Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
True electoral reform will require getting the money out of politics, which means meaningful public financing for (at least) national-office campaigns and overturning of the very harmful 2009 US Supreme Court decision Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310, in which the five-member corporatist majority banned the rest of the Federal government from restricting so-called independent political expenditures by corporations, citing 1st Amendment freedom of speech.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the rationale was something like this:
1. corporations are people. 2. corporations can't vote or go to rallies like human people. 3. therefore, to exercise their first amendment right to free speech, they NEED to be able to pour funding into political entities that promote their pro-corporate, anti-human agenda.
I think not so, because I believe it was decided more narrowly. I'll confess lameness, here: This is one of the recent USSC cases I've not actually read, only the summaries of the court's holding. I often rely on SCOTUSblog, but in this case they had a bunch of links rather than unified coverage, so these might be good enough: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html?pagewanted=all http://reclaimdemocracy.org/who-are-citizens-united/ It was one of the classic 5-4 decisions that _now_ would deadlock, following Scalia's blessed demise. Quoting the second link: The Court majority argued: 1. barring independent political spending amounts to squelching free speech protected by the First Amendment. 2. the First Amendment protects not just a person’s right to speak, but the act of speech itself, regardless of the speaker. Therefore the First Amendment protects the speech of corporations and unions, whether we consider them people or not. 3. although government has the authority to prevent corruption or “the appearance of corruption,” it has no place in determining whether large political expenditures are either of those things, so it may not impose spending limits on that basis. 4. the public has the right to hear all available information, and spending limits prevent information from reaching the public. In any event, it tops most people's list of Most Awful USSC Decision Since Plessy v. Ferguson, and there's a widely felt desire to erase it through either USSC or Congressional action, whichever works soonest.
Cf. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-...
With hilarious Mencius Moldbug rejoinder buried in the comment section.
Charlie is very much One of Us in lots of ways (technical, and I also like his politics). Strangely, a couple of times in person at SF conventions, I got the impression that he thought I was some sort of reactionary, perhaps because Eric Raymond is a friend of mine (despite politics and economics, e.g. he's Austrian School and I'm a neo-Keynesian), perhaps because I grew up in a British colony and he thinks I'm one of those unspeakable people nostalgic for empire. Or maybe he just finds American liberals boring. No offence taken. I'll still read everything he writes. I'll readily admit to being politically unreliable. ;-> And one of the reasons for that is I'll talk to just about anyone who's not actually trying to kill me.