Author: Chris Kromm

The Supreme Court decision on Citizens United yesterday — which greatly expanded the ability of corporations to spend money to influence elections — sent a collective gasp across the public interest community.

If the last year has shown how easily vested interests can already shape — some would say sabotage — policy like health reform and consumer protection, Citizens United has created a new political environment even more vulnerable to what Thomas Jefferson called “the excesses of the monied interests.”*

After Citizens United, what weapons are left in the public’s arsenal to protect against corruption and the undue influence of the wealthy?

First, a quick recap: In 2008, a conservative group named Citizens United made a documentary attacking Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission said it couldn’t be aired on cable because it violated a ban on corporations spending money for “express advocacy” for or against a candidate.

Citizens United appealed, saying the ad represented “free speech.” Law professor Rick Hasen argues that the Supremes could have narrowly ruled on the statute involved, but instead reached further to overturn previous decisions that had placed limits on corporate spending to influence elections. [Follow the case here.]

So what next? In the wake of the decision, advocates are regrouping and looking at new avenues to battle the growing influence of money in politics:

* NEW LIFE FOR “VOTER-OWNED” ELECTIONS? Trying to restrict campaign spending was often like pressing on a balloon — push down in one place, and special interest money found a way to pop up somewhere else. Some advocates are saying it’s time for a new paradigm: Leveling the playing field through publicly-financed elections.

As Bob Hall of Democracy North Carolina says that such efforts for such “voter-owned” elections are critical now, post-Citizens:

Regulation of private money in politics has gotten much more difficult. The decision … points to the importance of creating an alternative stream of clean money through a public financing option for candidates who abide by a set of public-trust standards. Public financing gives candidates the ability to compete and encourages them to be accountable to voters, not wealthy narrow interests. As the regulation of large wealthy interests becomes more impossible, it becomes more necessary to boost the power of small donors and voters through voluntary Voter-Owned Election programs.

Democracy NC was instrumental in passing such a program in North Carolina for judicial races — which 78% of candidates used in the 2004 and 2008 races — and piloted programs for other state and local offices.

* RESPECT THE LAW: One of the most dangerous prospects now is the influence wealthy interests will have to influence judicial elections and “buy” judges in their favor. In 39 states at least some judges are elected, and special interests spent over $200 million between 1999 and 2008 to influence those contests (double what was spent in the previous decade).

In fact, the Supreme Court recently heard a case just about this issue: Massey v. Caperton, a case involving the CEO of Massey Energy spending $3 million to elect a judge to West Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals; the judge went on to overturn a verdict against the coal conglomerate. The Supreme Court ruled against Massey in June, saying that judges had to recuse themselves when there’s direct conflicts of interest.

Burt Brandenburg of Justice at Stake says the Supreme Court’s latest decision will multiply the ability of wealthy interests to distort justice:

The U.S. Supreme Court forced the judge off the case, but it got a powerful sneak preview of what Citizens United
could spawn. Remarkably, the money spent in the West Virginia election
all came out of the executive’s private finances. Now it’s likely that
he and other CEOs, as well as union chiefs, will ultimately turn
business treasuries into personal election-campaign piggy banks.

Brandenburg urges public interest groups to push for judicial campaigns to at least be excluded from Citizens United and a “special protective shield around elections involving the courts.”

* LET THE SUN SHINE IN: One thing the court did affirm in the decision was the need for full and prompt disclosure of the special interests influencing elections. In the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy argued:

With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can
provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold
corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and
supporters.

Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation says the decision is a clarion call for government to step-up rules and systems for disclosure of campaign financing:

Today’s decision underscores the necessity of creating comprehensive
real-time disclosure for all election spending – across the board —
from when and how often candidates, individuals and PACs report their
contributions and expenditures to those involved in independent
expenditures, issue ads or direct election advocacy.

But Miller also says that the “rapid and informative” disclosure system Kennedy calls for “doesn’t exist yet.”

She also acknowledges that disclosure alone won’t do any good if journalists, advocates and elected officials don’t act on the information:

While we are supportive of Justice Kennedy’s call for greater transparency, we still believe and take issue with his belief that modern technology and the ability to quickly release campaign finance data alone will solve the problem. It is utopian to believe that making it easier to track corporate electoral activity
even comes close to solving the problem of money in politics.

