By Jeremy Logan
Oct. 15, Volume 47 Issue 1
Corporations are spending billions of dollars on political campaigns and making a killing on their return.
In 2010 the supreme court ruled, in a split 5 to 4 vote, that corporations are people, and as such were protected by the first amendment. Right now volunteers from Washington Moves to Amend [Wamend] are gathering signatures on campus to overturn the Citizens United ruling by amending the constitution to clearly state that corporations are not people and money is not free speech.
“By Dec. 31st, we need 320,000 signatures and right now we are just over halfway,” said Autumn Schmitt, a Wamend volunteer and student at SFCC. “We actually need 300,000 but we want the extra twenty just to make sure.”
What started as a clerical error in the 1886 Supreme Court hearing of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, kicked off a long string of Supreme Court decisions that brought us to the corporate spending we are seeing in our elections today.
“One level of corporate personhood is that a corporation has been deemed a person so that it can sue and be sued,” said Stacey Cossey, a local organizer for Wamend. “The other level, which occurred five years ago in the Citizens United hearing, essentially allowed corporations the right of free speech, but corporations can’t speak so they are allowed to use an undisclosed, unlimited amount of money to pour into super pacs that they can then use to buy our elections.”
Since the 2010 ruling, you may have seen protesters with painted signs that read things like, “If money is speech, then poverty is silence,” or, “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”
The fear that protesters have held since the court’s ruling — that big money in elections would sway power further from the people and into the hands of corporate greed — have already come into fruition.
The Brennan Center for Justice studied campaign contributions in the 2014 Senate races, discovering that outside spending had more than doubled since 2010. Up to $486 million was spent on campaigns with 47 percent coming from outside groups, or super pacs.
Potentially, multinational corporations are allowed to meet with politicians, and then negotiate their terms to basically buy support from politicians, and what the investors get in return is well worth the high price of a politician.
A recent study by the Sunlight Foundation, which gathered information from 14 million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, found that between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions.
What did they get in return? $4.4 trillion in federal business and, corporate welfare through government support.
“What they found out is that for every $1 they [corporations] put in, they get $760 back in subsidies, and that number is two thirds the amount that we pay in income tax every year,” Cossey said.
A recent survey done by Public Citizen, found that democrats and republicans alike oppose the supreme court ruling by 61 percent, with very little differing opinions from one party to the next.
“There are a lot of people that are seeking me out to sign, because they know it is a good cause when I tell them what the initiative is about, Schmitt said. “Especially when I point out that it is non-partisan, of course they would believe in it, if you know what it is there is no denying it.
In spite overwhelming support, the volunteers of Wamend are have struggled to get the necessary signatures. They tried to get the initiative up last year but fell short. This year they are at the halfway mark.
It doesn’t help that they seem to find resistance at some of the local events around Spokane.
“At the in state fair I’m thinking, ‘great, 300,000 people go by,’ I can’t afford a thousand dollar booth fee so we’ll just stay in the free speech zone outside because they have to have a free speech zone,” Cossey said. “But all they had to do was put the free speech zone across the street, and away from the ticket booth where people walk by, to totally squash the voice of democracy.
“It took something that could have been very meaningful for our state and made it meaningless,” she added.
There are still 2.5 months left to get the signatures they need, so if you would like to volunteer your time, donations, or just your signature, go to Wamend.org, and make your voice heard. Every vote counts.