A letter from Target

We at Vox Verax, like many fellow citizens, view the growing influence of corporations on the U.S. political system as a cancer upon the country. (For fairness sake, we view union influence the same way.) The United States system of government was built on the concept of "one man, one vote" — thankfully amended in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to mean "one person, one vote."

But nowhere in the Constitution is the word "corporation" mentioned. Yet since the constitution was adopted in 1787 corporations have achieved political powers far greater than any individual or other collective group, perhaps even more than the two major political parties. The U.S. claims to be a democracy or a republic, but it is arguably an oligarchy (some would say a legalized kleptocracy) using quasi-democratic processes to legitimize its money-driven governing system. These are strong words, but who can logically argue against them?

Corporations have long influenced the American political system either directly through bribery or indirectly by lobbying lawmakers to enact legislation favoring their interests or by campaign contributions made through political action committees (PACs). Now the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can bypass the thinly disguised PAC system and contribute directly groups advocating for a particular candidate.

There is no room here to go over the history of how corporations achieved such power, but those who are interested can study Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), Buckley v. Valeo (1976), and most recently Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). Interestingly enough, these are all Supreme Court decisions. They have become the supreme law of the land not by constitutional amendment or legislative action but by the votes of as few as five sitting members of the Supreme Court — hardly rule by democracy.

The cardinal reason why the influence of corporations and unions is fundamentally undemocratic (and, if one is a true strict constructionist, unconstitutional) is this: The corporation or union speaks with one voice, either for or against an issue or for or against a candidate, yet corporations and unions are made up of many individuals — employees, board members, stockholders, members — not all of whom have a say-so on or are in agreement with what the corporation or union does. Nor do the have the easy choice of separating themselves from that corporation or union without economic harm to themselves. In some cases — for instance, if they are indirect stockholders via a pension plan — they may not be aware that they are part of a particular corporate community.

In many cases, the corporation or union acts in direct contrast to the interests of some or maybe even most of its stakeholders, because the decisions of the corporation or union are vested in just a handful of powerful individuals acting in what they claim to be its best interests. Not surprisingly, these decisions most benefit themselves, even though they claim that they make the decisions to best benefit the stockholders or stakeholders. And thus they use the numbers and economic power of the group to enhance their own influence on the political process.

This obviously makes a mockery of the "one person, one vote" concept if that implies that all members of a democracy have an equal say-so in the governing of the nation. No one would argue that political influence is grossly unequal in the United States, and yet we pretend that it is equal when we go through the charade of voting every two years or so.

Citizen action

That said, there's one action citizens can take to protest the political stance of a corporation, and that is not do business with a corporation whose practices they disagree with. Joan Binder of Mankato, Minnesota, did just that recently, when, in opposition to the Target Corporation's funding of political ads supporting Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, she wrote Target saying she was not going to shop there anymore. In all fairness to Target, this is the letter they sent back:

From: guest.relations@...  
Subject: Target® Political Contributions
To: mankatojoan@...
Date: Wednesday, July 21, 2010, 7:09 PM

Dear Joan Binder,

Target has long believed that engaging in civic activities is an important and necessary element of operating a national retail business. What's more important than any one candidate's stance on a particular issue is how we nurture thoughtful, long-term growth in the state of Minnesota.

To continue to grow and create jobs and opportunity in our home state, we believe it is imperative to be engaged in public policy and the political process. That is why we are members of organizations like the Minnesota Business Partnership, the Chamber of Commerce and many others. And that is why we decided to contribute to MN Forward.

MN Forward's objective is to elect candidates from both parties who will make job creation and economic growth a top priority. We operate best when working collaboratively with legislators on both sides of the aisle. In fact, if you look at our Federal PAC contributions year to date, you will see that they are very balanced between Republicans and Democrats. For more information please visit www.target.com/company, and view the Civic Activity page.

Target has a large stake in Minnesota's future, which is why it is so important to be able to provide jobs, serve guests, support communities and deliver on our commitment to shareholders. As an international business that is proud to call Minnesota home, it is critical that we have a business environment that allows us to be competitive. Our guests, team members, communities and shareholders depend on Target to remain competitive.

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Hanson
Target Executive Offices

Ms. Binder is just one voice among many. Yet if each of us, in whatever small way we can, takes action to oppose the corrupting influence of corporate money on the political system, maybe — just maybe — we can begin to turn around what has been an ominous and truly dangerous trend since the latter part of the 19th century.

Progressive Ponderings: Evolution, Creationism, and the Supremes

Are these corporations?

"Person" defined
Sec. 22. (a) "Person" means a human being, corporation, limited liability company, partnership, unincorporated association, or governmental entity.

