A rally by Move to Amend Ohio, the state chapter of the national coalition seeking to amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate constitutional rights. Credit: Progress Ohio/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jan 28 2013 (IPS)

There is a growing national movement to establish a 28th amendment to the constitution of the United States to address the issue of unlimited corporate spending in elections, although the groups working on the issue diverge on what exactly the amendment should say.

One national coalition called Move to Amend (MTA) is led by David Cobb. A Green Party candidate for president in 2006, Cobb has been touring the country calling for a constitutional amendment to “clearly establish that money is not speech, a corporation is not a person, all corporations are subject to regulation, all campaign contributions will be disclosed, and (that) allows for no loopholes,” according to the MTA website.

But passing a constitutional amendment is a daunting task, requiring the support of two-thirds of the U.S. House and Senate, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures.

Cobb believes that it will take about 10 years to build a grassroots movement to successfully lobby for the enactment of the amendment, but that it can be accomplished eventually.

“It’s a lot of work, but so was the Civil Rights Movement, so was women’s suffrage,” Cobb told IPS.

“A small group of ruling elites has hijacked every one of the institutions in this country – the media and both political parties. There’s a corporatised culture and we have to change the power structure. The only way we see is to build a mass, multiracial movement,” he said.

“Move to Amend is a coalition coming together specifically to work together for (abolishing) corporate personhood. We’ve got 258,000 people who are participating with us specifically on this project. There’s lots of work going on now, and it’s coalescing.”

The effort to amend the U.S. constitution has in part been a reaction to the controversial ruling of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which found that the first amendment to the U.S. constitution, on freedom of speech, prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions.

In the ruling, corporations were essentially viewed as having the same rights as people, thus coining the term corporate personhood.

Activists held rallies across the U.S. earlier this month to protest the third anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. 

Data from the 2012 national elections have begun to reveal an unprecedented amount of spending in the elections, about six billion dollars, much of which is untraceable due to a new phenomenon called SuperPACs, political action committees that have literally no limit to how much they can spend, as well as shadow corporations, which are created for the sole purpose of funneling money into elections.

One of the main organising strategies by MTA and other groups to support an eventual constitutional amendment is to get local councils and commissions at the city and county levels to adopt resolutions in support of such an amendment.

According to the MTA website, there are at least 183 municipal government resolutions, 19 local ordinances, and three state-level resolutions in Hawaii, Montana, and Vermont that have passed to ban corporate personhood.

In addition, there are 79 local resolutions and 10 state resolutions that have also passed, but that MTA considers partial resolutions because they do not completely address the issue of corporate constitutional rights.

Most recently, on Jan. 22, the city council in Conway, Arkansas, passed a resolution with unanimous support.

MTA is itself a coalition of hundreds of organisations, and MTA has dozens of affiliates in cities throughout the U.S.

Other organisations that are working on this issue nationally include United for the People, which is also a coalition and which also has affiliates; in addition to Free Speech for the People, People for the American Way, and Public Citizen.

There has been some disagreement, though, among members of congress and various advocacy groups as to what the exact language of the constitutional amendment should be.

At least six different members of congress introduced legislation in 2011 to amend the constitution to in one way or another address the issue of unlimited corporate spending in U.S. elections.

Meanwhile, different organisations are supporting different versions of the bill. For example, Free Speech for the People is supporting the Edwards proposal and the McGovern proposal. People for the American Way is supporting the Udall proposal. And Public Citizen is supporting the Deutch proposal, which is the counterpart in the House to the Sanders proposal in the Senate.

Move to Amend presents on its website what it believes to be the strongest version of the proposed amendment, adding, “It is our belief that we need to operate on the assumption that once an Amendment comes out of Congress we won’t get another shot. So we MUST get it right!”

“I work on many issues. When you get to the bottom of just about every issue, you come up against the wall of the unholy alliance of money, corporate interest, and politicians,” Stacey Hopkins, lead organiser for United for the People Georgia and council organiser for MoveOn Atlanta, told IPS.

“I was active in doing voter registration, and we saw where dark money groups were backing voter suppression efforts around the country,” Hopkins said.

“We’ve also seen groups backing efforts to repeal Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, and as an African American, this is something that I take very personally,” Hopkins said.

