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Corporate Speech is Our Silence PDF Print E-mail
Written by Richard Whitehead   
Friday, 29 January 2010 09:15
Richard WhiteheadIn a disheartening 5-4 decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that a government restriction prohibiting corporations and unions from using general funds money to campaign on behalf or against political candidates, was an unconstitutional restriction. After this scandalous ruling was made, some nascent progressive efforts, led by Congresswoman Donna Edwards and constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin, have been gaining some distinct notoriety as credible measures pushing for a constitutional amendment rejecting the Court's ruling. As defined by Movetoamend.org, a constitutional amendment needs to “firmly establish that money is not speech” and that “human beings” are the only entities “entitled to constitutional rights”.

There are a number of similar petitions out there, and, to the best of my knowledge, I've signed every one of them. Why are these petitions important and why should you sign them? As any casual observer can easily guess, the Supreme Court's ruling crucially alters the political balance of power away from a political system already favorable to business interests, to a system where corporate money has the potential to define the terminology of conflict in future election campaigns. If there was ever a threat to democracy in America, this Court ruling is it folks! What we can now expect over the coming years is a shift away from a campaign finance ideal composed of millions of small donations, toward ones led by a smaller number of large donations. Already, the Chamber of Commerce threatens to organize the most aggressive election campaign in history during high stakes of the 2010 election cycle. With corporations now able to engage in a campaign spending orgy, the Chamber's threats will likely become a reality.

However, before we concretize our progressive objections within the discursive battle ground of politics, we need to come to grips with exactly what is so offensive with the Supreme Court's decision. Indeed, as these petitions show, we have already started defining the landscape of our objections. As if to reflect America's predilection for most things legalistic, and progressive's distaste for most things Corporate, the main offense has rested upon a rejection of corporate personhood, or legal provisions treating corporations to the same rights afforded to people. Perhaps the Public Citizen Petition best sets this tone, where five out of the seven objections listed cites the term “corporate” or “corporation.”

Addressing corporate personhood has clear political advantages. The concept is digestible in a 30 second sound bite, is easy to delineate in a petition, and has broad appeal to those non-progressives equally tired of a system dominated by unelected bigwigs. At the same time, debates within the broader media and blogosphere have yet to tackle some important epistemological questions about freedom, which, in my mind, are the more fundamental problems arising out of the Supreme Court's highly dubious interpretation of free speech. Why is this so fundamental? It is so because the Court's majority interpretation, which grants free speech rights to corporations, is consistent with an overly legalistic interpretation free speech, an interpretation that is at the crux of the upper-class bias in the American polity.

Let's start with the term “free”, which, in America's somewhat unique lexicon, describes a condition whereby a person's actions are unrestrained, autonomous, or independent. For the classical liberalism articulated by the likes of Montesquieu, Locke, and Hume, as well as America's Constitutional architects, political beliefs were constructed in opposition to things like divine rule, aristocratic clientelism, and taxation without representation. In this context, the natural law treatment of people as atomistic creatures might make some sense. But, in today's America, the idea of an individual being autonomous, unrestrained, and independent is theoretically and empirically untenable. The fact that corporations will now spend large sums of money on adverts successfully infiltrating opinion formation, should be enough evidence to show that this classical liberal definition of freedom is entirely fictional and actually damaging to the 80 to 90 percent of us who are nothing more than ordinary folks.

There is one more tendency worth pointing out. American political discourses are striking for their knee-jerk tendency to identify threats to freedom as emanating from institutions, namely governmental ones. In other words, the American lexicon reduces freedom as a function inversely proportional to the size of government. No surprise there! This logic of course gives people like Cleta Mitchell, a leading GOP attorney, the latitude to say that the Court's ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission “has ripped the duct tape off the mouths of the American people.” If the reality of politics was as simplistic as saying ‘less government equals more freedom', then I can completely concur with Mitchell that the Court's decision was an expansion of freedom. But, reality is not that simple.

So, how does these lexica relate to the Supreme Court Ruling? Let me first say that the exercise of government authority can, without a doubt, be inversely related to freedom. During my travels in Eastern Europe and Africa as an election monitor, I can say quite confidently that the there are few things “free” about beating protestors, forging election protocols, or assassinating political opponents. However, our overly legalistic interpretation of freedom, along with our knee-jerk tendency to identify government as the first and foremost threat to freedom, yields an unrealistic understanding of the sociological nature of freedom and ignores threats to freedom from non-governmental entities. In reality, we might say that freedom is inversely related to greater concentrations of power in the hands of people who are unelected. Stated differently, one private person's relative dominance is another private person's relative subordination. One person's loud-mouthed speech is another person's silence. The use of government authority can have a liberating effect when direct toward resolving these power imbalances between non-democratic forces. The primary spirit of democratic governance is to level the playing field of politics, yielding the concept of one-person, one vote that the Founders applied to the House of Representatives at least. In order to comport with the spirit of democratic governance, speech should be treated in essentially the same manner.

The Supreme Court's ruling however, effectively jettisoned this democratic ideal. Rather than seeing campaign spending restrictions as enhancing the democratic voice of ordinary citizens, the court took a highly primitive, purely outmoded perspective by suggesting that the only threat to absolute freedom comes from government itself. Yet, in reality, freedom of speech can be just as limited by campaign dominance from corporations as by the sometimes paternalistic nature of governmental authority.

The conservative reply is obvious. Even after the Supreme Court's decision, people can still say what they want. True. But, remember that the logic of the Citizen United position is something to the effect that, while corporations could indeed say what they wanted prior to the Court's ruling, spending restrictions effectively limited corporate ability to communicate what they wanted. This is essentially the logic I defined above, except that my logic comports with the spirit of democratic governance, while the Citizen United position does not. Any reasonably astute thinker would able to understand that giving people or corporations unlimited power to buy political voice fails to comport with the spirit of democratic governance, which the United States claims to uphold.

But Supreme Court justices are not necessarily astute thinkers and good democrats. Their ruling has the effect of reinforcing a system whereby political discourse is treated as a private commodity, where the voice with the highest bid wins. While our short-term focus should be targeted toward corporate personhood, we need to keep in mind that the real bone of contention lies with America's dominant interpretation that equates freedom with autonomy and freedom as universally at odds with government authority. With this interpretation, politics has less to do with the merits of an argument and the betterment of public interests, and more to do with the use of public political space for the satisfaction of private material wants. In many of the developing countries I've worked in, the privatization of public space would normally be defined as corrupt. Why should the often touted “beacon of democracy” be treated with lower democratic standards?


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Having recently completed his Ph.D. in comparative and international political studies at Temple University, Richard Whitehead has served as an election monitor in Eastern Europe and Africa and been involved in a variety of research projects related to political parties, elections, and democratic governance in Africa. Currently, Richard is working on post-Doc research at Temple University. As a resident of Norway, he is also an active member of the Norwegian standby force, as managed by the Norwegian Refugee Council.

More information can be found at www.drwhitehead.org . You can also contact Richard at \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text91239 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->\n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , follow him on Twitter @stunetii, or visit his blog at http://stunetii.blogspot.com

Last Updated on Friday, 29 January 2010 09:46
 

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