The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 6

DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

All,

THE REAL NEXUS BETWEEN 'RACE AND CLASS' IN AMERICAN POLITICS TODAY IS THAT THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF WHITE SUPREMACY AS A MAJOR IDEOLOGICAL, STRUCTURAL, INSTITUTIONAL, SYSTEMIC, AND MATERIAL FORCE AND REALITY WITHIN THE LARGER CONTEXT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM ITSELF IN ALL OF ITS DIMENSIONS IS AS ALWAYS INEXTRICABLY CONNECTED AND MUTUALLY DEPENDENT FORCES IN THE UNITED STATES.

THUS WHAT REALLY NEEDS TO BE OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGED AND SAID TODAY BECAUSE IT IS THE WHOLE DAMN TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH IS THE FOLLOWING:

This country is in much deeper trouble than it actually thinks it is. The most fundamental and horrifying fact is that in the last two elections in 2016 and 2020 a whopping 58% of ALL WHITE VOTERS nationally across the board in every single individual class group from the poor to the working class to the middle and upper middle classes as well as the wealthy throughout the entire country have voted overwhelmingly for Trump TWICE and in spite of everything (e.g. two impeachments, four major criminal indictments totaling 91 counts of felonious criminality, electoral insurrection and an attempted coup, numerous civil suits for sexual assault, personal defamation, massive criminal financial fraud in the hundreds of millions of dollars, a torrential and frankly psychotic onslaught of lies and endlessly virulent and violent fascist invocations in the name of dictatorial demands for and promises of public 'retribution') STILL openly and shamelessly support him for the presidency in 2024

THE MOST IMPORTANT, TERRIFYING, BUT ALMOST NEVER PUBLICLY COMMENTED UPON FACT IS THE FOLLOWING:

Trump has won more votes over the course of two elections than ANY OTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FROM EITHER PARTY IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Trump received a total of 137 million votes in the last two elections (63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020) which is a record previously held by Barack Obama who received 134 million votes combined in 2008 and 2012. The huge difference of course is that Obama only received these many votes because 95% of black voters and 70% of Asian and Latino voters voted for him. I keep trying to remind people that Obama (like every other Democratic party candidate in the last 60 years (!) received only a paltry 41% of the white vote (43% in 2008 and an even more dismal 39% in 2012). For example Hilary Clinton only received 37% of the white vote nationally in 2016 and Biden only received 42% of the white vote in 2020. This means of course that Obama, Clinton, and Biden between them only received 40% of the national white vote in this country in the last four elections. This means that ALL of them lost the white vote by a landslide.

Reminder: The largest national voting demographic in the country are white Americans who constituted 65% of all American voters in 2020 and were 70% of voters from 2008-2016. Which means as always that the white share of the voting public is larger than ALL OTHER racial/ethnic groups--male and female combined!

BTW the single largest voting bloc in the entire country is WHITE FEMALE VOTERS who make up 33% of all voters in the U.S. today—WHITE MALES now stand at 32%
.
ANOTHER ABSOLUTELY HARROWING STAT THAT SHOULD NEVER BE IGNORED: In the last 70 years of presidential elections since 1952 (a total of 18 elections overall and counting) a majority of white voters have voted for a Democratic party candidate ONLY ONCE (1964).

What all this means in a larger sense is that because the GREAT MAJORITY OF WHITE AMERICAN VOTERS in GENERAL SINCE 2016 HAVE ACTUALLY IN FACT openly supported and most importantly have continued to vote for Trump FAR MORE THAN ANY OTHER CANDIDATE IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY we are all in very big trouble come 2024 and that the actual political prospects for what happens not only to the presidency but even more importantly Congress (as well as civil society in general) is the worse than at any time since the horrendous 1980s…

Kof

HAPPY LABOR DAY!
September 4, 2023

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

[NOTE: The following commentary and open letter to a friend and colleague was originally posted here on November 11, 2016]

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

--James Baldwin

“One cannot change in one’s head that which can only be changed in society.”

