The article quoted several banking sources as saying they were outraged that the president had criticized their industry for the financial meltdown of 2008 and for their big bonuses. It wrapped up with a quote from Texas Republican John Cornyn, the senator tasked with raising money for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, noting that he was now making regular visits to Wall Street in New York City, because “I just don’t know how long you can expect people to contribute money to a political party whose main plank of their platform is to punish you.”
It was a loud shot across Obama’s bow, and within two weeks Obama had, just like Clinton, changed his tune on a wide variety of initiatives, ranging from taxes on the wealthy to banking, insurance, and pharmaceutical industry reforms.
Our democracy died thanks to Citizens United. Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor—all of whom dissented from the Roberts majority in the Citizens United case—knew it, too. Justice Stevens wrote the main dissent in the Citizens United case.
Calling the decision “misguided” in the first paragraph of his ninety-page dissent, Stevens (and colleagues) pointed out that the majority on the court had just handed our country over to any foreign interest willing to incorporate here and spend money on political TV ads.
“If taken seriously, our colleagues’ assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the Government’s ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions,” wrote Stevens. “Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.” Stevens then pointed out a dangerous consequence of John Roberts’s ruling, writing, “More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans: To do otherwise, after all, could ‘enhance the relative voice’ of some (i.e., humans) over others (i.e., corporations).”
Justice Stevens further points out the absurdity of granting corporations what are essentially citizenship rights under the Constitution, suggesting that perhaps the next SCOTUS decision will be to give corporations the right to vote: “Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”
Stevens recounted the history of the evolution of corporations in America, noting, “Corporations were created, supervised, and conceptualized as quasi-public entities, ‘designed to serve a social function for the state.’ It was ‘assumed that [they] were legally privileged organizations that had to be closely scrutinized by the legislature because their purposes had to be made consistent with public welfare.’”
Quoting earlier Supreme Court cases and from the Founders, Stevens wrote, “The word ‘soulless’ constantly recurs in debates over corporations… Corporations, it was feared, could concentrate the worst urges of whole groups of men.” Stevens was right: Thomas Jefferson famously fretted that corporations would subvert the republic.
In an incredible irony, Stevens even quoted Chief Justice John Marshall, the man who had first, in the 1803 Marbury case, given the court itself the power to overrule laws, such as McCain-Feingold, that had been passed by Congress: “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being a mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”
This decision was a naked handoff of raw political power to corporate forces by five unelected judges. Indeed, with this decision in place and the law of the land, the First Amendment now protects the “free speech” rights of the presidents of Russia and China and Iran to form corporations in the United States and pour millions of dollars toward supporting or defeating the politicians of their choice.
It protects the “right” of the largest polluting corporations on earth to politically destroy any politician who wants to give any more authority to the Environmental Protection Agency. It protects their “right” to elevate to elected status any politician who is willing to dismantle the EPA—or any other government agency that protects or defends the people of America from Royalist predation.
The behavior of the Roberts court in Citizens United eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said about the Economic Royalists, “In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.” Even before the Citizens United case blew open the doors to a corporate takeover of American politics, the corrosive influence of corporations’ having “rights” was already evident. Now these “unequal consequences” have been put on steroids.
With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, President Obama’s fledgling progressive agenda—already badly wounded by stimulus-act debate and the health reform debate—was dead. John Roberts killed it just one year after readministering the presidential oath in the Map Room.
From that point forward, corporations, with their newly acquired golden key to our democracy, jammed the airwaves with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign advertising to send a message to Congress that there would be political consequences to any decisions made that year.
Only when the 2010 midterm elections finally did come around would the effects of this court decision really be known.
As a result of Citizens United, outside political spending skyrocketed from just $68 million in the 2006 midterms, to over $304 million in the 2010 midterms. That’s a 400 percent increase in corporate cash influencing elections and buying politicians, just ten months after the Citizens United decision.
Royalist Republicans, this time calling themselves Tea Partiers, retook the majority in the House of Representatives, significantly cut into the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, and most important turned a lot of blue state legislatures around the country—in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—red.
Barack Obama’s revolution was officially over after the 2010 midterm elections—the first national elections post-Citizens United.
This is when the Crash of 2016 was sealed.
CHAPTER 10
Masters of the Universe
What’s happened is something that even Marx wasn’t cynical enough to dream about. It’s a financial war of Wall Street not only against labor but against industrial capitalism, it destroys the market.
In 1981, I had a conversation with my friend Dick Gregory. We were on an airplane high above the Atlantic Ocean on our way to Uganda to do relief work, and our conversation turned to America’s unfortunate wars abroad (mind you, this is twenty years before the start of our nation’s most recent decade of military misadventures). It was during that conversation that Dick gave me one of the best insights I’d ever heard on democracy and human nature.
“I don’t know why America always thinks she has to run all around the world forcing people to take democracy at the barrel of a gun,” he said. He paused for a moment, and then added with a sly grin, “When you’ve got something really good, you don’t have to force it on people. They will steal it!”