— from IC 35-41-1-22, the Office of Code Revision Indiana Legislative Services Agency

by Joe Mayer

As an older Christian, I long ago settled my inner struggle between evolution and creationism. But now the Supremes — Supreme Court — have thrown a new wrinkle into the debate. The Supremes have birthed a new corpus, a full grown and full blown body. They endowed it with speech, with money behind the speech. This money-speech became power, power to rule.

Now I’m confused. Is it “profits” or prophets? I guess it was bound to happen. The “Profit”able millionaire TV and radio preachers have confused “profits” with prophets. I must have been mistaken all these years in believing that prophets defended the poor, the suffering, the wretches of society. The new Gospel of wealth — that God favors the wealthy as evidenced by the material blessings bestowed on them — will take some mental gymnastics of the mind to understand.

I’m wondering how this corporate persona will be baptized by the new “Profits”; might they use the new profits they’re swimming in?

Last rites present no problem. The creating Supremes have blessed these new corpora with everlasting life.

Our marriage laws will need to be rewritten. What if two corporate media marry — merge? That seems homologous. What about multiple partners; a combination of numerous corporate persona? Will we have to rescind all of our polygamy laws?

My old Christianity spoke of love, empathy, morality, ethics and conscience. How will the “Profits” of the “for profit only” corporate persona fit a conscience into this new corpus?

This new birthing power of the Supremes really bothers me. Giving everlasting life to a corporate persona stretches my image of prophets. But, the Supremes have spoken. Who are we mere mortals of limited duration to question the new and powerful gods? Will they keep birthing eternally? Are they already doing that?

Evolution? Creationism? Did we really give our Supremes the power to birth our equivalent out of whole cloth? It doesn’t seem to fit evolution. I recall no mention of Supreme power in the scriptures. Will the new persona allow us mortals to continue?

The Goldman Sachs Party

Progressive Ponderings by Joe Mayer

United States presidential campaigns today are extremely expensive. In the year 2000, all candidates combined spent $528 million; in 2004 it had risen to $889 million. By Sept. 21, 2008 Obama had spent $454 million and McCain $230 million. The 2008 total easily topped $1,000,000,000 (one billion dollars).

While $1 billion is an extremely large amount of money, it pales when compared with the revenues and profits of major U.S. corporations. Profits for some major corporations in 2007 (before the recent recession) included Exxon-Mobil at $40.6 B., GE at $22.2 B., Chevron at $18.6 B., Walmart at $12.7 B., and AT&T at $11.9 B.

These profits, year after year, produce one of the more inequitable societies in history. As more and more Americans are left behind in our economic system – the middle class shrinking and the number of poor rising – the wealth at the top continues to multiply.

Forbes Magazine annually publishes a list of America’s richest citizens. The following names and net worth are from its Sept. 2009 issue: Wm. Gates - $50 B., Warren Buffet - $40 B., Lawrence Ellison - $27 B., four Walton (Walmart) families - $19 to $21.5 B. each.

On Jan. 29, 2010, Bill Moyers had as one of his guests Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham U. School of Law and a visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Brennan Center for Justice. That night she stated: “Goldman Sachs is the smartest political party I know in this country.”

In one sentence she encapsulates the essence of wealth’s threat to our democracy. Some of our major corporations “earn” in a matter of weeks the equivalent of the cost of a major presidential campaign. Some of our wealthy citizens could pay for a major presidential campaign from the interest, dividends, and rents their investments earn in a year. Transferring these billions to Senatorial or Congressional campaigns allows them to control whole committees of the Senate and House.

Our financial elites were already purchasing favorable legislation before the latest Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and the wealthy unlimited influence on members of Congress. Unless citizens fight back with all the resources available, their access to the legislative process will be denied by the power of money.

This court decision, which sets the stage for the corporate takeover of our democracy, is NOT Constitutional law. It is a case of an ideological activist court whose decisions generate new laws. Indeed, a Goldman Sachs political party is sure to arise. Everything else in our nation is being given corporate names.

Supreme Court decision a shame and travesty

by Leigh Pomeroy
Published in the Mankato Free Press

MANKATO — In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), the concept of corporate personhood was accidentally and benignly (at that time) inserted into the U.S. Supreme Court canon of judicial decisions. No less than a Frankenstein’s monster has evolved from that seemingly minor insertion.

It is quite clear that the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission even further establishes levels of “free speech”, allocating more power to the few individuals who control corporations and labor unions and, by consequence, allowing less to everyone else, especially employees and stockholders of corporations and members of labor unions who may disagree with the political stance of those corporate and union leaders.

