Will the Corporate Supremes Now Dance on Democracy's Corpse?

The Four Courtsmen of the Apocalypse are poised to finally bury
American democracy in corporate money. The most powerful institution in
human history---the global corporation---may soon take definitive
possession of our electoral process.

It could happen very soon.

While America agonizes over health care, energy and war, Justices John
Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas could make it
all moot. They may now have the fifth Supreme Court vote they need to
open the final floodgates on corporate spending in political campaigns.

In short, the Court may be poised to shred a century of judicial and
legislative attempts to preserve even a semblance of restraint on how
Big Money buys laws and legal decisions. The ensuing tsunami of
corporate cash could turn every election hence into a series of virtual
slave auctions, with victory guaranteed only to those candidates who
most effectively grovel at the feet of the best-heeled lobbyists.

Not that this is so different from what we have now. The barriers
against cash dominating our elections have already proven amazingly
ineffective.

But a century ago, corporations were barred from directly contributing
to political campaigns. The courts have upheld many of the key
requirements.

Meanwhile the barons of Big Money have metastasized into all-powerful
electoral juggernauts. The sum total of all these laws, right up to the
recently riddled McCain-Feingold mandates, has been to force the
corporations to hire a few extra lawyers, accountants and talk show
bloviators to run interference for them.

Even that may be too much for the Court's corporate core. John
Roberts's Supremes may now be fast-tracking a decision on CITIZENS
UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION, centered on a corporate-financed
campaign film attacking Hillary Clinton. According to the Washington
Post's account of oral arguments, "a majority of the court seemed
impatient with an increasingly complicated federal scheme intended to
curb the role of corporations, unions and special interest groups in
elections."

Former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, who in 2000 "persuaded" the
Court to stop a recount of votes in Florida and put George W. Bush in
the White House, said such laws "smothered" the First Amendment and
"criminalized" free speech.

The conservative Gang of Four has already been joined by Anthony
Kennedy, the Court's swing voter, in signaling the likely overturn of
two previous decisions upholding laws that ban direct corporate
spending in elections.

When he was confirmed as the Court's Chief, Roberts promised Congress
he would be loathe to overturn major legal precedents. But the signals
of betrayal now seem so clear that Senators John McCain and Russell
Feingold have issued personal statements warning Roberts that a radical
assault on campaign finance laws would be considered a breach of faith
with the Congress that confirmed him.

Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did assert during oral arguments
that "a corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with
inalienable rights."

But since the 1880s the courts have generally granted corporations
human rights with no human responsibilities. Thom Hartmann (UNEQUAL
PROTECTION) and Ted Nace (GANGS OF AMERICA) have shown with infuriating
detail how corporate lawyers twisted the 14th Amendment, designed to
protect the rights of freed slaves, into a legal weapon used to
bludgeon the democratic process into submission.

Civil libertarians like Floyd Abrams and the American Civil Liberties
Union have somehow argued that depriving these mega-conglomerations of
cash and greed their "right" to buy elections might somehow impinge on
the First Amendment.

But the contradiction between human rights and corporate power is at
the core of the cancer now killing our democracy. As early as 1815
Thomas Jefferson joined Tom Paine in warning against the power of "the
moneyed aristocracy." In 1863 sometime railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln
compared the evils of corporate power with those of slavery. By the
late 1870s Rutherford B. Hayes, himself the beneficiary of a stolen
election, mourned a government "of, by and for the corporations."

The original US corporations---there were six at the time of the
Revolution---were chartered by the states, and restricted as to what
kinds of business they might do and where. After the Civil War, those
restrictions were erased. As Richard Grossman and the Project on
Corporate Law & Democracy have shown, the elastic nature of the
corporate charter has birthed a mutant institution whose unrestrained
money and power has transformed the planet.

Simply put, globalized corporations, operating solely for profit, have
become the most dominant institutions in human history, transcending
ancient emperors, feudal lords, monarchs, dictators and even the church
in their wealth, reach and ability to dominate all avenues of economic
and cultural life.

The Roberts Court now seems intent on disposing of the feeble, flimsy
McCain-Feingold campaign finance law as well as the 1990 AUSTIN
decision that upheld a state law barring corporations from spending to
defeat a specific candidate.

Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas all voted to overturn McCain-Feingold in
2003, and nobody doubts Roberts and Alito will join them now. The only
question seems centered on how broad the erasure will be. This, after
all, is a "conservative" wing whose intellectual leader, Antonin
Scalia, recently argued that wrongly convicted citizens can be put to
death even if new evidence confirms their innocence.

Should our worst fears be realized, the torrent of cash into the
electoral process could sweep all else before it. With five
corporations controlling the major media and all members of the courts,
Congress and the Executive at the mercy of corporate largess, who will
heed the people?

"We don't put our First Amendment rights in the hands of Federal
Election Commission bureaucrats," said Roberts said in the oral
arguments.

Instead he may put ALL our rights in the hands of a board room barony
whose global reach and financial dominance are without precedent.

At this point, only an irreversible ban on ALL private campaign
money---corporate or otherwise---might save the ability of our common
citizenry to be heard. Those small pockets where public financing and
enforceable restrictions have been tried DO work.

A rewrite of all corporate charters must ban political activity and
demand strict accountability for what they do to their workers, the
natural environment and the common good.

It was the property of the world's first global corporation---the East
India Tea Company---that our revolutionary ancestors pitched into
Boston Harbor. Without a revolution to now obliterate corporate
personhood and the "right" to buy elections, we might just as well
throw in the illusion of a free government.

This imminent, much-feared Court decision on campaign finance is likely
to make the issue of corporate money versus real democracy as clear as
it's ever been.

Likewise the consequences.