#Buckley v. Valeo

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Thom Hartmann

Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation (largely responsible for Project 2025) just implicitly threatened Americans that if we don’t allow him and his hard-right movement to complete their transformation of America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, there will be blood in the streets.

“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” he told a TV audience, adding: “The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

He’s not wrong. America has been changed as a result of a series of corrupt rulings by Republicans (exclusively; not one of these rulings has been joined by a Democratic appointee) which have changed America’s legal and political systems themselves.

As Roberts notes, this is really the largest issue we all face, and our mainstream media are totally failing to either recognize or clearly articulate how radically different our country is now, how far the Republicans on the Court have dragged us away from both our Founder’s vision and the norms and standards of a functioning, modern democratic republic.

First, in a series of decisions — the first written by that notorious corporatist Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) — Republicans on the Court have functionally legalized bribery of politicians and judges by both the morbidly rich and massive corporations.

This started with Powell’s 1978 Bellotti opinion, which opened the door (already cracked a bit) to the idea that corporations are not only “persons” under the Constitution, but, more radically, are entitled to the human rights the Framers wrote into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

Using that rationale, Powell asserted that corporations, like rich people (from the Buckley decision that preceded Belotti by two years), are entitled to the First Amendment right of free speech. But he took it a radical step farther, ruling that because corporations don’t have mouths they can use to speak with, their use of money to spend supporting politicians or carpet-bombing advertising for a candidate or issue is free speech that can’t be tightly regulated.

Citizens United, another all-Republican decision with Clarence Thomas the deciding vote (after taking millions in bribes), expanded that doctrine for both corporations and rich people, creating new “dark money” systems that wealthy donors and companies can use to hide their involvement in their efforts to get the political/legal/legislative outcomes they seek.

Last week the Republicans on the Court took even that a huge step farther, declaring that when companies or wealthy people give money to politicians in exchange for contracts, legislation, or other favors, as long as the cash is paid out after the deed is done it’s not a bribe but a simple “gratuity.”

So, first off, they’ve overthrown over 240 years of American law and legalized bribery.

Last week they also gutted the ability of federal regulatory agencies to protect average people, voters, employees, and even the environment from corporations that seek to exploit, pollute, or even engage in wage theft. This shifted power across the economic spectrum from a government elected by we the people to the CEOs and boards of directors of some of America’s most predatory and poisonous companies.

Finally, in the Trump immunity case, the Court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution under criminal law, regardless of the crimes they commit, so long as they assert those crimes are done as part of their “official” responsibilities. And who decides what’s “official”? The six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of this, or its consequences. We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.

In America 2.0, there is no right to vote; governors and secretaries of state can take away your vote without even telling you (although they still must go to court to take away your gun).

They can destroy any politician they choose by simply pouring enough cash into the campaign system (including dark, untraceable cash).

The president can now go much farther than Bush’s torturing and imprisoning innocent people in Gitmo without legal process: he can now shoot a person on Fifth Avenue in plain sight of the world and simply call it a necessary part of his job. Or impoverish or imprison you or me with the thinnest of legal “official” rationales.

America 2.0 is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy, as I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The South has finally — nearly — won the Civil War.

While it will be months or more likely years before all of these new powers the Republicans on the Court have given the president, rich people, and corporations begin to dawn on most Americans, they will, step-by-step transform this country into something more closely resembling Hungary or Russia than the democracies of Europe and Southeast Asia.

The only remedy at this late stage in this 50+ yearlong campaign to remake America is a massive revolt this fall at the ballot box, turning Congress — by huge majorities — over to Democrats while holding the White House.

If we fail at this, while there will be scattered pockets of resistance for years, it’ll be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s rightwing billionaires have set us on.

There has never been a more critical time in the history of our nation outside of the last time rich oligarchs tried to overthrow our democracy, the Civil War. Like then, the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a nation of, by, and for we the people.

[eluvion]

oh also also re: money as speech—the ruling for citizens united v fec came out in 2010 so in the mcu timeline matt would have been somewhere around the beginning of law school

[racefortheironthrone]

is lobbying just basically legalized bribing, or is there any other difference?