—C.L.R. James

Hey Ray,

I know your intentions are good and you accurately recognize from a theoretical and analytical standpoint the integral and indispensable role of the fundamental materiality of corporate capitalism and its corresponding political/ideological identity of neoliberalism. That’s all fine and absolutely necessary to any coherent and productive analysis of contemporary politics and culture in the 21st century as far as it goes. However from a larger, more nuanced, and detailed analytical perspective it’s absurd and inherently counterproductive to act as though a thoroughgoing critique of the severe social, economic, and cultural fallout (and the informed civic rage which animates it) that is the direct result of over 60 million citizens openly endorsing and electing an authoritarian wealthy white rightwing “populist" to lead the country is not equally important and necessary as well. After all white supremacy, misogyny/patriarchy, and class exploitation are all joined at the hip at the levels of both material reality and ideological/social values and identity in this society (and always were). This means among many other things that a “purely” economic class analysis alone (what many and various Marxist theoreticians and scholars from George Lukacs to Antonio Gramsci have all for very good and sound reasons thoroughly critiqued as “economism”) is not only inadequate and irrelevant, but undesirable. My larger point here is that ideological and “cultural” factors having to do with “race", gender, sexual identity, and a broader intersectional critique of the dialectical (and dialogical) tension between these categories are essential to and more importantly inseperable from the still broader political, economic, and ideological critique of global capitalist hegemony that hovers over all of these various social and economic relations. Thus no myopic/reductive/sophist analyses by either fundamentally nationalist, populist, or even analytically reductive quasi-Marxist tendencies and theoretical frameworks are inherently sufficient in themselves and that means one must always be especially vigilant in actively interrogating and challenging these constructs on the levels of not only theory, but strategic and tactical dimensions as well. Kapiche? Comprende? Dig?... Good…

Love & Struggle,

Kofi

Frank Rich On The Tyranny of Big Money in American Politics

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28rich.html?src=me&ref=general

All,

The best damn political journalist writing for a major newspaper today--the always highly informative and razor sharp analyst Frank Rich--once again lays out in very precise terms exactly what has gone wrong and why, and what we need to do to fix it...

Kofi


OP-ED COLUMNIST

Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy
By FRANK RICH
November 27, 2010
New York Times


SO America’s latest crisis — until it wasn’t — was airport screeners touching our junk. As this long year lurches toward its end, we all agree that something has gone wrong in America, and we’re desperately casting about for a coherent explanation for our discontent, if not a scapegoat. Alas, the national consensus that the T.S.A. and full-body scans might be the source of all evil fizzled in less than a week. Most everyone got to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving without genital distress.

















Damon Winter/The New York Times
Frank Rich

The previous transient scapegoat was the Democrats. They were punished in yet another “wave” election — our third in a row — where voters threw Washington’s bums out. But most of the public remains bummed out nonetheless. In late October, the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that only 31 percent of respondents believed that America was on the right track. When the survey asked the same question after the shellacking, the percent of optimists jumped to ... 32. Regardless of party or politics, there’s a sense a broken country can’t be fixed. Few have faith that even “wave” elections are game-changers anymore.

The larger explanations for this dysfunction are well-worn by now, from the impotence of the filibuster-bound United States Senate to the intractable polarization of an electorate divided more or less 50-50 since Bush v. Gore. Such is the bipartisanship of the funk that Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck each succeeded in bringing off well attended rallies in Washington to commiserate over the country’s political and governmental stagnation — with each rally offering its competing diagnosis.

For Stewart, the hyperpartisanship of the modern news media remains the nation’s curse. “The country’s 24-hour politico pundit panic conflict-onator did not cause our problems,” he told the throngs at his rally to “restore sanity,” but it “makes solving them that much harder.” At Beck’s rally to “restore honor,” the message seemed to be that America’s principal failing is a refusal to recognize that God “is our king.” If Stewart’s antidote was more civility, Beck’s was more prayer.