Activists and watchdog groups across the United States unveiled a new national push on Thursday to urge policymakers to roll back a controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision that led to the unprecedented spending of about 6 billion dollars, much of it untraceable, during recent national elections.

Campaigns for those elections also saw the highest levels of spending by outside entities ever recorded, with 90 percent of campaign-related funding in more than 20 states reportedly coming from out-of-state. In an attempt to sway city polls in Richmond, California, the oil giant Chevron alone spent more than a million dollars, in addition to 2.5 million more across the country.

On Saturday, around one thousand protestors are expected to gather outside of the Chevron headquarters in Richmond to express their frustration with the massive new levels of corporate money in politics. They will be a part of coordinated demonstrations scheduled for more than 100 events in 33 states, organisers said Thursday.

“This level of spending by Chevron, for instance, changes what candidates are ‘allowed’ to talk about in elections – they’re no long necessarily covering the issues that voters want to hear about, but rather they’re bumping up against limits set by implied threats from big donors,” Aquene Freechild, a democracy organiser with Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog, told IPS.

“This type of money has allowed candidates that wouldn’t have been able to maintain any electoral position to stay in the race, while ensuring that issues important to big donors get airtime – or don’t get any,” Freechild said.

“There was almost no conversation on climate change in this election cycle, for example, and that may have had to do with fear that certain companies would come in and spend big money on negative attack ads.”

Two years ago, a contentious U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United opened the possibility for nearly unlimited anonymous corporate spending on political causes. The justices ruled that corporations’ right to engage in political spending as an extension of constitutionally guaranteed free speech cannot be limited.

Yet the justices also strongly supported transparency in that spending, as did a majority of people, election-time polling found.

During this weekend’s demonstrations, protestors will try to maintain momentum to roll back Citizens United at the state and federal levels, including through the long-term goal of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which three-quarters of states would need to support.

About 300 cities and 11 states have passed resolutions to support such an amendment. Several attempts were made in Congress last year to introduce amendment-related legislation, while a similar bill was re-introduced on Wednesday in the House of Representatives.

In what many transparency proponents saw as a major move, in late December the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also indicated that it would take up discussion to require all publicly traded companies in the United States to disclose any political spending.

Dark money

According to a new report released Thursday by two liberal non-profits, the Centre for Media and Democracy (CMD) and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from the last election cannot be traced.

The report states that around 17 percent of business contributions to the “super PAC” groups that are allowed to engage in political campaigning came from “shell corporations”, which appear to have been set up solely to funnel corporate money.

“Dark money non-profits” also claimed to have spent around 300 million dollars, although that amount may in actuality be far higher because these groups are not required to disclose their funding sources.

“Not a lot of corporations made donations to super PACs,” Brendan Fischer, a researcher with CMD and co-author of the new report, told IPS. “Instead, it appears that corporations that wanted to spend on the election gave to these ‘dark money’ groups so the public wouldn’t know.”

“In many cases, this money is used for attack ads that are false, misleading, even offensive,” Fischer added. “This way, however, the funder doesn’t have to publicly stand behind such a message.”

While much of this money was aimed to benefit Republican candidates, Republicans overall did not do nearly as well as they had hoped in the last election. Yet Fischer and others have rejected the suggestion that outside money is not as insidious as originally feared.

“This still has a corrupting influence,” he said. “Candidates’ interests and policy positions are increasingly shaped by the people writing these big cheques.”

Outsized influence

The number of people actually writing those cheques, however, is remarkably small, extending outsized influence to a tiny group of donors.

“In a country of more than 300 million people, nearly all of the money raised by Super PACs came from just a few thousand,” according to a second report released Thursday, co-produced by U.S. PIRG and Demos, an advocacy group.

“Super PACs provided such a convenient avenue for large donors to dominate the political process that the top 32 Super PAC donors, giving an average of $9.9 million each, matched the $313.0 million that President Barack Obama and [Republican challenger] Mitt Romney raised from all of their small donors combined.”

The end result, the authors say, is heavily skewed towards elites, special interests and incumbents.

According to CMD’s Fisher, there are potent lessons here for those outside the United States watching the evolution of the country’s democratic system.

“As developing countries expand protections for free speech, it is important to clarify that spending on elections should not be considered ‘speech’ and should not be subject to the same protections,” he said.

“What we have seen is that big donors are spending on elections not as a form of ‘speech’ but as a way to exert influence and buy access.”