The difficulty is that lobbying is simultaneously "legalized bribery" and "influence peddling," and the core of the First Amendment's guarantee of "the right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Whether it's done by an environmental group trying to preserve endangered species or a deeply corrupt corporation that wants to strip-mine public lands for pennies on the dollar while poisoning the planet, or by a civil rights group trying to achieve equal rights or a hate group trying to legalize oppression of minorities, it's all lobbying.

Now, professionalized lobbying is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, wealthy elites simply just bought elected officials or entire branches of government outright, but during the Progressive Era this was uncovered by muck-raking journalists and led to a lot of people going to jail, so something had to take its place - and that was lobbying.

Even as late as 1945, there were barely 400 lobbying groups in the U.S compared to 17,000 today. The cause of the explosion of lobbying as an industry was a combination of the post-war expansion of the U.S government and changes to campaign finance law in the wake of Watergate. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) sought to regulate campaign spending and campaign finance in response to perceived corruption in Federal elections, and was further strengthened by major amendments in 1974 that set hard limits on contributions and spending and created the Federal Elections Commission to enforce FECA.

The Supreme Court, which had begun its slide to the right thanks to LBJ massively fumbling the ball with his Supreme Court nominations and letting Nixon get a bunch of Justices on the Court, struck down a lot of those limits in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 - which started us down the road to Citizens United. Corporate lobbies very quickly realized that they could expand their influence enormously by acting as the middle-men between corporate cash and elected officials, which now meant that they could wield enormous carrots and sticks to get elected officials to comply with their wishes.

Now, I think there will always be problems with lobbying that come down to the issue of concentrated vs. diffuse interests. There are all kinds of political issues where the majority of the people are on one side of a debate, but where they aren't particularly aware of or engaged with that debate, and even though they have a stake in the outcome, it's rather vague and abstract not something they care about very much. But a lobbying group for a particular "special interest" that is on the other side of that debate and is very aware and engaged and cares about the outcome very much because they stand to gain or lose a lot of money from the outcome. So that lobbying group, which represents a minority position and should lose in the democratic process, will invest the necessary resources in order to win.

The only way to fight this, sadly, is for social movements to be just as organized as lobbyists. For the longest time, it was the labor movement that acted as the "countervailing power" in American politics, because they had the manpower and the money to effectively lobby the Federal government not just on behalf of unions but also on behalf of low-wage workers or racial minorities or consumers and so forth. The problem is that the labor movement doesn't really have that manpower and money any more, but nothing has really replaced it in American politics, in no small part because the left is not immune to America's instinctive hatred of politics and institutions.

And yes, the other major thing that we could do to fight "legalized bribery" is to break up the nexus between campaign finance and lobbying, but in order to do that, we'd have to overrule about fifty years of Supreme Court precedents, and that's not going to happen without the Democratic Party successfully taking back control of the Supreme Court.

[0r4nge-s0da]

timeline - 10/16

1 congress passes fedral election campaign act 1971 and 1974

watergate and vietnam- congress attempts to limit corruption in political campaigns

created federal election commission

create presidential election campaign fund

provide public financing for presidential primaries and general elections

limit presidential campaign spending

require disclosure

limits contributions

bipartisan FEC was creates to administer campaign finance laws and enforce compliance with their requirements

FECA made it eaiser for political parties to raise money for voter registration drives and the dist. of campaign materual at the grass roots level or for generic party advertising known as soft money

BUCKLEY V VALEO 1976-did the limits of expenditures limit free speech?

court decides no- restrictions on individual contributions to political campaigns do not violate the 1st amendments

restriction of spending by campaigns DID violate the 1st amendment-- can use personal and family money

BIPARTISAN CAMPAIGN REFORM ACT 2002

also McCain-Feingold act

eliminate increased use of "soft money" to fund ads by political parties on behalf of their candidates

raised amts of hard money permitted

hard money-- given to specific candidate

1,000 per cand. per election to 2,000 ( primary and general elections counted separately-- 4,000 total )

provide for future adjustments in accordance w inflation

federal candidates cannot ask for/ direct soft money to another person/ agents cant solicit receive or direct soft money in order to avoid fed. limits

prohibited electioneering communications-- political ads by corporations and unions in attempt to influence federal elections

527 groups skyrocket( do not directly endorse candidates)

encourage spread of political action committees

pacs are formed by groups contributing to candidates whom it believes will be favorable towards its goal

[squishmallow36]

On the one hand, I kind of want to know how Elvin campaign finance and on the other hand...*looks at Citizens United v. FEC and Buckley v Valeo* that would be physically painful

[worldofwardcraft]

Why is it so useless?

