Thom Hartman: Fascism Coming to a High Court Near You
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I’m sick of conservatives pretending that a corporation is no different than an individual citizen, with the same rights and protections under the law (but not the same responsibilities: can you throw a corporation in prison?).
A corporation is not a citizen. The tortured logic Supreme Court Justice Roberts used to defend Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right To Life (more on that below) reminds me of this exchange between Bart Simpson and Fat Tony, the mobster (source: http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Bart_the_Murderer):
Tony: Bart, um, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?
Bart: No.
Tony: Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?
Bart: Uh uh.
Tony: And, what if your family don’t like bread? They like… cigarettes?
Bart: I guess that’s okay.
Tony: Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime, Bart?
Bart: Hell, no!
Now let’s say you’re a citizen and you want to say defamatory things about Hillary Clinton. Would that be wrong? And say, instead of a citizen, you’re a multinational conglomerate using millions upon millions of dollars to defame the candidate you don’t like. Is that wrong?
Thom Hartmann takes a loot at the SCOTUS and relevant cases, and warns about corporate fascism coming to a high court near you, in this article from The Huffington Post:
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Get ready.
Last year a right-wing group put together a 90-minute hit-job on Hillary Clinton, and wanted to run it on TV stations in strategic states. The Federal Election Commission ruled that the “documentary” was actually a “campaign ad” and thus fell under the restrictions on campaign spending of McCain-Feingold, and thus stopped it from airing. (Corporate contributions to campaigns have been banned repeatedly and in various ways since 1907 when Teddy Roosevelt pushed through the Tillman Act.)
Citizens United, the right-wing group, sued the Supreme Court, with right-wing hit man and former Reagan solicitor general Ted Olson as their lead lawyer.
This new case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, presents the best opportunity for the Roberts Court to use its five vote majority to totally re-write the face of politics in America, rolling us back to the pre-1907 era of the Robber Barons.
As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker (”No More Mr. Nice Guy”): “In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.”
And the only way the modern Republican Party can recover their power over the next decade is to immediately clear away all impediments to unrestrained corporate participation in electoral politics. If a corporation likes a politician, they can make sure he or she is elected every time; if they become upset with a politician, they can carpet-bomb her district with a few million dollars worth of ads and politically destroy her.
And it looks like that’s exactly what the Roberts Court is planning. In the Citizens United case, they asked for it to be re-argued in September of this year, going all the way back to the 1980s and re-examining the rationales for Congress to have any power to regulate corporate “free speech.”
As Robert Barnes wrote in The Washington Post on June 30, 2009, “Citizens United’s attorney, former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, had told the court that it should use the case to overturn the corporate spending ban the court recognized in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, as well as its decision in 2003 to uphold McCain-Feingold as constitutional.”
The setup for this came in June of 2007, in the case of the Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right To Life, in which the Roberts Court ruled that the FEC couldn’t prevent WRTL from running ads just because they were a corporation.