Under the false guise of judicial conservatism, the court has in fact acted just the opposite. Nowhere do the words “corporation” or “labor union” or any phrase or words approximating them appear in the Constitution. And yet, now five members of the current sitting Supreme Court have decided that these institutions “de jure” have the same rights as individuals while “de facto” it is no secret they will have more.

It is a shame and travesty to the intentions of our Founding Fathers.

Progressive Ponderings: Absolute Power

by Joe Mayer

In 1887, British historian and moralist Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, stated, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

I couldn’t but think of Lord Acton’s wisdom as our own Supreme Court rained (or reigned) down its latest creation on us merely ordinary citizens. We should not be surprised. This same body of absolutes chose to crown George Bush nine years ago.

Keep in mind that members appointed to the Supreme Court are almost always white men of wealth and power. In 1857, these men, in the Dred Scott decision, defied the Deity, and decided that part of his creation did not measure up to the court’s standards. To correct God’s work they proclaimed. “African Americans are not citizens, but property protected by the Constitution.” This decision resulted in civil war.

Since that war the powerful wealthy court set about once again improving on God’s creation. First the states birthed corporations to which the courts gave legal status. Gradually the Court stated that corporations were legal “persons,” entitling them to First Amendment rights such as free speech. The next step really challenged God’s shortsightedness; in this leap to mythology the court decided that money was speech. Now this latest decision, based on the court’s previous rulings and not on the Constitution, declares that the people’s elected representatives cannot limit corporate personhood by restricting corporate/wealth/power’s “money speech.”

In the span of approximately one hundred fifty years our Supreme Court, playing God, went from denying personhood to part of the human race to granting personhood to a creation of its own. THAT’S ABSOLUTE POWER.

Now it is up to us citizens to protest the court’s equating a thing, an object, a creation of wealth with our own God-given humanity.

Democrats should view this as a campaign gift. Every candidate, at every level, for every office should be required to state his or her position on this issue of corporate personhood. Those politicians favoring the court’s decision (yes, there are many already in the clutches of corporate “persons”) should be forced to explain: (1) How this ruling advances the principle of people rule, i.e., “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” (2) How “profit only” motivated institutions will advance our human and social values such as love, hope, empathy, community, (3) How this new “person” creation is in harmony with our human creation stories.

Our democracy has already been wounded by the previous court rulings. This could be the death blow.

The new hijackers: Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy

The End of Restraint

By Stuart Taylor Jr. | NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 22, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 1, 2010

The Supreme Court's five conservatives are properly protective of American citizens' First Amendment rights to spend as much of their money as they wish on political speech, both individually and by funding nonprofit advocacy groups. But this was no justification for the court's blockbuster, precedent-smashing Jan. 21 decision unleashing corporate executives to pour unlimited amounts of stockholders' money—without their consent—into ads supporting or attacking federal candidates. Indeed the 5–4 decision would allow any big company to spend a fortune attacking candidates whom many, or even most, of its stockholders would rather support. And corporations—including multinationals controlled by foreigners—will spend money on elections not to advance the political views of their stockholders, but to seek economic advantage.

So the court's decision strikes me as a perverse interpretation of the First Amendment, one that will at best increase the already unhealthy political power of big businesses (and big unions, too), and at worst swamp our elections under a new deluge of special-interest cash. More ominously still, Citizens United v. FEC lends credence to liberal claims that all five of the more conservative justices are "judicial activists," the same imprecation that conservatives have for so long—and often justifiably—hurled at liberal justices.

Judicial activists—at least as I define them—are judges who are unduly eager to aggrandize their own power and impose their own policy preferences on the electorate. They invoke farfetched interpretations of the Constitution to sweep aside democratically adopted laws and deeply rooted societal traditions. I'd hoped that Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who came across in their confirmation hearings as believers in judicial modesty, would bring a healthy dose of restraint to a court long populated by activists, and would thereby shun sharp lurches to the ideological right. It appears that I misjudged them.

(More here.)

So much for the Constitution

High-Court Hypocrisy

By Jonathan Alter | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 1, 2010

The year 2010 is already a nightmare for progressives, and it's only January. In one week alone, the health-care bill derailed, the liberal radio network Air America went silent, and the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allows corporations to pump as much money as they want into political campaigns. I've got no answers on the first two, but a few suggestions for avoiding despair on the third, the most serious threat to American democracy in a generation.