April 15, 2024

The Federal Election Campaign Act was signed into law in 1971 by President Nixon with the purpose of creating limits for campaign spending on communication media, adding additional penalties to the criminal code for election law violations, and imposing disclosure requirements for federal political campaigns. In 1974, the act was amended and established the Federal Election Commission to enforce these goals. It was a good idea while it lasted.

Because over the years, right-wing organizations and individuals have launched lawsuit after lawsuit aimed at eliminating any kind of election regulation whatsoever. And a conservative Supreme Court has been only too happy to help. In fact, almost immediately it ruled that limits on campaign contributions were unconstitutional (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976).

With the passage of the follow-up Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002, large chunks of this law too were struck down. The Court declared issue ads cannot be banned (FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, 2007), restrictions on wealthy candidates violate their First Amendment rights (Davis v. FEC, 2008) and, worst of all, corporations can spend unlimited amounts on campaigns (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010).

The arrangement of the FEC itself is also problematic. The commission consists of six members, three from each major party. Which almost guarantees gridlock since at least four of the six need to approve investigating any campaign violation. Still, according to the FEC's enabling statute, any non-enforcement is subject to judicial review. So, naturally, in June 2018, two Republican-appointed judges on the DC Circuit — including now-SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh — gutted that rule. No wonder that, of the 200 matters currently before the commission, only seven are under active investigation.

Of course, whenever the subject is election cheating, Donald Trump's name is always prominent. Most recently, he's been charged with illegally soliciting and directing "soft" (unregulated and undisclosed) money to an outside super PAC called America First Action, an outfit that spent almost $134 million on ads opposing Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Here's FEC Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub last December:

And for those keeping count, the tally is now 59 times the Commission has been presented with allegations that Mr. Trump or his committees violated the FECA, 29 times the Commission’s nonpartisan professional staff recommended that we take some steps to enforce the law, and (checks notes) still zero times a Republican commissioner has voted to approve any recommendation to enforce the law against Mr. Trump.

So if you're counting on the Federal Election Commission to rein in Trump's ongoing election crimes, don't bother. It's simply no use.

[prelawland]

What is Citizens United v. FEC?

By Ellie Boman, University of Central Missouri Class of 2024

December 2, 2023

Citizens United v. FEC, a landmark case mentioned in almost every article that brings up money in campaigns. But what is this case? What even is the FEC? The FEC stands for Federal Election Commission and their primary goal is to interpret or enforce campaign finance law as outlined through different historical acts like the 1971 FECA and 2002 BCRA. [6] Though campaign finance law and the FEC run a fine line, as some laws can infringe upon the First Amendment rights of corporations and citizens, as is the claim that is brought up in Citzens United v. FEC. The First Amendment is as follows: [5]

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It has been established that the FEC enforces campaign law, and such law was the Federal Election Campaign Act, which introduced caps on individual donations to certain campaigns and how those individual’s identities must be revealed after donating a certain amount of money. Though a case known as Buckley v. Valeo (1976) established that these restrictions were against the First Amendment rights of free speech and association. [1]

These restrictions and cases have led us to the landmark case of Citizens United v. FEC (2010). This case was brought to the attention of the Supreme Court after a non-profit corporation called Citizens United released a film about Hillary Clinton, who was a current Senator as well as a candidate for the 2008 presidential election. The corporation wanted to release the film a month before the primary elections were due to take place, but they were not able to do to another act of campaign finance law, which was the Federal Election Campaign Act: [3]

“The Federal Election Campaign Act ("the Act") prohibits corporations and labor unions from using their general treasury funds to make electioneering communications or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a federal candidate.” [3]

Due to this Act, Citizens United sought relief in court against the FEC, claiming that this law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United on this claim, saying that denying corporations and unions the right to use their own treasury funds for independent public broadcasts and imposed a ‘no limit’ on these expenditures. The Supreme Court further explained that if time and notice was given ahead of time for these broadcasts, then that would allow for voters to see who was paying for the ads, and proper time would allow for voters to analyze all of the evidence. In simple terms, this meant that Citizens United and any other corporations could use as much as their own money as they deemed necessary to fund independent public broadcasts, such as the Hillary Clinton film. [2]

