The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision over corporate spending in advertisements and political campaigns threatens to worsen the already dire state of our democracy, leading us ever closer to a bankrupt dystopia.

I feel incapable of bottling my anger over a recent misstep by “our nation’s leaders.” On Thursday, January 21, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to lessen the restrictions on corporate funding for political campaigns and advertisements. As NPR’s Deborah Tedford reports, “The new ruling blurs the lines between corporate and individual contributions in political campaigns. It also strikes down part of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that banned unions and corporations from paying for political ads in the waning days of campaigns” (link added for clarification).

According to Mass Media Law by Don R. Pember and Clay Calvert, that 2002 law, officially called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, contained three main points:

• “National political parties and their committees are prohibited from accepting or spending ’soft money,’ the large unlimited contributions by corporations, unions, and individuals. [...]
• “Corporations, unions or other interest groups cannot use soft money to pay for ‘electioneering communications’… that is broadcast within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. [...]
• “[Increased] limits on ‘hard money’ contributions, that is, contributions to candidates from individuals…”

The law’s Wikipedia page says that’s why, since the law went into effect in 2003, you’ve heard this message at the end of political advertisements: “I’m [insert candidate's name] and I approve this message.”

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.” – Walter Lippman

The New York Times reports that this decision actually “overruled two precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that upheld the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted campaign spending by corporations and unions.”

According to the Times article, the five Justices in the majority issued a case opinion that amounted to more than 180 pages. It’s not surprising then that news media are having trouble conveying the implications of the case to the public. The need for clarification is almost as dire as it was during the convoluted reporting of the health care reform debate, which is still undecided but has died down since the fall of 2009.

Not only will most of the American public not hear about this change, but those who do probably won’t understand it (because of inadequate translation from Legalese to news copy) and, therefore, won’t care. I feel thankful that I had to take a Media and the Law class to meet credit requirements in my masters of journalism program. Before that I don’t think I had learned anything about the workings of our legal system since my 9th grade Government & Civics class. (That’s about a 10-year gap, just to be clear.)

I came out of the media law class with a good sense of what I could and could not do as a journalist, and the ways in which I’m endangered, protected, and enabled. But the most significant concept I took from the class was the utter importance of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing about the U.S. that can unconditionally stir up a sense of American pride in me.

In short, the First Amendment grants free speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble peacefully, and the right to petition the government. Here we’re primarily concerned with the concept of free speech. As Tedford reported, this case started because the filmmakers behind Hillary: The Movie advertised without disclosing the funding sources. The case, titled Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, made it to the Supreme Court because of the claim that restricting the film and its advertisements would in effect restrict free speech, regardless of whether it was speech made by a corporation.

The first problem to arise in my mind is that the First Amendment has always seemed to apply more to individuals, since the whole purpose was to prevent the government from shutting you up if you had something important to say. Remember, our country was founded by people not only pissed off about taxes, but also people tired of censorship and government propaganda. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1920 book Liberty and the News, “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”

Sure, the amendment doesn’t specify individuals, and there are cases where it would undoubtedly apply to a group (like a newspaper). But a corporation is, in terms of business (and civics in general), the exact opposite of an individual. A corporation is a pooling of resources — money, brains, labor, etc — in order to achieve a financial goal: consistent profit. My main concern is that corporations allow an individual to dissolve into the clockwork. Personal responsibility and morality both evaporate in that kind of environment. Or at least, if it comes down to a legal matter, it’s possible for someone to get away with much greater evil if it’s done in the name of a company (see: Blackwater, the military contracting company that now goes by Xe; also, the piles of white collar crime and corruption we’ve witnessed, even just in the past few years).

You may be wondering why I’m fussing so much. Well, look at the ongoing debate about health care reform in the U.S. For a quick briefing, one must only glance at the Lobbying section of the corresponding page on Wikipedia.

Our democracy was built on the concept of self-governance. It evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a state of business-led governance, a deranged sort of Capitalistocracy that is driving our country – and, by extension, the entire world – into ruins.