Stewart’s point is indisputable as far as it goes. Beck’s, not so much: If prayer hasn’t cured this highly prayerful nation by now, it may be because our body politic has long since developed an immunity to it. But both rallies, for all the commotion they generated, have already faded to the status of quirky historical footnotes. The reason is that neither addressed the elephant in the room — or the donkey. That would be big money — the big money that dominates our political system, regardless of who’s in power. Two years after the economic meltdown, most Americans now recognize that that money has inexorably institutionalized a caste system where everyone remains (at best) mired in economic stasis except the very wealthiest sliver.

The Great Depression ended the last comparable Gilded Age, of the 1920s, and brought about major reforms in American government and business. Not so the Great Recession. Last week, as the Fed’s new growth projections downsized hope for significant decline in the unemployment rate, the Commerce Department reported that corporate profits hit a record high. Those profits aren’t trickling down into new jobs or into higher salaries for those not in the executive suites. And the prospect of serious regulation of those at the top of the top — the financial sector — is even more of a fantasy in the new Congress than it was in its predecessor.

Wall Street is already celebrating the approach of bonus season by partying like it’s 2007. In The Times’s account of this return to conspicuous consumption, we learned of a Morgan Stanley trader, since fired for unspecified reasons, who went to costly ends to try to hire a dwarf for a Miami bachelor party prank that would require the dwarf to be handcuffed to the bachelor. If this were a metaphor — if only! — Wall Street would be the bachelor, and America the dwarf, involuntarily chained to its master’s hedonistic revels and fiscal recklessness with no prospect for escape.

As John Cassidy underscored in a definitive article titled “Who Needs Wall Street?” in The New Yorker last week, the financial sector has paid little for bringing the world to near-collapse or for receiving the taxpayers’ bailout that was denied to most small-enough-to-fail Americans. The sector still rakes in more than a fourth of American business profits, up from a seventh 25 years ago. And what is its contribution to America in exchange for this quarter-century of ever-more over-the-top rewards? “During a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot and Lipitor,” Cassidy writes, the industry reaping the highest profits and compensation is one that “doesn’t design, build or sell a tangible thing.”

It’s an industry that can buy politicians as easily as it does dwarfs, which is why government has tilted the playing field ever more in its direction for three decades. Now corporations of all kinds can buy more of Washington than before, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and to the rise of outside “nonprofit groups” that can legally front for those who prefer to donate anonymously. The money laundering at the base of Tom DeLay’s conviction by a Texas jury last week — his circumventing of the state’s post-Gilded Age law forbidding corporate campaign contributions directly to candidates — is now easily and legally doable at the national level.

There are plenty of Americans who don’t endorse Stewart’s indictment of cable news; there’s even a reasonably large group that doesn’t buy Beck’s perceived shortfall in American religiosity. But seemingly everyone is aggrieved about the hijacking of the political system by anonymous special interests. The most recent Times-CBS News poll found that an extraordinary 92 percent of Americans want full disclosure of campaign contributors — far many more than, say, believe in evolution. But they will not get their wish anytime soon. “I don’t think we can put the genie back in the bottle,” said David Axelrod as the Democrats prepared to play catch-up to the G.O.P.’s 2010 mastery of outside groups and clandestine corporate corporations.

The story of recent corporate political donations — which we may never learn in its entirety — is just beginning to be told. Bloomberg News reported after Election Day that the United States Chamber of Commerce’s anti-Democratic war chest included a mind-boggling $86 million contribution from the insurance lobby to fight the health care bill. The Times has identified other big chamber donors as Prudential Financial, Goldman Sachs and Chevron. These are hardly the small businesses that the chamber’s G.O.P. allies claim to be championing.

Since the election, the Obama White House has sent signals that it will make nice to these interests. While the president returns to photo ops at factories, Timothy Geithner has already met with the chamber’s board out of camera range. In a reportorial coup before Election Day, the investigative news organization ProPublica wrote of the similarly behind-closed-doors activities of the New Democrat Coalition — “a group of 69 lawmakers whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists” makes them “one of the most successful political money machines” since DeLay’s K Street Project collapsed in 2007. During the Congressional battle over financial-services reform last May, coalition members repaired to a retreat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to frolic with lobbyists dedicated to weakening the legislation.