The immediate backlash of this decision was felt, as some claimed this was a win for free speech, and others felt that not all voters have the opportunity to be well-informed of political campaigns, such as researching the different ads or movies that release and who funded them. [4]

Furthermore, the Citizens United decision has opened the doorway for the creation of a phenomena known as ‘super PACs.’ Super PACs are vague groups that can accept an unlimited amount of money from any source that is within the United States. Their contributions come from groups that give these PACs ‘dark money,’ and those groups do not need to disclose their funding, which leaves a loophole for super PACs not disclosing their own funding sources. To put it simply, Group A receives money from Group B. Group B does not need to reveal itself or its funding, due to the ruling made in Citizens United v. FEC, but Group A does. Group A can reveal that it received money from Group B, but since no one knows where Group B got its money, there is no set trail for Group A’s funding. [4]

This loophole has led to a 900% increase of campaign spending by corporations between 2008 and 2016. [4] The impact of Citizens United v. FEC changed the course of campaign financial law, and either side continues to stand firm on its claim for or against the landmark decision.

______________________________________________________________

[1] Amdt1.7.11.1 overview of Campaign Finance - Constitution Annotated. Constitution Annotated. (n.d.). https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-11-1/ALDE_00013490/ 

[2] Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. (n.d.). Oyez. Retrieved December 1, 2023, from https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205

[3] Federal Election Commission. (2010, February). Citizens United v. FEC. FEC.gov. https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/

[4] Lyon, G. (2022, January 21). How Does the Citizens United Decision Still Affect Us in 2022? Campaign Legal Center. https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-does-citizens-united-decision-still-affect-us-2022

[5] U.S. Const. I Amendment

[6] Weiner, D., & Bacskai, O. (2023, September 15). The FEC, Still Failing to Enforce Campaign Laws, Heads to Capitol Hill | Brennan Center for Justice. Www.brennancenter.org. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fec-still-failing-enforce-campaign-laws-heads-capitol-hill

[the-lady-general]

valeo means i'm fine they probably just have like super good op sec about bruce horak coming back valeo means i'm fine and like that was only a super super brief shot of a smoking shuttle that probably doesn't even have anything to do with uhura at all right not everybody needs dead parent trauma right valeo means i'm fine and oriana is going to be a fat happy baby with her parents and buckley and that poor orion kid valeo means i'm fine i mean surely they wouldn't have called the planet i'm fine if they wouldn't fix it right who would do that like stellar cartography would have called it "if you die on this planet you die in real life" of it were so bad right not something like Valeo (it means i'm fine) Beta (better) V(ictory)

[wuerkaixii]

US has become a country of the rich, by the rich and for the rich

A year on from Joe Biden’s narrow election victory over Donald Trump, the US remains on a knife-edge. Many political outcomes are possible. These range from the gradual economic and political reform that Biden is seeking to the subversion of elections and constitutional rule that Trump attempted in January — and that he and the Republican Party are still intent on pursuing.

It is not easy to diagnose exactly what ails America so deeply that it incited the Trump movement. Is it the ceaseless culture wars that divide America by race, religion and ideology? Is it the increase in inequality of wealth and power to unprecedented levels? Is it America’s diminishing global power, with the rise of China and the repeated disasters of US-led wars of choice leading to national agony, frustration and confusion?

All these factors are at play in America’s tumultuous politics. Yet, in my view, the deepest crisis is political — the failure of America’s political institutions to “promote the general welfare,” as the US Constitution promises. Over the past four decades, American politics has become an insider’s game to favor the super-rich and corporate lobbies at the expense of the overwhelming majority of citizens.

Warren Buffett homed in on the essence of the crisis in 2006. “There’s class warfare, all right,” he said. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The main battlefield is in Washington. The shock troops are the corporate lobbyists who swarm the US Congress, federal departments and administrative agencies. The ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying (an estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (an estimated $14.4 billion in the 2020 federal elections). The pro-class war propagandists are the corporate media, led by mega-billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Nearly 2,500 years ago, Aristotle famously observed that good government can turn into bad government through a flawed constitutional order. Republics, governed by the rule of law, can descend into populist mob rule or oligarchic rule by a small and corrupt class or a tyranny of personal, one-man rule. America faces such possible disasters unless the political system can detach itself from the massive corruption of corporate lobbying and campaign financing by the rich.

