APRES CITIZENS, LE DELUGE? — PART ONE; CURSING THE DARKNESS

By Jerry D. Rose

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Too much money being poured into political campaigns in the U.S., both in elections to public office and in “referendum” type campaigns on specific issues?  Just wait until you see the fallout from the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in which the Supreme Court confirmed the trend to confer “personhood” on corporations and other organizations, giving them the free speech right to contribute as much as they like to whatever campaign they might choose to contribute.  80% of Americans may disagree with the ruling, but it stands as the law of the land, and the standard rhetoric of outrage is the assertion that the ruling “opens the floodgate” to a campaign field which is already soaked in the water of corporate funding.

The corruption of the bench (and other seats of government).

The above-described critique of the ruling was highlighted in a Bill Moyers Journal PBS program and again in an article by Moyers and his chief researcher Michael Winship.  The Journal features a 1999 interview of Moyers with Justice Anthony Kennedy in which Kennedy decried the influence of money on politics, especially on the election of judges in most of the judicial system throughout the country.  Kennedy of course, wrote the majority opinion in the Citizens United Case which allegedly opened the “floodgate” to just such influence.  The show went on to highlight specific cases of candidates for judicial office who felt it necessary to raise a million dollars or more for a campaign, the cozy relationship with trial lawyers and corporations that have “business” before the court, and with “media consultants” whose job it is to help candidates spend all that money with lavish TV ads and other consumers of campaign budgets.  Moyers closes his show with a typical dramatic statement that the “death of democracy” approaches as a consequences of opening that floodgate of further capacity of monied interests to control our public policies. Most of the commenters on a Common Dreams posting of the Moyers and Winship article echo this mood of despair at the consequences of the Citizens United decision.

“We are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle.”

John F. Kennedy uttered this familiar phrase when he accepted the Democratic nomination for President at Los Angeles in 1960.  It’s the standard antidote to over-doses of pessimism reflected in the critiques of Bill Moyers and others of the dire consequences of the Citizens decision.  True, the candle-lighters (or those hoping to close the floodgate if you prefer that imagery) have quickly tried to call for the darkness to be dispelled by such actions as a constitutional amendment indicating that corporations are NOT persons, but publicly created entities that are subject to regulations of their speech.  Demands for public financing of political campaigns and placing caps on campaign expenditures are other candles of light being offered.  The trouble with these illuminations is that they are quickly extinguished by the fallacy of believing it is possible to establish these through the instrumentality of legislatures, executives and courts that we now have: instruments that are already  plutocratically controlled and that are unlikely to bite the very hand that nourishes them.  Nor are new regulations or new systems of public financing any more likely to be achieved  if approached by referendum votes of the people, because these votes are as well notoriously dominated by those some money interests.  Clearly we need a more powerful candle, one that proceeds not from the SUPPLY but from the DEMAND side of the “market” for campaign funds and expenditures. Let us proceed to look for that candle.

A preliminary note: “the awesome power of saying no.”

Sociologists like Max Weber and philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre have developed a viewpoint on power in human relationships that can help open a new window into the matter  of  campaign financing.  In every situation of unequal power between parties—the weaker and the stronger—the submissive and the dominant—there is a point of ultimate exhaustion of power for the supposedly stronger and more dominant party.  That comes in the power of the weaker and submissive to say “no” to the exercise of that dominant.  No, I will not take any more of your abuse, No, I will not agree to be conscripted into your Army to fight an immoral war against other country, No I will not take this bribe to vote this way or that on some public issue.  Gandhi demonstrated the power of saying “no” to imperial dominance of Britain, Mandela of saying “no” to apartheid in South Africa, Patrick Henry and other American patriots of saying “no” to the imperial power of King George, Martin Luther of saying “no” to the abuses of the Church. The Green Party of the United States already says “no” to corporate funding, and I am going to argue in the concluding part of this essay that this kind of principled nay-saying can actually be effective in winning elections, if the Green Party and other populist candidates and campaigns are smart enough and bold enough to make it work by drastically reducing the value of money in the electoral market place.

Romans 13: 11,12 And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.

Part 2 THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT (Blueprint for a populist campaign) to follow.

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Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist