise of the grassroots. And as a result, the political parties, for the first time, had an incentive to start reaching out to small donors, to start cultivating grassroots organizing networks. And you saw what happened in the last election. Now, what the Supreme Court has done here is really a power play. It takes power away from the grassroots, and it puts it squarely back in the hands of corporate special interests.
It threatens to make these grassroots networks irrelevant. To say, you know, it's no longer going to be worthwhile for, you know, parties to look for fundraising opportunities, $20, $100, even $2,400 at a time, if they can just have multimillion dollar support directly from corporate treasuries.
The problem with Greenwald's type of analysis is that it takes the First Amendment argument seriously, it accepts the first two big lies identified above, rather than realizing that this decision is a reductio ad absurdum refutation of them. In contrast, Youn simply looks at what's happening right in front of us. It's a classic case of "Who are going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"
The classic response that the solution to bad speech is more speech utterly misses the central point here: One direct effect of this decision will be the prevention of speech. Because money is not speech, and the taking of money from wealthy corporations will inevitably mean that other voices will be drowned out. As Youn points out here, not just voters' voices, but even small donors, just starting to be heard, will be increasingly ignored. Why bother with them? They don't have anything the parties or the politicians really need or want.
There is nothing ideological about this. It is simply a realist view of what the Citizens United decision is all about. Saying, "The solution to bad speech is more speech" in the face of this reality-now, that's ideological. I have nothing against ideology per se. In fact, I generally think it's a good thing. For the most part, it's impossible to make much sense of the world without ideology in some form or other. But when ideology blinds you to what's right in front of your eyes, when ideology becomes, in essence, nothing more than an elaborated lie, then ideology becomes the enemy of truth. And that's what so-called "First Amendment absolutism" becomes when it accepts the two big lies that "money is speech" and "corporations are people".
A bit later on, Youn gave a very clear description of what the Citizens United decision actually meant:
MONICA YOUN: But the problem with that is when you are talking about money being equivalent to speech. And corporations being equivalent to people. It's as if you're saying, "Okay, I'm going to put an ordinary person in a boxing ring against a Sherman tank and that's a fair fight. May the best fighter win." You're talking about artificial constructs that were built to accumulate money. That's the purpose of a corporation. There's nothing wrong with that. As long as that economic inequality does not directly translate into political equality. There's a reason our Constitution was set up the way it was. And there's a reason that you can't buy an election. Because we didn't intend for those who have the most money just to be able to get everything in the system the way they want it, every time.
Beyond the fact that corporate money will tend to crush the importance of small donors on the front end, there are at least two other easy-to-see ways that limitless corporate spending will diminish speech. The first is intimidation, the second is the monopolistic buying up of limited opportunities for commercial speech. Youn discussed intimidation in a passage that occurred between the two quote above, along with the other guest, Zephyr Teachout:
BILL MOYERS: But if I understand the decision, it doesn't enable the chairman of Exxon Mobil, or the chairman of GE to write a check to Zephyr Teachout, who's running for Congress from Vermont. It says she can spend as much money as they want to, in the, right up to the election. Right? Advocating that you be elected or defeated?
ZEPHYR TEACHOUT: Yeah. Or, what happens more likely is candidates getting threatened and encouraged. It's a much subtler form of corruption. Where your mind shifts to say, "Well, do I really want to take on that financial transaction tax if I know that Goldman Sachs is going to do an ad campaign?"
MONICA YOUN: And I think that the threat is going to be even more of an important weapon than direct, you know, "Vote for so and so who we like."
BILL MOYERS: How do you mean?
MONICA YOUN: I think there's going to be a threat of corporate funded attack ads against elected officials who dare to stand up to corporate interests. Corporations have basically been handed a weapon. And when you walk into a negotiation, and you know that one person is armed and is able to use a weapon against you, they don't have to take out that weapon. They don't have to even brandish it. You know that they have it. And every elected official who goes up against an agenda on regulatory reform, on climate change, on health care, will know that the corporation who, you know, he or she is opposing, can fund a, you know, a $100 million ad campaign to take him or her out.
The underlying point here is simple: Offering a bribe is a free speech. Making a threat is free speech. So is blackmailing someone. But none of them is protected free speech, because they involve criminal activity-activity that itself serves to stifle free speech. Treating unlimited corporate funding as simply free speech and nothing more not only buys the underlying lie that money is speech, it ignores the fact that even just the potential of unlimited corporate funding is a de facto blurring of the lines, it is inherently an offering of a bribe and a making of a threat. It could even be blackmail. These are not mere possibilities that might occur. They are inherent in the very nature of the vastly unequal power being given to corporations.
And, of course, that gets back to the "corporations are people" lie, which has been hovering in the background throughout most of this post. The two lies are intimately connected, of course, since for-profit corporations exist for only one purpose: to make money. That's why they have so much money in the first place. It's the very essence of their existence. Citizenship--the defining essence of the person as political actor--is entirely foreign to the essence of the corporation.
By way of contrast, non-profit corporations have be formed to serve a public beneficial purpose--such as furthering childhood education, running an museum, promoting medical research into a specific kind of disease, etc. This doesn't really constitute citizenship, either, but at least it takes a step in that direction, and by doing so, it makes all the more obvious what for-profit corporations lack in the way of genuine personhood as political actors.
What happens? Homer Simpson says, "D'oh!" That's what happens. John is a little less blunt, a little more articulate:
I've had some experience with trying to buy ad space during elections, and as the days creep closer to one, the ad space becomes more expensive, for the most part. At least in my experience.
My question is what happens when Big Corp decides to buy up the last month, or two or three, of available ad space on all major media outlets for a particular election? That would have an incredible impact on either an election or like we have in California, a proposition. We saw what happened when the Mormons bought up a ton of air time in California to oppose Prop. 8
We need regulations in politics, just like we need them for Wall Street and just like we need them when you buy a car. Hopefully, Congress will act and pass much needed legislation to help preserve our Democratic process. It already is deeply flawed, but this ruling only makes it worse.
Although the lineup of personnel is a little bit different this time out, what we're faced with here is very much like the invasion of Iraq. The rationale is compelling-if all you listen to is one side. If you hear both sides, there are gaping holes. But there are a certain group of liberals (without the air quotes this time) who think that despite the flawed motivations involved, it still advances something they believe in, and so they're good to go.
It's time we just sat back and trusted our lying eyes.
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