America’s class war on the poor is not new — it was launched in earnest in the early 1970s and implemented with brutal efficiency over the past 40 years. For roughly three decades, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression to the Kennedy-Johnson period of 1961-68, America was generally on the same development path as postwar Western Europe, becoming a social democracy. Income inequality was declining and more social groups, most notably African Americans and women, were joining the mainstream of economic and political life.Then came the revenge of the rich. In 1971, a corporate lawyer, Lewis Powell, laid out a strategy to reverse the social democratic trends toward stronger environmental regulation, worker rights and fair taxation. Big business would fight back. President Richard Nixon nominated Powell to the US Supreme Court in 1971 and he was sworn in early the next year, enabling him to put his plan into operation.

Under Powell’s prodding, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate money in politics. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the court struck down federal limits on campaign spending by candidates and independent groups as violations of free speech. In First National Bank of Boston v. Belotti (1978), Powell wrote the majority opinion declaring that corporate spending for political advocacy was free speech that could not be subjected to spending limits. The court’s onslaught on campaign finance limits culminated in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010), which essentially ended all limits on corporate spending in federal politics.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he reinforced the Supreme Court’s assault on the general welfare by cutting taxes for the rich, waging an assault on organized labor and rolling back environmental protections. That trajectory has still not been reversed.

As a result, the US has diverged from Europe in basic economic decency, well-being and environmental control. Whereas Europe generally continued on the path of social democracy and sustainable development, the US charged ahead on a path marked by political corruption, oligarchy, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, disdain for the environment, and a refusal to limit human-induced climate change.

A few numbers spell out the differences. Governments in the EU raise revenues averaging roughly 45 percent of gross domestic product, while US government revenues amount to only about 31 percent of GDP. European governments, thus, are able to pay for universal access to healthcare, higher education, family support and job training, while the US does not ensure provision of these services. Europe tops the World Happiness Report rankings of life satisfaction, while the US ranks only 19th. In 2019, life expectancy in the EU was 81.1 years, compared to 78.8 years in the US (which had a higher life expectancy than the EU in 1980). As of 2019, the share of the richest 1 percent of households in national income was about 11 percent in Western Europe, compared with 18.8 percent in the US. In 2019, the US emitted 16.1 tons of carbon dioxide per person, compared with 8.3 tons per person in the EU.

In short, the US has become a country of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, with no political responsibility for the climate damage it is imposing on the rest of the world. The resulting social cleavages have led to an epidemic of deaths of despair (including drug overdoses and suicides), declining life expectancy (even before COVID-19) and rising rates of depression, especially among young people. Politically, these derangements have led in varied directions — most ominously to Trump, who offered faux populism and a cult of personality. Serving the rich while distracting the poor with xenophobia, culture wars and a strongman’s pose may be the oldest trick in the demagogue’s playbook, but it still plays surprisingly well.

This is the situation that Biden is trying to address, but his successes so far have been limited and fragile. The simple fact is that all congressional Republicans and a small but decisive group of Democrats (most notoriously Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) are intent on blocking any meaningful increase in taxes on the rich and US corporations, thereby preventing the growth in federal revenues urgently needed to create a fairer and greener society. They are also blocking decisive action on climate change.

Thus, we are arriving at the end of Biden’s first year in office with the rich still entrenched in power and with obstacles in every direction regarding fair taxation, increased social spending, the protection of voting rights and urgently needed environmental safeguards. Biden could still eke out some modest wins and then build on them in the coming years. The public wants this. Roughly two-thirds of Americans favor higher taxes on the rich and corporations.

However, there is a real possibility that Biden’s setbacks in 2021 will help the Republicans win control of one or both chambers of Congress in 2022. That would put an end to legislative reforms until at least 2025 and could even presage the return of Trump to power in the 2024 presidential election amid social disarray, violence, media propaganda and voter suppression in Republican-controlled states.

America’s turmoil has disturbing international implications. The US cannot lead global reforms when it cannot even govern itself coherently. Perhaps the only thing that unites Americans nowadays is an overwrought sense of threats from abroad, mainly from China. With America in domestic disarray, politicians of both parties have escalated their anti-China rhetoric, as if a new cold war could somehow soothe America’s homegrown angst. The only thing that Washington’s bipartisan belligerence will produce, alas, is more global tension and new dangers of conflict (over Taiwan, for example), not security or real solutions to any of our urgent global problems.

The US is not back, at least not yet. It is still in the throes of a struggle to overcome decades of political corruption and social neglect. The outcome remains highly uncertain and the outlook for the coming years is fraught with peril for both the US and the world.

[reportwire]

Happy 100th Birthday to Senator, Undersecretary, and Judge James L. Buckley

On Thursday, James L. Buckley turns 100 years old. Most law students will know his name from the seminal case of Buckley v. Valeo. But he did so much more. He served as a lieutenant in the Navy. He was elected as New York Senator on the conservative party ticket. President Reagan appointed Buckley as undersecretary of state for international security. And Reagan latter tapped Buckley as a judge…

[xtruss]

Reaganism's Hideous Death

Will we recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

— Thom Hartmann | December 18, 2022

Ronald Reagan giving a lecture at Westminster College, Fulton MO • Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.

Now we know. We’re there.

Violence toward women and minorities has exploded. Armed militias tried to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House in an attempted coup directed by the Republican President of the United States. They tried to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan. They’re blowing up power substations from Oregon to the Carolinas. They’ve embedded themselves in DHS, police departments, and our military. They’re coordinating with fascists overseas.

Leading up to this moment was a 41-year political war that splattered the American Dream like gut-shot blood across a dystopian Republican hellscape mural.

Reaganism brought us:

the collapse of the middle class;

student and medical debt that’s impossible to climb out of;

an explosion of predation from health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals;

political manipulation by corporations and billionaires;

an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental illness;

and turned our elementary schools into killing fields.

The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised on January 20, 1981, end the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

The seeds of Reaganism were planted in 1972 when President Nixon put tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell on the US Supreme Court.

Powell had written his infamous “Memo” a year earlier, arguing that corporate America and the morbidly rich needed to join forces to wrest back control of America after forty years of FDR’s New Deal had empowered middle class union workers, consumers, and environmentalists.

Attacking Ralph Nader (forgive the brag: he wrote the foreword to my book on monopolies) for kicking off the consumer movement with his 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed and Rachel Carson for the environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring, Powell asserted that “leftists” — middle class socialists and communist sympathizers — had taken over our government, universities, the Supreme Court, and our media:

“Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’”

It was the job of big business and the very wealthy to reclaim our nation from the clutches of people concerned about the environment or the rights of average American consumers, Powell wrote:

“Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

Once on the Supreme Court, Powell went to work. In 1976, he and his colleagues considered a case that would redefine the next five decades: Buckley v Valeo.

Congress passed strict regulations on political campaign fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals (that led to Vice President Agnew’s resignation to avoid prison), Congress doubled-down by strengthening that law in 1974 and creating the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

This outraged then-Senator James Buckley, the elder brother of the late William F. Buckley and now the Senior Judge for the DC Circuit Court. Most Republicans opposed those laws and agencies but he and his side in the Senate had lost the vote, so limits on money in political campaigns became law and the FEC was created.

Like a sore loser, he sued, essentially saying that the “free speech” right of wealthy people like himself and his friends to buy off politicians was inhibited by such clean-campaign legislation.

The result, legalizing political bribery, was a first for America and the developed world. The Supreme Court ruled with and for Buckley, striking down nearly a century of campaign finance legislation going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act.

Two years later, in the First National Bank v Bellotti case, Powell himself authored the decision that gave corporations that same legal right to bribe politicians or insert themselves into campaigns for ballot initiatives (among other things).

Prior to this, from the end of the Republican Great Depression right up until the Reagan Revolution — from 1933 to 1981 — the American middle class had a half-century of uninterrupted political and economic progress. About two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class when Reagan was elected in 1980.

Before Reagan, we’d passed the right to unionize, which built America’s first middle class. We passed unemployment insurance and workplace safety rules to protect workers. Social Security largely ended poverty among the elderly, and Medicare provided them with health security.

A top personal income tax rate between 74% and 91% throughout that period kept wages strong for working people and prevented the corrosive wealth inequality we see today. We didn’t get our first billionaire until after the Reagan revolution.

America built colleges that were free or affordable; gleaming new nonprofit hospitals; the world’s finest system of public schools; and new roads, bridges, rail, and airports from coast to coast.

We cleaned up the environment with the Environmental Protection Agency, cleaned up politics with the Federal Elections Commission, cleaned up corporate backroom deals with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We outlawed banks from gambling with our deposits via the Glass-Steagall law.

Then the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (and tripled-down on them both with Citizens United in 2010).

Reagan was the first modern American president to jump through this newly opened door to giving government favors to corporations and wealthy individuals who threw their money at his political party.

He installed America’s first anti-labor Secretary of Labor, our first anti-environmentalist in charge of the EPA (Neal Gorsuch’s mother, Anne), our first anti-public-schools crusader as Secretary of Education, and our first end-times “Jesus will make all things new” fanatic in charge of selling off public lands as Secretary of the Interior.

He cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% to 27%, and tore the top rate for corporations from 50% down to 25%.

To pay for both, he tripled the national debt.

He crushed unions, starting with one of only three that had supported his candidacy: the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO). He gutted federal support to education, kicking off what is today’s student debt crisis.

He froze the minimum wage. He cut federal benefits to the poor, pregnant women, and the mentally ill, kicking off today’s crisis of homelessness. He encouraged corporations to send our jobs overseas in an orgy of “free trade.”

As a result, money flowed into the GOP like an unending river, continuing to this moment. The result we see today, after a mere 41 years, is stark.

Republican-leaning businesses bought up radio stations from coast-to-coast and put “conservative” talk radio into every town and city in America. Wealthy people began running for political office or supporting those politicians who’d do their bidding.

Conservative donors demanded right-wing economics and political science professors in universities across America. Right-wing think tanks and publishers were funded to support them. Billionaires founded a movement to pack our courts, including the Supreme Court.

As a result, seven years ago the American middle class ceased to be half of us: it went from two-thirds of Americans when Reagan took office to 49 percent in 2015. NPR commemorated it with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”

Last year, according to statistics from the US Census and the Fed, middle class households also sank below the top 1% in total wealth. Last year’s most clear-eyed headline went to Bloomberg: “Top 1% of U.S. Earners Now Hold More Wealth Than All of the Middle Class.”

As the GOP’s game of shilling for corporations and the morbidly rich became obvious, support for the party slipped. Needing more votes to gain and hold political office, Republicans reached out to bigots, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and open fascists. Each slice of that poison pie gave them a few percent more votes.

When working class white men realized they’d been screwed by 40 years of Reaganism, they were unsure where to focus their rage.

Republican politicians and right-wing media were happy to supply the villains: women in the workplace when they should be home barefoot and pregnant; racial minorities who “want your job” or to “rape your daughter”; and queer people who are “after your children.”

Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign for president with a speech to an all-white audience near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Civil Rights activists were brutally murdered. His topic was “state’s rights.”

Bush the Elder rolled out his Willy Horton ad and George the younger lied us into two wars with Muslim nations.

Finally, like an evil Santa, Trump dumped out his bag of malice, malevolence, and odium. He embraced the world’s worst despots, seeing them as role models for a future America, while trashing our allies and disparaging democracy. He applauded police violence and ridiculed its victims.

Demagogues like DeSantis and Abbott further raised the temperature by accusing career public school teachers of promoting “Critical Race Theory” and librarians of hustling perversion and porn.

They used desperate refugees as human pawns in their vicious game. They purged millions of mostly Black, Hispanic, and young voters from the rolls, a process endorsed by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2018.

Our most recent Republican President of the United States is hawking NFT art and facing decades in prison in multiple state and federal venues for his crimes while in office.

Now, at the end of these forty-one short years of this unrelenting barrage of corruption and hate promoted by Republican media and politicians, we’ve arrived at the end stage of Reaganism. As a result, our nation stands upon a precipice:

Will we continue down Reagan’s path that I charted in my book on neoliberalism and end up, as did Russia and Hungary, with neofascist strongman rule and a total collapse of the American experiment?

Or will we turn back to the lessons of the New Deal and Great Society, embraced by presidents and politicians of both parties for a half-century, and rebuild our middle class and our democracy, along with our trust in each other?

