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John Nichols has an interesting piece over at The Nation about the fallout from last week’s Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. It’s a pretty brutal take on the thinking that led the AFL-CIO to file an amicus brief supporting unlimited corporate spending. Nichols writes:
Some union leaders think that the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC — which essentially takes the limits off campaign spending — will give them the same flexibility and freedom to influence the process as it does corporations.
These are the same union leaders who imagined that electing Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress would lead to the rapid enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act and meaningful labor-law reform.
The AFL-CIO actually filed a brief in the Citizens United case that urged removal of reasonable restraints on campaign spending.
Indeed, an attorney who prepared the amicus brief for the AFL-CIO recently participated in a conference call talking up the merits of the corporate position, along with representatives of the conservative Heritage Foundation and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.
What are the leaders of the labor federation thinking?
They imagine that, with spending limits removed, organized labor will be able to buy enough television time to reward their political friends and punish their political enemies.
It’s a sweet fantasy. But the reality is that corporations will be buying so much more television time when it matters — in the run-up to key elections — that the voices of working Americans will drowned out with the same regularity that they are on Capitol Hill — where, it should be noted, overwhelming Democratic majorities have yet to deliver on even the most basic demands of the labor movement.
To think otherwise is to neglect the reality that one corporation – Goldman Sachs — spends more annually to pay just its top employees than the combined assets of all the nation’s major unions.
While Citizens United would give the AFL-CIO and unions large leeway to spend additional funds on ads, Nichols is correct that a dwindling labor movement doesn’t stand a chance to compete with any of the largest corporations in the country and the world. In an ideal world, possibly one with a rejuvenated labor movement bolstered by the Employee Free Choice Act, one can see the AFL-CIO’s ideas. But as it stands, it’s tough to make sense of the federation’s decision.
The AFL-CIO is largely alone. Nichols notes that National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of nurses and a member of the AFL-CIO, filed an amicus brief opposing the outcome of the Citizens United decision. Nichols spoke with Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of NNU, about the decision:
“Equating what unions and working people could spend on campaigns would be like comparing a toy boat to an aircraft carrier,” she explains. “Corporate influence peddling in politics already distorts and prevents our democracy and political system (from functioning).”
SEIU also opposes the Citizens United decision, though it did not file an amicus brief with its position. After the decision was made public, the union’s Anna Burger released a blistering statement portending doom for working people.
“But with today’s Citizens United decision, the Court has given corporate managers the greenlight to bypass the checks and balances, use unlimited amounts from the general treasury -funds that should be used to increase the value of the business or pay dividends to shareholders–to instead pay for public communications expressly advocating the election or defeat of the candidates of their choice.
“Our democratic process was meant to protect the people not profit margins and today’s decision makes the need for an effective system for public funding, effective disclosure regulations, and other reforms of federal elections all the more pressing.
There’s some talk of allowing shareholders of corporations to exempt their shares from political use, similar to how union members can opt out of having their dues fund the union’s political activity as a fix to Citizens United. That would hardly level the playing field, as those activist shareholders will be in the minority. Regardless, it’s clear that corporations have the potential to spend much, much more than any union in this brave new world of campaign finance. Note: the AFL was contacted for comment but had not responded by time of publication. I’ll update when I hear back.
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Absolutely. Not only will unions easily be outspent by corporations, but it also will encourage them to forgo their potential strengths. Unions should be working on grassroots mobilization. They have significant advantages over corporations in this regard. To the extent they can do this, they are creating power that can be used to pressure Democrats once they take office, in a much more effective way than spending money on big media campaigns can do.
People powered campaigns, along with public financing, are the only ways to effectively respond to Citizens United.
If you hadn’t noticed, corps are doing grass roots now, as in Tea Party.
I did notice, but:
I think unions, and community groups, etc., can be more effective at doing lasting grassroots mobilization than corporations can.
the tea partiers have done better than unions lately.
I think it will be more of all the inequities for corps. including renta crowds.
It’s about the banks. Unions used to hold the mantle for anti-bank populism, until the Obama Administration started squashing any kind of useful activity from unions with regard to financial reform and bank accountability.
And the tea party picked it up from there.
It depends on how much money corps put into it. They seem to be able to get crowds to show up at rallies without breaking a sweat. And I’m not sure that they organization to be lasting. Just start up a new group when the issue changes.
I hope you’re right, and that the unions do it. I’m just really pessimistic after Citizens United.
And of course the unions don’t have endless cash. They do have to support their members, if there is a strike or through their pensions. I see this as a way for corporations to bleed the unions in another way.
Overall, a bigbig win for the corporate citizenry.
Over the past two decades the power Wall Street has amassed to both channel and effectuate change to their own advantage in Washington is in direct [and overwhelming] disproportion to the ever weakening power of organized labor to do the same.
That is so flagrantly obvious, one can only assume the AFL-CIO position above is meant mainly to shore up their own ineffectual role in controlling a “labor movement” aimed less at organizing and mobilizing new members than at preserving what’s left of the post-war pact they have with the Bilderberg ruling class.
Ironically, in the short run, the only real hope [re the Citizen decision] is the election of Democrats to the White House and the Congress such that over time they are able to put more liberal justices on the Court and overturn the Roberts gift to Wall Street.
the SCOTUS decision puts the nail in the coffin of Employee Free Choice Act – nevah gonna hapin, so unions will never get around to rejuvenation. I can’t believe how stupid some people are.
