01.22.10

A Common Cause for Liberals and the Tea Party

Posted in ALL, Government, Media, The Supreme Court at 4:38 pm

This week the Supreme Court essentially ruled that the founders got it all wrong.

Anyone who reads this space regularly knows I’m not prone to frequent hyperbole, but the consequences of what happened this week in Washington for the United States republic can hardly be overstated.

Last September I wrote about a case coming before the Supreme Court. It supposedly involved free speech, but actually involved whether five judges could be persuaded to consider cash as speech. A slim majority of justices (the “conservative” bloc) just became the “judicial activists” they’ve railed against in the past, overturning decades of legal precedent by confusing money with speech and endorsing the absurd notion that corporations are people, entitled to the same human rights guaranteed to (human) individuals under the Bill of Rights.

“It will be similar to the tyranny that [conservatives] fear from Big Government, only Mickey Mouse will be issuing the decrees…”

In the new United States, corporations will be able to spend as much money as they need to saturate the airwaves, the newspapers, and the Internet with as much political propaganda as it takes (there’s no requirement it has to be true) to decide the course of American democracy in their interests. (Read a synopsis of the decision here, and a moving protest against it here.)

Most conservatives claim that any limit on what an Enron or an Exxon can spend on elections is a muzzling of free speech. But they can’t point to a single actual person who has been denied their right to speech. Supposedly, the founders intended such rights for corporations as well as people, and “free speech” entitles institutions to spend any amount of money to drown out the speech of actual, breathing individuals.

A first-year law student — with one brain lobe tied behind her back — could demolish the argument that no one may control how people or groups spend money:  bribing a federal judge is illegal, but is that “free speech” too?

“If you free yourselves from “The Government” only to hand it over to “The Gap,” your freedoms will follow…”

Liberals are justifiably up in arms over this, but why aren’t conservatives, as well? If you count yourself as one, here’s just a few reasons you should be as irate as the rest of us:

You’re against a strong federal government. Congratulations — you’ve just witnessed a big step towards one. One of the checks against a big, bad government is the election of hundreds of different representatives from different walks of life — different parts of the country, different philosophies, different experiences. They’re all too similar as it is, most of them coming from just two parties which themselves are pretty similar. But with no limits on what corporations can spend to shape the system, our senators and congresspeople will get more and more alike with each and every Election Day. And the philosophy all these corporate shills embody will be one and the same.

It will be one which enforces the power of private institutions to roll over anything — anything — in order to grow and produce profit. Individual rights — the ones that the tea party movement purports to protect — will have zero value in this brave new world. It will be similar to the tyranny you fear from Big Government, only Mickey Mouse will be issuing the decrees.

You’re in favor of freedom. Good, so am I. And we have quite a lot of it in the U.S. But do you know why the people of, say, North Korea have so little freedom? It’s not just because they’re barred from traveling to Hawaii. It’s also because their information is tightly controlled. The government controls the media, blocks the Internet. So not only do they know very little about the world and their own country, but they don’t even know what they don’t know.

In the U.S., much of what we know and rely on to help us decide how to vote is already fed to us by the corporate world. The same companies that make aircraft carriers and medical devices produce textbooks and TV news. But the Supreme Court just struck down the last major barrier to near-total corporate control on what you put in your head. The information we receive will soon have even less relevance to democracy, your community, reality, or anything that doesn’t serve the interest of large banks, energy companies, and money itself.

Your tea party movement said it opposed bailing out the banks at the people’s expense. Now Wall Street will have the freedom to put even more bailout-ready politicians in government.

If you free yourselves from “The Government” only to hand it over to “The Gap,” your freedoms will follow.

You’re against taxes. Presumably, that’s because you don’t like spending your money on things for other people. But all the millions more that corporations will now spend on consultants, media buys, attack-ads, attack-feature-films — where do you think it will come from? Out of the salaries of bankers and CEOs? No, it’ll be passed on to consumers, the buyers of everything from gasoline to Gas-X.

So unless you participate in Buy Nothing Day — every day of the year — it’ll come out of your pocket. Tell me how that’s any different from a tax. (Except you get a small say in how your taxes are spent.)

Whether you count yourself as a tea partier or a disciple of MoveOn.org, the Supreme Court has just attacked your freedom in the name of freedom. I can’t think of any greater time for bipartisanship than now.

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