* ARE CORPORATIONS REALLY PEOPLE? For those who know about it, it’s an infamous moment: In 1886, in the otherwise obscure case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite made the following passing remark, without any supporting argument:

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

The astonishing statement was duly recorded by the court reporter (who likely misunderstood the scope of the justice’s comments), and the rest is history: From that moment on, U.S. law has awarded the corporation, a legal fiction, the status of a living and breathing “person,” including First Amendment free speech rights.

There are numerous problems with the idea that corporations are people. For example, as David Korten has pointed out, it creates an interesting legal contradiction: If a corporation is legally owned by its shareholders, and therefore considered their property, wouldn’t that make corporations slaves, something prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment?

A campaign to change U.S. law and stop regarding corporations as people has lived on the fringes of political life for a while, but Citizens United — one of the boldest decisions yet based on corporate personhood — may revive interest in the idea.

A network of people and groups called Move to Amend is spearheading just such an effort now, their first demand being that Congress move to amend the constitution to “Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.”

Clearly, public interest advocates see no simple road to reasserting the power of everyday people versus those with more economic clout.

And now that Citizens United has opened the floodgates of corporate influence in politics, the ability to elect leaders and pass legislation that could reign in the “excesses of the monied interests” has likely become even more difficult.

* UPDATE: Not many have mentioned it, but in the Citizens United decision [PDF], the Supreme Court justices included a little back-and-forth on what the founding fathers thought about corporations and their influence in the political process.

For example, Justice Stevens noted in his dissent (p. 123) that “Thomas Jefferson famously fretted that corporations would subvert the republic,” with a reference to this footnote:

See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Tom Logan (Nov. 12, 1816), in 12
The Works of Thomas Jefferson 42, 44 (P. Ford ed. 1905) (“I hope
we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied
corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial
of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”).

Justice Scalia, on the other hand, downplays these sentiments — even dismissing Thomas Jefferson’s comments thusly (pp. 81-82):

Even if we thought it proper to apply the dissent’s approach of
excluding from First Amendment coverage what the Founders disliked, and
even if we agreed that the Founders disliked founding-era corporations;
modern corporations might not qualify for exclusion. Most of the
Founders’ resentment towards corporations was directed at the
state-granted monopoly privileges that individually chartered
corporations enjoyed. Modern corporations do not have such privileges,
and would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising
Founders– excluding, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson and others favoring
perpetuation of an agrarian society.

Did Scalia just call Jefferson a backwards hick?

NOTE: The following essay by Charles McKinney, professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis and former board member of the Institute for Southern Studies, appeared on the website of The Jamestown Project in 2008, but the themes it raises are as important as ever.

CONTENDING WITH KING

By Charles W. McKinney, Jr., The Jamestown Project

As the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr. approaches, the nation’s attention will be ineluctably drawn, once
again, to the words and teachings of an American who altered the course
of history.

However, unlike the corporate-sponsored celebrations that
mark King’s birth – or the ones that take place during Black History
Month – the focus this time around will be on the work and words of a
veteran activist, drawn to Memphis in the early months of 1968 in an
attempt to confront the debilitating racial and economic inequality
that dogged the lives of the city’s sanitation workers.

Perhaps, as we
reflect on King’s death, we will – at least temporarily – move away from
the pop culture caricature of King that’s come to characterize our
collective memory of him, and actually seek to understand his responses
to the complex dilemmas that bedeviled American society in his lifetime
and beyond.

Historian Tim Tyson writes that in the years after the
assassination we worked hard to turn King into a “black Santa Claus.”
This version of King is a raceless, non-confrontational action figure
that can be, Tyson continues, “filled with whatever generic good wishes
the occasion may dictate.”

In an increasingly conflict-averse society,
we’ve grown comfortable with this new rendition of the Good Doctor –
King 2.0. This King is meek. This King turns the other cheek. This King
has dreams. Over time, we’ve become much less comfortable with the
black southern preacher and fierce social critic who, for most of his
public life, stood against some of the most powerful forces in American
society.

“The church,” King wrote in 1963, “must be the guide and critic of
the state.” If religious leadership failed in this effort, the church
would be reduced to “an irrelevant social club without moral or
spiritual authority.” This belief that the church played a central role
in the transformation of society placed him on a moral and political
trajectory that frequently confounded allies and convicted the
ambivalent.