For most of the past 41 years the choice has not been as clear to as many people as it is today. Now that America can no long plead uncertainty, we must seize hold of the awesome responsibility for rescuing our nation and her democracy from the extraordinary damage of Reagan’s neoliberalism.

For ourselves, our nation, our children and grandchildren, and the larger world. This piece was originally published at The Hartmann Report.

— Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and author of more than 25 books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. His work is also crossposted with permission from Common Dreams.

[einsteinsugly]

Get rid of Buckley v Valeo too! "Money is free speech" my ass!

Read the full report

[docholligay]

This is about more than, “There are plenty of Americans who have contributed great things to this world” though that is also true. This is about the idea that Borlaug went through all of this and didn’t worry about fucking copyright law with regards to the wheat. It’s a condemnation of what the fucking pharma companies are being allowed to do within all of this, and how criminal it is. How people are dying, but profit is the only motive here, but America doesn’t HAVE to be that way because it hasn’t ALWAYS been that way. 

[einsteinsugly]

1976, season 1, around Prom Night. All that glitters, isn't necessarily gold.

@scaponigifs: I need more scenes like this I love them. You have asked, and I have delivered! The Forman kitchen. Hyde's at the kitchen table, in Red's spot. Reading the paper, as Jackie enters. Hyde (slamming down the paper): Fuckin' hell. Welcome to the fuckin' gilded age. 2.0.

Jackie (looking at him oddly, but sincerely): What's wrong?

Hyde: The fuckin' Supreme Court, that's what's wrong. Havin' nine people overrule the will of the people is frustrating as hell...

Jackie: Well, it's been like that for almost two hundred years, so...

Hyde: Doesn't mean it works, Jackie. Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson. Slavery, Jim Crow. A bunch of other shit, with some good shit every once in awhile.

Jackie: I take it today isn't good...shit?

Hyde: No way in hell. They just ruled that money is free speech. So rich assholes can bribe politicians legally. Does your dad...

Jackie: I don't know...

Hyde: He doesn't want you to know. A bunch of shit goes on in smoke-filled back rooms, and he's probably in the center of it all, puttin' his hand on the scale. While us peasants get fuckin' crumbs, if we're lucky. You get everything handed to you on a silver platter, and you get to be some politician's wife, if you don't decide to get back with kettlehead Kelso...

Jackie: My date's going to be better than Michael, in every conceivable way. *With a dramatic sigh* I tell everybody I plan to get by on my looks, but I'm not sure that's what I want. Everyone tells me I'm like my father, smart and ambitious, but I'm a girl. So I can't do anything except look pretty. Like a Stepford wife or something.

Hyde: That's a load of bull. You can do whatever you want, Jackie. Remember that. *With a pause* Just don't be a rich asshole who pisses on the peasants, okay? Use your silver platter for good, not evil.

Jackie: That silver platter is kind of rusty, you know. Because money doesn't buy happiness. It buys clothes, Daddy's Lincoln, and lots and lots of booze...

Hyde (with a poignant pause): Huh.

Jackie (with a saddened sigh): Uh huh...yeah. Silence engulfs the room, as Jackie and Hyde sit across from each other, in silent solidarity.

[imkeepinit]

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/24/808134530/supreme-inequality-makes-a-case-that-the-top-u-s-court-has-widened-the-wealth-ga?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR3VNHxiGhzNxQ6ruG5Fx2VJJPCzD5_pjaHwT0GcFKHQnCQdP6Z2Hy22tmE

[weevil-mastermind]

I think my post has been misunderstood. I’m talking about playing the long game to overturn rulings like Citzens United and Buckley v Valeo so that we can pass laws to address the problem of politicians being beholden to wealthy donors and to restrict corporate political spending. Since these Supreme Court decisions can only be reversed by a constitutional amendment or another Supreme Court ruling, and constitutional amendments are incredibly difficult to pass in the U.S., slowly shifting the court to the left with sympathetic appointees seems to be the only viable strategy. (Aside from court packing, which I don’t think is going to happen.) This strategy was successfully executed by the conservative legal movement to overturn Roe v Wade.

I don’t see the significant intrinsic difference you refer to.

I really wish there was a leftish movement in the U.S. willing to play the long game on campaign finance reform and Citizens United like how the right was willing to play the long game on Roe v Wade.