Such is the ethos in his own party that Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, complained this month that he “couldn’t even get a vote” for his proposal for a one-time windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Republicans “obviously weren’t going to vote for it,” he told Real Clear Politics, but Democrats also demurred, “saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fund-raising.”

Roughly two-thirds of the New Democrat Coalition’s House contingent won re-election on Nov. 2. Now they’ll have more Republican allies in both houses of Congress. Tea Party populists — already being betrayed by one Senate leader, Jon Kyl, on the supposed pledge against earmarks — may soon be as disillusioned as those Democrats who had hoped Barack Obama’s economic team wouldn’t look like Wall Street.

For all the McConnell-Boehner rhetorical pandering to Tea Partiers, the health care law will not be repealed by Congress — and certainly not any provisions that benefit the G.O.P. establishment’s friends in the health care industry. Over at FreedomWorks, Dick Armey’s Tea-Party-organizing group, there’s much belligerent talk of retribution against corporations seen as too friendly to Obama policies — most notably General Electric. It’s all hot air: G.E.’s political action committees gave a total of $1.6 million to politicians in both parties in 2010, and one of its former high-powered lobbyists, Dan Coats, is the newly elected Republican senator from Indiana and a probable member of the Senate Finance Committee.

America needs a rally — or, better still, a leader or two or three — to restore not just honor or sanity to its citizens but governance that’s not auctioned off to the highest bidder. When it was reported just days before our election that Iran was protecting its political interests in Afghanistan’s presidential palace by giving bags of money to Hamid Karzai’s closest aide, Americans could hardly bring themselves to be outraged. At least with Karzai’s government, unlike our own, we could know for certain whose cash was in the bag.

Frank Rich On Christine O'Donnell, The Tea Party Movement, the Republican Party, and the Super Wealthy Sponsors of the U.S. Right

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03rich.html?th&emc=th

All,

As usual Frank Rich shows us what intellectual clarity, research, and knowledge can do to reveal the complex truth about our society and culture. Thought, insight, depth, and genuine critical analysis rooted in material reality trumps stupidity, ignorance, fear, and irrationality every single time. It also doesn't hurt to have an eloquent and disciplined command of language. Thanks Frank...

Kofi


October 2, 2010

The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell
By FRANK RICH
New York Times

ALL it took was some 30,000 Republican primary voters in a tiny state to turn Christine O’Donnell into the brightest all-American media meteor since Balloon Boy. For embattled liberals, not to mention the axis of Comedy Central, “Saturday Night Live” and Bill Maher, she’s been pure comic gold for weeks: a bottomless trove of baldfaced lies, radical views and sheer wackiness. True, other American politicians have dismissed evolution as a myth. Some may even have denied joining a coven. But history will always remember her for taking a fearless stand against masturbation, the one national pastime with more fans than baseball.

Yet those laughing now may not have the last laugh in November. O’Donnell’s timely ascent in the election season’s final lap may well prove a godsend for the G.O.P.

At first some Republicans had trouble figuring this out. On primary eve, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee badmouthed O’Donnell’s “disturbing pattern of dishonest behavior.” On election night, Karl Rove belittled her “nutty” pronouncements and “checkered background” on Fox News. But by the morning after, bygones were bygones. The senatorial committee’s chairman, John Cornyn, rewarded O’Donnell’s “dishonest behavior” with an enthusiastic endorsement and a big check. A sweaty Rove reversed himself so fast you’d think he’d been forced to stay up all night listening to Glenn Beck’s greatest hits at top volume in a Roger Ailes re-education camp.

Rove’s flip-flop was no doubt hastened by his own cohort’s assaults on both his ideological purity and masculinity. The blogger Michelle Malkin labeled him an “effete sore loser,” and Sarah Palin publicly instructed him to “buck up.” But surely the larger motive for his retreat was the dawning recognition of just how valuable O’Donnell is to the G.O.P.’s national aspirations in November — even should she ultimately lose her own race in blue Delaware. Whatever her other talents, she’s more than willing to play the role of useful idiot for her party. She gives populist cover to the billionaires and corporate interests that have been steadily annexing the Tea Party movement and busily plotting to cash in their chips if the G.O.P. prevails.

