The Best Government Money Can Buy

Before the first Iowan cast the first vote of the 2012 presidential campaign, we saw what the Supreme Court’s evisceration of campaign finance laws has wrought.

In its ‘Citizens United’ decision two years ago, the high court declared campaign funding to be speech and corporations to be citizen-speakers. That directly led to the creation of “super PACs,” organizations that can take unlimited donations from individuals and corporations and spend it on behalf of any candidate. And if, like most super PACs, it incorporates for tax purposes as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, it never has to reveal where the money came from.

What this means has been seen in Iowa, where citizens have been treated to an unprecedented barrage of campaign commercials, most of them attacking candidates, signed not by a candidate’s campaign committee, but an innocuous-sounding super PAC.

Going negative is what super PACs do best. As distasteful as most people find attack ads, history shows they work. They can backfire against the candidate behind them, but if they come from a super PAC, the candidate can stand above the fray and bemoan the coarsening of political discourse.

Most of the negative ads have been aimed at Newt Gingrich. Amid a barrage of attack ads from the Romney and Ron Paul super PACs, Gingrich fell from first to fourth place in Iowa.

The Iowa caucus was just the first step of this smutty campaign. There is much more to come, and, thanks to the Supreme Court, we know it will be expensive, negative and, inevitably corrupting to the political process.

Does this turn your stomach? Well you can do something about it. There is a new movement called Move to Amend which seeks a Constitutional amendment that will declare that corporations do not have the right to personhood. You can find out more about this movement by going to  http://movetoamend.org/

You also can go to a lecture this Thursday night @ 7:30. John Hill, from the Greater Boston Move to Amend, will deliver a speech entitled Democracy Betrayed: The Citizens United Supreme Court Decision and How Corporations Rule America. The talk will be held at the First Universalist Society of Salem, 211 Bridge Street, Salem, MA.

This is how democracy works.