Most significantly, it placed him at odds with the Johnson
Administration on its two central issues, the War on Poverty and the
war in Vietnam. By 1966, King had come to see Johnson’s domestic war as
piecemeal and under funded. In a time of soaring prosperity, it was
absurd, King declared, to spend billions of dollars on travel to the
moon while poor and working class Americans suffered under unspeakable
conditions.

Johnson’s War on Poverty did accomplish the task of
illuminating the intractability of poverty. For King however, it also
highlighted the unwillingness on the part of liberal politicians to
confront the issue in more foundational ways. The seeds of this
analysis would bear fruit in the Poor People’s March, King’s effort to
place the issue of poverty front and center in the American conscience,
and to challenge the country to make the necessary political and
economic adjustments to address the matter. “True compassion”, King
wrote in 1968, “understands that an edifice which produces beggars
needs restructuring.”

In 1967, a year to the day of his death, King delivered a major
speech against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City. To
King, it was morally inconsistent to simultaneously condemn state
sanctioned violence within the United States while ignoring state
sanctioned violence abroad.

The United States, he intoned in that
historic speech was “the largest purveyor of violence in the world
today.” Moreover, the war highlighted America’s hostile relationship
with its poor and minority citizens, who were dying at dramatically
higher rates than their numbers in the country merited.

King’s
political and spiritual instincts led him to a momentous conclusion –
that the war represented an immoral, racist, imperialist endeavor that
stained the soul of country. For King, the choice – though difficult –
was crystal clear: the moral and political crusade he waged in the
United States was built upon an alter of redemptive nonviolence; this
reality demanded that he speak out against the war. And so he did; and
when he spoke, he did so as a child of God and brother to the
Vietnamese.

It was a position that placed him in uncharted political territory
and had serious implications. Despite the fact that he’d recently
received the Nobel Peace Prize, and had long espoused the international
nature of the struggle for equal rights in the United States, pundits,
politicians and activists virulently chastised King, a mere “civil
rights leader”, for having the audacity to express an opinion on an
issue not unfurling on the streets of Selma or Los Angeles.

He faced
intense resistance from almost every corner of his professional life.
The board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference – the
organization he helped create – expressed its opposition to the effort.
His closest advisors and political allies urged him to stick to civil
rights, and warned that an unwarranted foray into foreign policy could
jeopardize everything they’d worked for over the past decade.

By the time he arrived in Memphis, King’s opposition to the war –
now in full bloom – had rendered him persona non grata at Johnson’s
White House. Surrogates for President Johnson declared that King had
neither the authority nor the competence to speak about foreign
affairs.

His opposition to the war severely damaged his relationships
with other national leaders within the civil rights movement as well.
Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, questioned King’s loyalty to his
country. Whitney Young of the National Urban League accused King and
other anti-war activists of intentionally undermining the War on
Poverty with their anti-war stance. National publications were hardly
more kind.

The New York Times called his anti-war position a “serious
tactical mistake”, while newspapers across the South reaffirmed – with
renewed vigor – that King’s recent statements confirmed his suspected
communist sympathies. The Washington Post ran an editorial titled “What
on Earth can Dr. King be thinking?”

Simply put, King thought that unchecked racism, militarism and
poverty posed a direct threat to the existence of the human race. It
was this perspective that drew him to Memphis, to support a group of
men whose relationship with their employer seemed as if it had been
ripped from the pages of a previous century.

Called to work with a
plantation bell, paid starvation wages and fired on a whim, sanitation
workers represented the nearest thing to an “untouchable” class in the
city. But they were also increasingly fed up with the city’s antebellum
treatment. After they decided to stand and fight for better wages, the
right to organize and their very manhood, they asked King to join them,
and he did. So, in March of 1968, he brought publicity and star power
to their movement. He helped to nationalize their plight.

Of course, King brought a lot of things with him to Memphis for
what would be his final campaign. He brought the titanic pressures of
national leadership, pathological harassment by the FBI and the specter
of his own mortality. He attracted Black Power advocates who openly
mocked his leadership and attempted to consign nonviolent direct action
to a bygone era.

But more importantly, he brought with him a bedrock
assurance that the universe was morally ordered, and that there was in
fact a deep, abiding relationship between power, justice and love.
King, the hard-nosed political realist, also brought with him the
realization that coercion represented one of the crucial variables in
the calculus of liberation.

He knew, in his bones, that Frederick
Douglass was right about the fact that power conceded nothing without a
demand. He brought the knowledge that every ounce of freedom won in his
lifetime was the product of prayerful, deliberative struggle. He
brought an enduring, ever-deepening confidence in the power of
redemptive nonviolence to transform the human condition.