In a devastating decision, the high court cleared the way for one of those corporate takeovers you read about, only much bigger. If Exxon wants to spend $1 million (a bar tab for Big Oil) defeating an environmentalist running for city council, it can now do so. If Goldman Sachs wants to pay the entire cost of every congressional campaign in the U.S., the law of the land now allows it. The decision frees unions, too, but they already spend about as much as they can on politics. Fortune 100 firms currently spend only a fraction of 1 percent of their $605 billion in annual profits on buying politicians.

(More here.)

Money Isn't Speech and Corporations Aren't People

The misguided theories behind the Supreme Court's ruling on campaign finance reform

By David Kairys
Slate.com
Posted Friday, Jan. 22, 2010

Go back almost a century, to the time when the modern corporation was created, and you'll find laws that prohibit or limit the use of corporate money in elections. And yet this week, a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the limits that Congress passed in 2002 in this tradition in the case Citizens United v. FEC.

The majority's ruling unleashes a new wave of campaign cash and adds to the already considerable power of corporations. The court's main rationale is that limits on using corporate treasuries for campaigns are a "classic example of censorship," as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. To get there, Kennedy depends on two legal theories that blossomed as constitutional principles in the mid-1970s: money is speech and corporations are people. Both theories are strange, if not simply wrongheaded—why, according to the Constitution or common sense, would money be speech or corporations be people? The court has also employed theories not uniformly but, rather, as constitutional cover for dominance of the electoral system by corporations and by the wealthy.

The first theory appeared in a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which invalidated some campaign-finance reforms that came out of Watergate. The Court concluded that most limits on campaign expenditures, and some limits on donations, are unconstitutional because money is itself speech and the "quantity of expression"—the amounts of money—can't be limited.

But in subsequent cases, the conservative justices who had emphatically embraced the money-is-speech principle didn't apply it to money solicited by speakers of ordinary means. For example, the court limited the First Amendment rights of Hare Krishna leafleters soliciting donations in airports to support their own leafleting. The leafleting drew no money-is-speech analysis. To the contrary, the conservative justices, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, found that by asking for money for leafleting—their form of speech—the Hare Krishnas were being "disruptive" and posing an "inconvenience" to others. In other words, in the court's view, some people's money is speech; others' money is annoying. And the conservative justices have raised no objection to other limits on the quantity of speech, such as limits on the number of picketers.

(Continued here.)

Five Supreme Court Lifers Deliver a Payoff

By Jim Klobuchar

[Updated 1/23/10 @ 11:40 a.m.]

More than 100 years ago the Congress of the United States passed a law that opened the horizons to a kind of America the country’s founders envisioned.

In reigning in runaway political spending by corporate power, it tried to insulate the country from corporate domination of the government. If America was going to be a country embracing the principles of fairness in the bounty and opportunities it offered its citizens, it needed an election process free of the stranglehold of big money. It should be a country ruled by government institutions answering to the fundamental markers of democracy. These were and are defined with breathtaking simplicity by the greatest of all Republican presidents, Abraham Lincoln, as “government of, by and for the people.”

The Congress in 1907 acted to prevent corporate power from feeding billions of dollars directly into candidates' campaign pockets. In so doing it created a relatively even playing field for the battle of political ideas. Among the results was the flowering of a great middle class that fueled the yearnings of the American people and the rise of the American Century that literally became the hope of the world.

On Thursday a Republican-dominated Supreme Court of the United States, acting almost vengefully, re-examined one of those bedrock principles — fairness in how we run our elections — and revoked it.

As an open and direct assault on the American political process it was an intervention that could not have been more crass, cynical and brazen.

By a vote of 5-4 the Supreme Court’s five Republican appointees decided that corporations are human beings, entitled to the same First Amendment rights of free speech. This now gives corporations the right to splatter whatever millions they want as a form of “free speech,” a corruption of the First Amendment's intention that is a brutal caricature of fair and stable public policy.

What it means is that some of the country's biggest corporate powers, including insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil, Wall Street alliances, transportation, construction and more can open their cash bins, some of them swelled by the public’s bailout and stimulus money, and pump their millions into political spending. It is spending that overwhelmingly favors Republican candidates.

It’s not the kind of spending where the money goes directly into a candidate’s campaign. It can now legally come in from vaults and from the alley. It can finance unlimited political muggings on television, around the clock, with the kind of defamation that swamped the war hero, John Kerry.

Do you want some irony laced into all of these new "speech" freedoms open to corporate power in political spending? As a counterweight to the stash now open for campaign manipulation by big business, fronted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Republican five offered the same opportunities to American unions.

To American what?

The political strength of American labor, except for remnants here and there, fundamentally disappeared with the election of Ronald Reagan. What there was left was further eroded by the recession of today, which was basically enabled and triggered by the under-the-table manipulations of Wall Street and the dismantling of government regulations that could have saved millions of jobs.