Considering wages from Corporations (and Gov) and the real human has to pay for living and a small due… the numbers of umion would have to be much greater for it to be an advantage.
The fake person Corps meanwhile can have a few Billion on hand. And may be setup to take governement contracts (thus uses citizen tax to make profit, and could use some of the profit to buy the next contract from their rep – and could use it to supress wages and worker rights).
I suppose it will help a few areas where unions are strong in the short run….alway them to have another 5 yearsr or so (much like the deal to avoid the health tax on workers.
They may be better at organizing for the long term but the Tea Parties have the media support behind them and Fox does their recruiting for them. The rest of us have to knock on doors, etc.
The banks are at the center of it, no doubt.
They have tentacles on most things now, But unions were a power when labor intensive industry was alive and well.
So as I see it, the use of the unions is mostly a dialectic in use to counter pose these moves to consolidate the corporate hegemony.
Unions are a tiny percentage now of the working people. (They ) use these old worn out terms of disparagement, for the sake of the right wing propaganda mind set, which is out of touch with any reality. All they’ve got is a few buz words, liberals; socialists; the unions; and so on. And tax cuts.
Dialectics: the meaning of the terms etc.
I’m not happy about the decision and even less happy about the “reasoning” that appears to be behind it. But, fundamentally, I have to agree with Glen Greenwald that the problem is not too much corporate speech. The problem is too much corporate money.
Money is antidemocratic to the extent that it is voluminous enough to monopolize communications media and push the price of corrupt politicians high enough that only the big money can afford them. Wealth on this scale is largely but not exclusively in corporate hands. Super-rich individuals can play too.
So maybe we need to see the Court decision as a long overdue wakeup call. Liberals have shied away from money inequality since the Red-baiting 1950s. We have embraced any and all ways of getting around it. One such, campaign finance reform, has been a will o’the wisp that has led us astray since Jimmy Carter. Every campaign finance reform has made things progressively worse, more complicated, and more legally suspect.
So maybe it’s time to again strike at the root of the problem, at the money. Let’s stop fussing over what the rich buy with their money and instead focus on the fact that they have too much of it.
Let’s focus on closing the widening gulf between America’s wealthiest few and everyone else.
The most productive, socially beneficial ways of making the rich less so are well-known and time-tested: sharply progressive taxation, generous public entitlements, and labor regulations that make worker and employer equals and partners. We need to do the following:
* Bring wages back up to parity with productivity.
* Replace regressive taxes with income taxes.
* Push the top income tax brackets above 95% and lower the others.
* Treat capital gains as ordinary income.
* Tax estates in excess of $250,000 at 99.9999%.
* Provide an income-tax-funded, single-payer national health system with comprehensive benefits.
* Provide an income-tax-funded, single-payer national system for funding college education of all qualified candidates.
* Provide an income-tax-funded, single-payer national system of old-age pensions with comprehensive benefits.
To insure universal free speech, fund free, nationwide internet and reassert public ownership of the airwaves, do the following:
* Drastically cut the cost of broadcast licenses.
* Require licensees and franchise holders to provide free air time for any citizen that requests it.
The court has equated money with speech, so we need to hold them to their decision. Let’s insure that everyone has enough money to speak and that no one has enough to crowd out everyone else.
I just heard you on the Rick Smith shoe from yesterday.
Agree with everything you said. Excepting that I am not sold on that it is good to continue any health care bill including the House bill. In particular you are right about the way they monuevred the excise tax to be a special deal for unions. That in and of itself does damage to unions, it is plain to see.
The president has shown no leadership for what is needed. He should be a lame duck from here out. It seems to me that his goal is actually to help put the progressive agenda items in a hole and cover it up.
He will just tap dance as long as he can, like the band on the Titanic poop deck. That’s what is sad. That’s his job.
A really bad f’ing idea by the AFL-CIO.
David Montgomery’s The Fall of the House of Labor is instructive here. And then, after the labor apocalypse which occurred during the early 20th century as told by Montgomery, unions continue to be purged of its most progressive members by the Taft-Hartley Act, the Chamber of Commerce and corporate controlled MSM. Sad state of affairs for working people.
In the short term, yes. Unions will suffer.
Their ability to project a progressive voice will be diminished. That sucks. However there is a danger, perhaps more than ever before, in buying into any ideology that chucks out our constitutional protections in order to get a result we want. Often, constitutional safeguards are sidelined in order to effect what we don’t (see: George W. Bush).
What this decision could do (if populists from both the left and right seize the day to defy the corrupt, corporatist reality in Washington) is bring to a head a problem that fundamentally frustrates our democracy. It grieves me to say, but perhaps it’s time to make friends with your inner-tea party, no matter how repugnant you find their views.
I can wrestle with, and respect an honest right-wing values-voter. But I can’t fight an invisible hydra (big money) that surreptitiously infects all political avenues and negates all legitimate political aspirations.
Short story – it’s gonna have to get a little worse before it gets better but the band-aid patches on money and politics haven’t worked so far. SCOTUS has provided us an opportunity to face fundamental challenges of our democracy. If we’re not up to it, we could always surrender to Canada. They seem to be doing OK.
Like the current crop of Democratic Party leaders, the AFL-CIO honchos are great organizers of defeat. Only when the membership throws them out, and voters put forth progressive candidates, or indeed a new popular progressive part, defeat and decline is all working Americans can expect.
The Roberts Court has closed down regulation as an answer to corporate takeover of elections. We need a “supply side” response. See: Fair Election Now Act.