He brought
with him the prophetic hope that America would one day live up to the
high principles it set for itself at the Founding and in the wake of
Civil War. History, King believed, charted an upward path.

Forty years ago this Friday, the nation’s pre-eminent moral voice
fell silent for the last time. As in years past, we will run the risk
of celebrating the man by reducing him to a few familiar sound bites,
perhaps a video or two.

However, as we reflect on Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s legacy this weekend, let us remember him in his context. Let’s
confront the uncomfortable and perpetually uncompleted journeys he
dared us all to take. Have we kept each other accountable for our
mutual betterment? Have we done everything we can to make our democracy
as vibrant and inclusive as possible? Do our houses of worship speak
truth to power, or have they become the “irrelevant social clubs” that
King warned us they could become?

Finally, let us remember the beautifully complex, conflicted and
hopeful young man whose full potential – like that of our country – had
yet to be fully realized.

The following is another dispatch from Bill Quigley, long-time advocate for human rights in Haiti, as well as a leading advocate in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Facing South published Quigley’s earlier piece yesterday, “10 Things the U.S. Can and Should do for Haiti.”

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE FOR HAITI?

By Bill Quigley

Point One: $100 Million – Are You Kidding Me?

President Obama promised $100 million in aid to Haiti on January 14, 2009. A Kentucky couple won $128 million in a Powerball lottery on December 24, 2009. The richest nation in the history of the world is giving powerball money to a neighbor with tens of thousands of deaths already?

Point Two: Have You Ever Been Without Water?

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti have had no access to clean water since the quake hit. Have you ever been in a place that has no water? Have you ever felt the raw fear in the gut when you are not sure where your next drink of water is going to come from?

People can live without food for a long time. Without water? A very short time. In hot conditions people can become dehydrated in an hour. Lack of water puts you into shock and starts breaking down the body right away. People can die within hours if they are exposed to heat without water.

Point Three: Half the People in Haiti are Kids and They Were Hungry Before the Quake.

Over half the
population of Haiti is 15 years old or younger. And they were hungry
before the quake. A great friend, Pere Jean-Juste, explained to me that most of the people of Haiti wake every day not knowing how they will eat dinner that day. So there are no reserves, no soup kitchens, no pantries, nothing for most. Hunger started immediately.

Point Four. A Toxic Stew of Death is Brewing.

Take hundreds of thousands of people. Shock them with a major earthquake and dozens of aftershocks. Take away their homes and put them out in the open. Take away all water and food and medical care. Sit them out in the open for
days with scorching temperatures. Surround them with tens of thousands
of decaying bodies.

People have to drink. So they are drinking bad
water. They are getting sick. There is no place to go. What happens
next?

Point Five. Aid is Sitting at the Airport.

While millions suffer, humanitarian aid is sitting at the Port au Prince airport. Why? People are afraid to give it out for fear of provoking riots. Which is worse?

Point Six. Haiti is Facing A Crisis Beyond Our Worst Nightmares.

“I think it is going to be worse than anyone still understands.” Richard Dubin, vice president of Haiti shipping lines told the New York Times.

He is so right. Unless there is a major urgent change in the global response, the world may look back and envy those tens of thousands who died in the quake.

Wake up, world!

Photo: A boy in Cite Soleil carries away a hard-won bucket of water from a broken water pipe where many Haitians struggled for their share. The shanty town of Cite Soleil has been left with severely diminished water resources after a powerful earthquake rocked the area on 12 January. UN Photo/Logan Abassi

Bill Quigley is legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. A longtime contributor to Facing South, Quigley is a Katrina survivor who has been active in human rights work for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.

To help step up relief efforts, donate to Haiti relief groups through the Institute’s NC Haiti Action campaign — the Institute will match all gifts up to $1,000 made through this campaign!

After this week’s devastating earthquake, the people of Haiti desperately need our help.

In
response, the Institute for Southern Studies has launched “NC Haiti
Action,” a campaign to mobilize the North Carolina community to raise at least $1,000 in 24 hours for critical medical and
other relief. (If you don’t live in NC and still want to help, please do!)

The Institute for Southern Studies will also match all donations made through this cause up to $1,000.

