My Facebook post from this morning seems worthy of a diary:
One of the ways that Bernie disappoints me is that if there is ever some thoughtless thing that liberal propagandists are fond of saying, it's only a matter of time before Bernie starts saying it too. This is in stark contrast to Obama, who always keeps it real and talks to Americans as if we are adults. The one I woke up to this morning was "Money isn't speech. Corporations aren't people. We need to overturn Citizens United." Wrong, wrong, and wrongish!
Starting with the wrongish: Yes we need to overturn Citizen's United, but if all we did was rewind to the state of campaign finance the day before Citizen's United, what we would have would be completely unacceptable levels of corporate ownership of politics. Sound familiar? Citizen's United isn't the legal embodiment of corporate/political corruption, it is merely the most recent major step towards big money's domination of American politics. Are people's memories really that short that they don't remember how awful it was before Citizen's United? Setting the goal at overturning Citizen's United is like calling the police saying "you must arrest this criminal because he broke a window on my car," after the criminal broke into your house, tied you up, raped you, killed your family, stole all your money, and then came back the next day and broke a window on your car.
Now the wrong: Sorry folks, but legally speaking, corporations are indeed people and money is indeed speech. No these things aren't LITERALLY true. This is not the bible. These are two examples of literally thousands of legal fictions which are entirely non-controversial in the legal profession. Pick your favorite liberal legal scholar, maybe Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Thurgood Marshall, or anyone else who is not ignorant on this topic, and they would tell you (if they were alive) that, legally speaking, corporations ARE people and money IS speech. So when you say that they are not, you are basically advertising that you really don't understand the very subject matter of which you are speaking. Here's why:
Corporations are, of course, not literally flesh and blood people. They are a fictitious entity that the law treats like people in many circumstances. When you hear the word "corporation," you probably think Monsanto, Exxon, Phillip Morris, etc. While a tiny percentage of corporations are, in fact, giant monstrosities like those, the overwhelming majority of corporations are mom and pop businesses or non-profit organizations. Choose your favorite social justice organization. If that organization has non-profit status, it is a corporation. Your favorite breakfast restaurant, medical marijuana dispensary, farmer's market, or the shop where you stock up on personal lubricants are also most likely organized as corporations. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but the dailykos is most likely also a corporation.) And one really good thing about corporations, especially the big nasty ones, is we want to be able to sue them if they do something wrong. Well, guess what folks..... you can only sue PEOPLE, and that is why we have this legal fiction called corporate personhood. The legal fiction of corporate personhood came about when the legal fiction of corporations were invented, so they can sue in the courts and, more importantly, be sued in the courts. Trust me, you want them to be people or we'd really be screwed.
You might be thinking, well that's all good with respect to them being sued, but they shouldn't have any of the same rights that people have. Wrong again. Let's say you open up a non-profit organization or a small store. You incorporate, which means you are now a corporation, even though your whole organization has a total of two people. Now that you are a corporation, do you give up your 4th Amendment rights and the police can come search your office any time they want, without a warrant or probable cause? Do you give up your 1st Amendment rights and now the government can tell you what you can or can't say? Of course not. Corporations have most of the same rights as the people that make up the corporation, or else we would live in a world that is totally asinine. (What's that? We do? Oh yeah, we do.)
Which brings us to the final point: Of course money is speech. No, not in the literal sense, don't be a dummy. Again, we are not talking about our favorite science textbook, the bible. We are talking about the 1st Amendment, which is all about forms of free expression that are encapsulated by the term, "speech." The 1st Amendment protects not just the words that come out of our mouths, but the clothes that we wear (think T-shirts or black armbands), the signs we post, the computer code in the programs we use, the expressive actions that we take (burning a flag, protest marches), and, yes, how and where we spend our money. Imagine that congress passed a law saying that you can only spend your money in stores owned by Republicans, or you couldn't give money to an organization that performed abortions, or you couldn't donate to a politician who was for the legalization of marijuana. This would be an unconstitutional law, because it unlawfully infringes on the 1st Amendment right to Freedom of Speech, in this case, the right to express yourself by spending your money however you want.
So, how to prevent corporations from buying up all of politics, when they are indeed, legally speaking, people and they do have 1st Amendment free speech rights to express their political views with their money? Simple. The rights that the Constitution affords to people are not absolute. None of them are. They all have limitations. The legal rule for limiting Constitutional rights is that there must be a compelling government interest behind those limitations and those limitations must be narrowly tailored to further those compelling government interests. Since the government has a compelling interest in preventing gun violence, we can limit the 2nd Amendment. Since the government has a compelling interest in preventing crime, we can limit the 4th Amendment. And, since the government has a compelling interest in corruption free politics, we can limit the 1st Amendment. We already limit freedom of speech in many ways. Everybody has heard that you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. (But, next time you're in a crowded fire, try yelling, "Theater!") You also can't speak so loud that it busts people's ear drums and drowns everybody else out. And that is the key to campaign finance reform. Corporations and billionaires have been speaking so loudly with their enormous financial power that they have drowned out the free speech of the average citizen and busted the ear drums of our democracy. The solution must be in either publicly funded elections or drastically limiting the amount of money that can be contributed to politicians, as well as the timing of independent expenditures.
So, it's not "Money isn't speech. Corporations aren't people. We need to overturn Citizens United." It's we need to pass laws that tell those corporate people they have to Shut the Fuck Up!, meaning stop hogging up all the airtime and talk the same as us regular folks. We also need a Supreme Court majority that will uphold those impositions on 1st Amendment rights as justified by the compelling need to eradicate political corruption. Which is why we need Bernie Sanders. End of sermon.