The Story of Citizens United v. FEC

(via Danny Mayer and Democracy is For People)

In under nine minutes, Annie Leonard explains:

* The history of “corporate personhood” in America.

* The dangers of allowing disproportionate corporate influence over our lives.

* Why a constitutional amendment is the best way to defend our democracy from an all-out assault by corporations motivated solely by an unquenchable thirst for profits.

The Story of Stuff

Linda Greenhouse: The Rhetoric That Shaped The Abortion Debate

Linda Greenhouse: The Rhetoric That Shaped The Abortion Debate
Fresh Air (NPR)



Before the Supreme Court struck down many state laws restricting abortion in the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade, the Justices read briefs from both abortion-rights supporters and opponents.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse has collected the best of these briefs — as well as important documents leading up to the decision — in a new book, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling.

In an interview on Fresh Air, Greenhouse explains the arguments in favor of decriminalizing abortion — and the rhetoric used by both sides of the debate that continues to resonate more than 35 years after Roe.

After researching the book, Greenhouse says, she came away with a more nuanced understanding of how the abortion debate has affected so many other issues.

"What the research did indicate to me is how multifaceted the issue is and how the word [abortion] came over time to stand for so much more than the termination of a pregnancy," she says. "It really came to stand for a debate about the place of women in the world."

To Read More and To Listen to the Interview

5 Ways You Can Fight Citizens United: The Story of Citizens United v FEC - How we the people can reclaim our democracy

5 Ways You Can Fight Citizens United: The Story of Citizens United v FEC - How we the people can reclaim our democracy.
by Annie Leonard and Allison Cook
Yes!

We never expected to be writing an article with this title. Aren’t united citizens a good thing? Civil Rights movement? Egypt? Madison?

Yes, but that’s not the kind of people power we’re talking about here. What we want to fight is the disastrous 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision. Ironically, “Citizens United” is the name of a conservative advocacy group which receives corporate funding and works to promote increased rights for corporations. The Citizens United v. FEC case originally dealt with the question of whether or not airing Citizens United’s documentary about Hillary Clinton was an advocacy ad, and therefore subject to existing restrictions on election ads under the McCain-Feingold law.

Whether your passion is protecting the environment or creating green jobs or improving public education—or really any other issue on which corporate interests are blocking real solutions—this is your campaign too.But in a brazen act of judicial activism, the court decided to consider the much broader issue of corporate spending to influence elections, which wasn’t even presented in the original case. In a decision that stunned democracy advocates and trampled a number of campaign finance laws, a slim five-Justice majority ruled that corporations—including for-profit corporations—do indeed have a right to spend as much money as they want to elect or defeat candidates in our elections.

This decision effectively grants corporations the same First Amendment Free Speech protections granted to real live people.

The catch is that corporations obviously are not people. Someone get the Supreme Court a biology textbook! There are some really big, and really significant, differences. For starters, people are part of the biological system; we need clear air and water, a healthy environment, a stable climate to thrive. Corporations are legal entities, created by people, and have no such biological needs and thus no inherent reason to safeguard the environment.

People make decisions based on a constant balancing of many interests, including love for our families and communities, compassion, kindness, desire for a better world, as well as economic and material interests. Corporations don’t have families and communities, nor hearts with which to love them. As Justice Stevens said in his dissenting opinion, “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts and no desires.” Instead, corporations—by both law and the demands of the market—are under enormous pressure to focus on one thing: maximizing profit.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Justice v. The World

U.S. Justice v. the world
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon

In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber." Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically. All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Padilla -- like so many other War on Terror detainees -- has spent years in American courts trying unsuccessfully to hold accountable the high-level government officials responsible for his abuse and lawless imprisonment (which occurred for years prior to his indictment). Not only has Padilla (and all other detainees) failed to obtain redress for what was done to them, but worse, they have been entirely denied even the right to have their cases heard in court. That's because the U.S. Government has invented -- and federal courts have dutifully accepted -- a whole slew of legal doctrines which have only one purpose: to insulate the country's most powerful political officials from legal accountability even when they commit the most egregious crimes, such as imprisoning incommunicado and torturing an American citizen arrested and detained on U.S. soil.

Yesterday, in South Carolina, an Obama-appointed federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Padilla against former Bush officials Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and others. That suit alleges that those officials knowingly violated Padilla's Constitutional rights by ordering his due-process-free detention and torture. In dismissing Padilla's lawsuit, the court's opinion relied on the same now-depressingly-familiar weapons routinely used by our political class to immunize itself from judicial scrutiny: national security would be undermined by allowing Padilla to sue; "government officials could be distracted from their vital duties to attend depositions or respond to other discovery requests"; "a trial on the merits would be an international spectacle with Padilla, a convicted terrorist, summoning America's present and former leaders to a federal courthouse to answer his charges"; the litigation would risk disclosure of vital state secrets; and "discovery procedures could be used by our enemies to obtain valuable intelligence."

In other words, our political officials are Too Important, and engaged in far Too Weighty Matters in Keeping Us Safe, to subject them to the annoyance of the rule of law. It's much more important to allow them to Fight The Terrorists without restraints than to bother them with claims that they broke the law and violated the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That's the mentality that has resulted in full-scale immunity for both political and now private-sector elites in a whole slew of lawbreaking scandals -- from Obama's refusal to investigate Bush-era crimes or high-level Wall Street criminality to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms and legal protection for defrauding mortgage banks. With very few exceptions -- yesterday's ruling, for instance, brushed aside a contrary decision from a Bush-43-appointed federal judge in California last year that refused to dismiss Padilla's lawsuit against John Yoo for having authorized his torture (that decision is on appeal) -- Executive Branch officials and the federal judiciary have conspired to ensure that the former are shielded from judicial scrutiny even for the most blatant and horrifying crimes.

To Read the Rest of the Report