DONATE HERE through Facebook Causes

DONATE HERE through Network for Good

100% of all funds raised will go directly to four credible, social justice-oriented non-profits supporting on-the-ground relief efforts in Haiti:

1 – DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS

2 – HAITI EMERGENCY RELIEF FUND

3 – LAMBI FUND OF HAITI

4 – PARTNERS IN HEALTH

Please join us in helping Haiti at this critical hour!

– Chris, Desiree, Jerimee and Sue for Facing South

By Bill Quigley

1. Allow all Haitians in the U.S. to work. The number one source of money
for poor people in Haiti is the money sent from family and workers in the U.S. back home. Haitians will continue to help themselves if given a chance. Haitians in the U.S. will
continue to help when the world community moves on to other problems.

2. Do not allow U.S.
military in Haiti to point their guns at Haitians. Hungry
Haitians are not the enemy. Decisions
have already been made that will militarize the humanitarian relief — but do
not allow the victims to be cast as criminals. Do not demonize the people.

3. Give Haiti grants as
help, not loans. Haiti does not
need any more debt. Make sure that the
relief given helps Haiti rebuild its public sector so the country can provide its own citizens with
basic public services.

4. Prioritize
humanitarian aid to help women, children and the elderly. They are always moved to the back of the
line. If they are moved to the back of
the line, start at the back.


5. President Obama
can enact Temporary Protected Status for Haitians with the stroke of a
pen. Do it. The U.S. has already done it for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Sudan and Somalia. President Obama should do it on Martin Luther
King Day.

6. Respect human rights from day one. The U.N. has enacted
Guiding Principles for Internally Displaced People. Make them required reading for every official
and non-governmental person and organization. Non governmental organizations like charities and international aid
groups are extremely powerful in Haiti — they too must respect the
human dignity and human rights of all people.
[Ed. Note: For more on the U.N.’s Guiding Principles, see the Institute’s January 2008 report.]

7. Apologize to
the Haitian people everywhere for Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.


8. Release all
Haitians in U.S. jails who are not accused of any crimes. Thirty thousand people are facing
deportations. No one will be deported to Haiti for years to come. Release them on
Martin Luther King Day.

9. Require that
all the non-governmental organizations that raise money in the U.S. be transparent about what they raise and where
the money goes, and insist that they be legally accountable to the people of Haiti.


10. Treat all
Haitians as we ourselves would want to be treated.

Bill Quigley is legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. A friend of the Institute for Southern Studies and longtime contributor to Facing South, Quigley is a Katrina survivor who has been active in human rights work for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.

A Catholic Relief Services official is calling Haiti’s devastating earthquake this week “the disaster of the century.”

It’s a disaster that especially hits home for the growing Haitian community in Florida, which has been one of the top destinations for Haitian immigrants starting in the 1960s.

The 2000 Census found that 23 of the 35 U.S. communities with the highest percentage of Haitian-Americans are in Florida, and the Miami Herald is reporting today that South Florida communities are in full-scale mobilization to channel relief to Haiti.

The crisis has pushed the White House to change course on a key issue facing these communities: the U.S. government’s controversial plans to deport over 30,000 Haitians. As Facing South reported last spring, many of these were refugees from 2008’s deadly hurricanes, which displaced up to 80% of Haiti’s population.

Yesterday, U.S. immigration officials said they would stop deporting Haitians back to the ravaged country, but they stopped short of granting them Temporary Protected Status which has been given to nationals of other countries fleeing natural disasters.

In a statement yesterday, the Florida Immigrant Action Coalition argued that granting Temporary Protected Status would have immediate benefits to Haiti’s relief efforts:

Granting TPS to Haitians here would allow some 30,000
Haitians to work legally and send remittances to loved ones in Haiti.
These remittances are a vital lifeline, particularly in times of
disaster. The money goes directly to Haitians on the island,
encouraging them to stay and rebuild their country. TPS would, thus,
discourage Haitians from attempting dangerous sea voyages to get to the
United States.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

With hospitals, water supplies and other vital resources in Haiti in shambles, dozens of charities are mobilizing to provide immediate relief and fill in the gaps.

For those in the Facing South community wanting to contribute to relief efforts, here are several groups that have a strong track record in Haiti and have swung into action, and which may not be as well known:

Doctors Without Borders

Haiti Emergency Relief Fund

Lambdi Fund for Haiti

Madre

Mennonite Disaster Service

Partners in Health

Let us know in the comments about other groups that might be good to support!