In his 2005 book, "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," Joel Bakan writes, "Democracy requires, at a minimum, some measure of equality of opportunity to participate in the political process. Yet profound inequality is the result when corporations - huge concentrations of shareholder wealth - exercise the same rights as individuals in that process. Today, warns Robert Monks, we face a "situation of great precariousness"; we are "dangerously close to the co-optation of government by business." "Unless we are extremely attentive to the inclination of business to dominate government," he says, "it could well be that the institution [of government] will fade."On January 20th, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision prohibiting limitation of corporate spending in political campaigns. It is likely that this ruling will fundamentally change the way that campaigns are run and will prove a serious detriment to the fairness of elections.
Until this point, corporations were limited in the amount of money that they donated to political campaigns or candidates, and when they were permitted to run TV ads. However, in the ruling, the majority opinion found that, "if the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing any citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
Essentially, the controversial ruling deems that corporations have the same rights under the Constitution as an individual citizen. This distinction is a difficult one to make when one considers the position of a corporation in the context of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights. It is difficult to imagine applying the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, to anyone other than an individual. However, it has been established that corporations do have the capabilities to sue or be sued and are protected under the 14th Amendment of equal right to due process.
But the issue here is the disproportionate and disadvantageous position of the American individual. Can governmental elections truly be for the people and by the people if a corporation is able to throw millions of dollars behind a candidate of their choosing?
In the 2008 election, Barack Obama became the first candidate to opt out of Federal Public Financing, raising and spending records amounts of money. But with the recent ruling, it seems to me that the Public Financing system is the only way to maintain any semblance of fairness in our election system. I believe that money and corporations should not drive elections, candidates and ideals should.
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The entire time I was reading your post and watching that clip from the Colbert Report I couldn't help but think of someone who predicted this same thing just a few years earlier. He's not necessarily the political critic you would expect, he's Mike Judge the writer of Beavis and Buthead, King of the Hill, Office Space, and the movie I was thinking of - Idiocracy.
ReplyDeleteIn Idiocracy, Luke Wilson is part of a military hibernation experiment that gets messed up somehow and he wakes up 500 years in the future. In the dystopian future where natural selection has reversed itself because of new technologies and an attitude of instant gratification, corporations now rule the world. There's an entire city that's a Costco, Gatorade has convinced everyone that plants need electrolytes and they water their crops with it, and one particularly successful organization goes around buying out governments and implementing new leadership in a satirical analogy to imperialism. And yes, the corporations are allowed the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, as they each have their own hired armies. It's hilarious, and I definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the topics you're discussing.
But with this Supreme Court ruling it's kind of scary that such an absurd satire has some real bearing on our government today - and even while Judge's film should be fresh in our memories. But there are two things I would also like to bring up. First, corporations have already been closely intertwined with government for a long time - they have been limited in donations to candidates, but they're also still donating to special interest groups and lobbyists, and a lot of our gross national product is because of them.
It's scary to think that corporations are getting more rights now that they are also getting so much more power, but that brings me to the second thing - the individual is also getting more power through new media outlets. A large corporation can now spend however much they want on a candidate, but at the same time one individual can also reach millions of voting Americans with a free blog. I agree with you in that "money and corporations should not drive elections, candidates and ideals should," and I think that the internet allows for individual opinions and ideals an incredibly larger amount of exposure than in the past as well. Obviously everyone isn't going to read everyone else's blogs every day, but the significant and valid opinions during election years often spread just as fast as viral youtube videos. One could argue that the internet doesn't reach as many Americans as a commercial on primetime television; but, more and more every day, TV News organizations are not only citing internet sources, but often have their research teams perusing the web for stories. And so yes, corporations will be fueling campaigns, but I bet because of JoeBlogger out there we will mostly know what companies are fueling what campaigns for what reasons, and that should hopefully offset at least some of their bias.