While O’Donnell’s résumé has proved largely fictional, one crucial biographical plotline is true: She has had trouble finding a job, holding on to a home and paying her taxes. In this, at least, she is like many Americans in the Great Recession, including the angry claque that found its voice in the Tea Party. For a G.O.P. that is even more in thrall to big money than the Democrats, she couldn’t be a more perfect decoy.

By latching on to O’Donnell’s growing presence, the Rove-Boehner-McConnell establishment can claim it represents struggling middle-class Tea Partiers rather than Wall Street potentates and corporate titans. O’Donnell’s value is the same as that other useful idiot, Michael Steele, who remains at the Republican National Committee only because he can wave the banner of “diversity” over a virtually all-white party that alternately demonizes African-Americans, Latinos, gays and Muslims.

O’Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs.

The O’Donnell template, by sharp contrast, is Palin. It was Palin’s endorsement that put O’Donnell on the map, and it’s Palin’s script that O’Donnell is assiduously following. The once obscure governor of Alaska was also tripped up by lies and gaffes when she emerged on the national stage, starting with her misrepresentation of her supposed opposition to “the bridge to nowhere.” But she quickly wove the attacks into a brilliant cloak of martyrdom that positioned her as a fierce small-town opponent of the coasts’ pointy-head elites. O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”

The more O’Donnell is vilified, the bigger the star she becomes, and the more she can reinforce the Tea Party’s preferred narrative as “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement” (in the recent words of the pundit Charles Krauthammer) populated only by everyday folk upset by big government and the deficit. This airbrushed take has had a surprisingly long life even in some of the nonpartisan press. In a typical example just three weeks ago, the influential publication National Journal delivered a breathless report on how the Tea Party functions as a “headless” movement where “no one gives orders.” To prove the point, a head of the headless Tea Party Patriots vouched that “75 percent of the group’s funding comes from small donations, $20 or less.”

In fact, local chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker. Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

However much these corporate contributors may share the Tea Party minions’ antipathy toward President Obama, their economic interests hardly overlap. The rank and file Tea Partiers say they oppose government spending and deficits. The billionaires have no problem with federal spending as long as the pork is corporate pork. They, like most Republican leaders in 2008, supported the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout. They also don’t mind deficits as long as they get their outsize cut of the red ink — $3.8 trillion worth if all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

But while these billionaires’ selfish interests are in conflict with the Tea Party’s agenda, they are in complete sync with the G.O.P.’s Washington leadership. The Republicans’ new “Pledge to America” promises the $3.8 trillion addition to the deficit and says nothing about serious budget cuts or governmental reforms that might remotely offset it. Surfing the Beltway talk shows last Sunday, you couldn’t find one without a G.O.P. politician adamantly refusing to specify a single program he might cut at, say, the Department of Education (Pell grants?) or the National Institutes of Health (cancer research?). And that’s just the small change. Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else.

They are acing it, these guys. Election Day is now only a month away. The demoralized Democrats are held hostage by the unemployment numbers. And along comes this marvelous gift out of nowhere, Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party everywoman, who just may be the final ingredient needed to camouflage a billionaires’ coup as a populist surge. By the time her fans discover that any post-election cuts in government spending will be billed to them, and not the Tea Party’s shadowy backers, she’ll surely be settling her own debts with fat paychecks from “Fox & Friends.”

The New York Times Attacks the Supreme Court's Anti-Democratic Decision to Allow Corporations Control Over American Politics

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html?em

All,

The New York Times excoriating editorial take on the disgraceful Supreme Court sellout of the American people and the political system to super wealthy corporations...

Kofi


January 22, 2010

EDITORIAL

The Court’s Blow to Democracy

New York Times

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.


Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company