“The health and insurance sectors gave nearly $170 million to House and Senate members in 2007 and 2008, with 54% going to Democrats, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

$170 MILLION?!?!?! DOES THAT SEEM…A BIT EXTENSIVE TO ANYONE ELSE?!!! Do your friends have $170 million in expendable income? Do your grandparents? What I’m saying is, a corporation doesn’t deserve the same free speech protections as individuals or non-profit groups, because they are inherently much more powerful and much less… human. Our capitalistic system already makes it nearly impossible to have a functioning democracy, let alone a healthy society. We should be bolstering restrictions on campaign funding, not making it easier for companies to sway elections.

And that’s exactly what Lawrence Lessig – a law professor, author, and activist best known for his 2003 book Free Culture – has been up to since leaving his work on copyright law reform to focus on his new organization, Change Congress (Update 8/13/2011: The group is now called Fix Congress First). Lessig and his team have literally been targeting U.S. Congressmen who vote based on campaign contributions instead of what constituents want. As their website states, “It’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption — we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.” Apparently their path just got a lot steeper.

It’s not just a single political party at fault (except that, as NPR’s Tedford notes, Republicans will benefit more from the Supreme Court’s decision, since corporations generally back Republican candidates. That’s what comes from political tenets that prize a “small government” and “the autonomy of the market.”) As quoted above, 54 percent of the health care lobbying money has gone to Democrats. And that’s understandable, considering that the party had a filibuster-proof majority and could have passed a health care reform bill regardless of what the Tea Partiers – or anyone else, for that matter – wanted. (Since Ted Kennedy’s death in August 2009 and the subsequent election of Republican Senator Scott Brown, Democrats no longer have that power. Read more on the flabbergasting perplexity that is the filibuster here.)

I’m regressing, so let me return to the point. Our democracy — if it can even still be called one — is injured, near death, on life support! Ordinary Americans may gain a sense of involvement through voting, demonstrating, and whatnot. But in reality the general populace is here to play audience for the great circle jerk between Big Business and Bipartisan Politics.

This leads to a secondary – yet still enormous — concern of mine, beyond the technicalities of First Amendment rights. The election process was already flawed at basically every level of public office, from city to nation. What I mean is, if someone decides to run for office, they have a better chance of winning if they have a larger pool of campaign funds. The higher up the position, the more true that is. I could delve here into one of my major campaign pet peeves: the political debate. (To clarify, why do only a handful of candidates get to debate? It should be more like a tournament. May the Master Debater win!) Instead I’ll just point out that the three candidates you heard the most about in the 2008 presidential election — Barack Obama, John McCain, and Ralph Nader — were the ones who raised and spent the most money. Don’t believe me? Wikipedia has the stats!

Our democracy was built on the concept of self-governance. It evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a state of business-led governance, a deranged sort of Capitalistocracy that is driving our country – and, by extension, the entire world – into ruins. If you’ve read this far, you probably know what I mean. You’ve seen Blade Runner, you’ve seen (and read, hopefully) A Clockwork Orange, you watched the viral web documentary Zeitgeist and raved about it to all your friends. It’s perfectly clear to this sub-population that we’re quickly approaching a full-on dystopia, and moving further away from any idyllic, clean, proud vision of the future in a steady and irrevocable fashion.

Self-governance will never be perfect, but our democracy should be self-correcting. And the only self-correction a corporation will ever know is the kind that brings on larger profit margins. Business already dominates too much of what happens on this planet. It’s been obvious since the ’80s, while just as true (but more obscure, or less noted by pop culture) before then. Politicians are humans, and humans will – for the foreseeable future, at least – fall prey to greed. That makes it all the more necessary for us to build adequate constraints into our system of self-governance, to ensure that some kind of progress remains possible.

When business becomes the single lens through which democracy is projected, the only long-term outcome — for our government, for our economy, for our citizens — is bankruptcy.

This essay was also be published as an op-ed on Spartanedge.com on 2/10/10.

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