Contributors

Thursday, June 07, 2012

Should Corporations Be Accountable for What They Say?


In a democracy the business of government needs to be open and transparent: we need to see what our elected representatives are saying and doing to make sure that they have our best interests at heart.

Given that, shouldn't the process we use to select those representatives be equally open and transparent, to make sure that we know who got those representatives elected and can judge what their motivations might be?

Since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, unlimited corporate spending on political ads has become a major influence on the outcomes of elections. To make sure that the electoral process remains open and fair, the FCC recently ruled that TV stations have to put detailed information on political ad purchases on line.


But Republicans in the House are trying to prevent the FCC from enforcing that rule. For people who claim to believe in personal responsibility, Republicans sure do want to make it hard to hold people accountable for the things they say in public.

Stations are already required to make this information available, but only in paper form at the stations. These stations frequently charge a substantial fee to copy the information, making it hard for non-profit public interest groups to obtain it.

Everything about Republican opposition to this transparency rule is bogus. It's not a burdensome new regulation: they already have to provide this information in hard copy. Every TV station has a website, and it's much easier to slap data into an HTML file and stick it on the website than it is to hire someone to be responsible for producing, maintaining and copying paper documents. A web-based solution can be automated to be made cheap and effortless, while hard copy will always be expensive and personnel-intensive.

The stations claim it's bad because it allows competitors to find out what their advertising rates are. But competitors can already get the data by sending a secretary over to make a paper copy; and they can deduct any costs as a business expense.

The conceit of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was that speech is money, and multinational corporations are people. The former is debatable, but the latter is specious nonsense: corporations are a legalistic creation of government; if you prick them they do not bleed. They do not have birth certificates. They cannot vote. Why should they be able buy political campaigns?

And why are these corporate "citizens" so afraid of being identified with the ads they're running? Why do they cower in the shadows instead of bravely speaking their minds? Why don't they want to be associated with the negative half-truths they pay to have spewed over the airwaves? Are they afraid of the wrath of well-informed voters? Or are they really shills for foreign-owned corporations (like, say, TransCanada, which is the force behind the Keystone XL pipeline)?

Due to the the lax disclosure rules after Citizens United, there's already no way to know for sure whether foreign money from multinational corporations owned by the Chinese Red Army or Cayman Island banks is influencing American politics.

And after all, the Constitution doesn't say that you have to be a citizen to enjoy free speech: the First Amendment just says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," without mentioning anything about the nationality or citizenship of the purveyors of that speech.

Thus, the prohibition against foreign campaign spending doesn't descend from the Constitution, it's just one of those pesky nanny-state FEC regulations.

In time Republicans will come to bitterly regret the Citizen's United decision. Corporations are fickle; they are becoming increasingly stateless, owned by foreign interests and only care about money. In ten or fifteen years, when the Republican Party consists of nothing but old, white and wizened men, the dynamic new power players from Brazil, India and China may anonymously use their fiscal might to back Democrats and shout down Republican candidates on the American airwaves.

After all, it's completely legal for foreigners to do it even today. All they need is a green card.

1 comment:

juris imprudent said...

unlimited corporate spending on political ads has become a major influence on the outcomes of elections.

Yes, corporations like the NRA, AARP and the AFL-CIO. And your issue is?