So the decision by the Supreme Court turns loose on the next big elections the very powerhouses and speculators that created the recession.

These are the same Supreme Court judges whose promoters in their confirmation hearings decried the idea of “judicial activism” by Democratic-appointed judges

What we saw this week was the same kind of closet activism that in the year 2000 stripped thousands of Florida citizens of the right to have their votes counted. It gutted the candidacy of Al Gore, who outpolled his opponent, George Bush, by 500,000 votes across the country

So this has been the progression of plunder of this political right-wing domination of the Supreme Court in the last ten years. What it means is that the U.S. Supreme Court, the Roberts Court Five, has now become the campaign manager and self-appointed fund raiser of the Republican Party.
________________

Jim Klobuchar returns to an arena that will be familiar to his readers when he was a columnist for the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE.

Toward a New Environmental Era?

by Leigh Pomeroy

The ship of state does not turn on a dime. Picture it as a giant oil tanker -- perhaps the Condoleezza Rice. It takes miles to turn the darn thing -- and plenty of time.

On the environmental side, the ship of state has been wallowing of late.

The Environmental Protection Agency was set up under Republican President Richard Nixon, strengthened under Democrat Jimmy Carter but nearly gutted by Republican Ronald Reagan. It maintained its own under the first George Bush and gained strength again under Bill Clinton. Then came George Bush the younger, and it was all but redubbed the "Exxon Protection Agency."

The election of 2006 has made a big difference in the future of environmental protection in the United States. Yet for better or for worse, the ship of state has three rudders -- congress, the judiciary and the president. Two are pulling one way, the third another. Nevertheless, the ship plows on, fighting between inertia and the mixed commands of the helmsmen (helmspersons?) of its three rudders.

Lawsuits filed years ago are finally floating to the top of the judicial pyramid. Just this week the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency that the the federal government and states may regulate carbon dioxide as a potentially hazardous pollutant. And the Court also turned back a lower court decision, deciding unanimously that the EPA can require power companies to install pollution control equipment on aging coal-fired plants.

Just a day or two afterwards, a federal judge in California said that the U.S. Forest Service had erred when it reformulated regulations easing environmental safeguards for national forests.

Is the ship of state really turning?

The decision of the one-vote majority in Massachusetts makes empirical sense. Evidence of global warming due to increased CO2 levels due to human activity is, while not universally accepted, overwhelmingly strong. The toxicity or danger of an element or compound in the environment is not that it exists, but that it exists at relative levels dangerous to human health and the well-being of the planet.

Yet why was the decision so close? In fact, why was it not unanimous?

The four dissenting justices, led by Chief Justice Roberts, listed five reasons: (1) questioning the standing of the petitioners to bring the case, (2) failure of the petitioners to establish injury, (3) failure to establish a solid link between global warming and the petitioners' alleged injuries, (4) failure of the petitioners to prove that CO2 emissions within the U.S. are the cause of those alleged injuries, and (5) failure of the Court's majority to differentiate political debate from actionable offense.

The problem with law, as with any debate, is that cases and arguments can be found to justify both sides of an issue. Massachusetts seems to be one of those cases not unlike Bush v. Gore wherein the justices had their minds made up in advance, and that their duty was to listen to the arguments and then find the reasons in existing law to defend the respective sides that they took.

In other words, in Massachusetts the outcome was predictable, with the so-called judicial liberals lining up on one side and the so-called conservatives on the other, with the true swing voter, Justice Kennedy, siding with the liberals. What this means is that Justice Kennedy may in fact be one of the single most powerful people in the land.

Despite all the hoopla and declarations of victory by the pro-environment forces, Massachusetts is perhaps more correctly a victory by circumstance -- that Justice Kennedy is on the Court instead of another Reagan (Justice Scalia), Bush Sr. (Justice Thomas) or Bush Jr. (Justices Roberts and Alito) nominee.

Receiving less notice but perhaps more important because of its unanimous outcome, the Court in Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy, by remanding the case back to a lower court, sided with the plaintiffs that the EPA can establish strict emissions from older power plants.

The ship of state moves on relentlessly ahead burning its fossil fuel and delivering tons of pollutants into the atmosphere. But at least one of the three rudders is trying to navigate it to a greener, more sustainable port. A second rudder, that controlled by congress, will be pushing with it. But don't expect the third to join the other two.

The Bush administration will talk a good line about changing directions, and a few positive cranks of the wheel will be made, but overall that rudder won't move much till January of 2009 at the earliest, nearly two years and many nautical miles away.