Hillary Clinton Adopts Citizens United in Defense of Her Wall Street Millions

Hillary Clinton was paid $2.9 Million from 12 speeches
to huge banks, (Zaid, Jilani, The Intercept). Money for
nothing, assures Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton declined again last night to release her transcripts for talks to Wall Street for which Clinton was paid $2.9 million.

In fact in last night's debate Clinton refused to acknowledge the question posed twice by CNN's Dana Bash, who limited her question to the mere $100,000s for which Clinton was paid by Goldman Sachs.

CNN's DANA BASH: Secretary Clinton, if I may, Senator Sanders keeping bringing up the speeches that you gave to Goldman Sachs. So I'd like to ask you, so you've said that you don't want to release the transcripts, until everybody does it, but if there's nothing in those speeches that you think would change voters' minds, why not just release the transcripts and put this whole issue to bed?

CLINTON: You know, let's set the same standard for everybody. When everybody does it, OK, I will do it ... .

SANDERS: Well, let me respond. Secretary Clinton, you just heard her, everybody else does it, she'll do it. I will do it.
(APPLAUSE)
I am going to release all of the transcripts of the speeches that I gave on Wall Street behind closed doors, not for $225,000, not for $2,000, not for two cents. There were no speeches. ... (CNN Transcript of Democratic Debate)
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Now, as Glenn Greenwald notes: The "key argument of the right-wing justices in Citizens United has now become the key argument of the Clinton campaign and its media supporters to justify her personal and political receipt of millions upon millions of dollars in corporate money: 'Expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption' — at least when the candidate in question is Hillary Clinton," (The Intercept).

In other developments, Michael Hudson, Bill Black and Jaisal Noor have an exclusive at Countpunch revealing why Bernie Sanders is right about breaking up the banks, and the New York Daily News is a sham.

Misogyny, Dark Money, and Corporation as Uber People

Update III: Koch brothers revealed as John Birchers, racist and anti-Semitic

Update II: Opus Dei comes to Washington D.C.

Update: Why Harris and Hobby Lobby Spell Disaster for Working Women (Jafee, In These Times)
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Throughout U.S. history, nothing has spooked the political body as much as alarms sounded about the presence of insidious forces embedded in our community, bursting with bad intentions, amoral character and rapacious appetites.

Examples from the 20th-21st centuries are clear: African-Americans, anarchists, uppity women who want to vote, peace activists, sewer socialists, communists, artists, civil rights workers, immigrants and terrorists have all at times fit the bill for the purposes of narrow ideological interests intent on consolidating their political-financial power at the expense of the liberty of the disfavored citizenry.

In the wake of the Citizens United, McCutcheon and the misogynistic Hobby Lobby decisions [among others] by the five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Roberts Court has created a class of citizens (non-human entities) with more rights than the typical American, and imbued with immunity from the criminal justice system:  The corporation, formerly chartered by the individual states to deliver a specific economic purpose for a specified benefit of the community, now aligned with closely held ideological interests such as the Koch brothers who endeavor to reengineer American society.

These cases are not decided out of naiveté or an academic misreading of the law by the justices.

This is a extra-judicial project constructed by raw and hostile socio-economic powers that resemble nothing so much as 20th century fascism with their concomitant political taunts against minorities and creation of a prison state.

Tortured, contrived jurisprudence by the allied, ultra-activist Roberts Court is simply a manner to engineer the transformation of power of narrow ideological and financial interests to the specific detriment of non-favored citizenry, an enterprise that could never be accomplished through the legislative process.

The judicial reasoning is fallacious and obvious: "In his dissent, Justice Stevens (in Citizens United) acknowledged that 'we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.' That traces back to the time when the 1907 Tillman act banned corporate contributions, the precedent overturned by the Court. In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts came to adopt and implement the Court's 1886 (Santa Clara) principle that these "collectivist legal entities" have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood, an attack on classical liberalism that was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives as 'a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American States as popular governments' (Christopher Tiedeman)," notes Noam Chomsky in reaction to the Citizens United decision.

The maintenance of this Republican Party-economic royalists' long-term project's aims and objectives is ongoing.

Today, even as the servants of economic royalists such as Scott Walker and virtually the entire Republican Party attack the working class for organizing and selling their work product, the rightwing is calling for the Court to sanction the use of dark money into our formal electoral system in an attempt to eliminate any popular accountability, and insulate huge moneyed interests from the criminal justice system under the rubric of the new judicial doctrine of civil rights for invisible, non-human forces that were never recognized by the United States Constitution but have been created by a handful of Supreme Court justices for the benefit of a very few uber people.

Eric O’Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc. v Francis Schmitz, et al (Case No.  14-C-139) now before the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit may become the judicial vehicle through which the Court constructs a new doctrine in which any individual associated with a special class of interests becomes immune to campaign finance law and law enforcement.

We will soon see whether individual appellate justices in the Seventh Circuit define their legacy by acclaiming the lawless acquisition of political power by societal forces such as the Koch brothers, Christopher Cline and various other anti-social, criminal minds in American society.

One would think the trajectory of the drive to power for royalists would be addressed constantly by the Democratic Party, and it should be their number one appeal to the public.

J.B. Green argues this morning it's imperative:

Don't buy any of the crap about the narrowness or 'nuances' of the Hobby Lobby ruling. It established a precedent that begs to be broadened, and this is a High Court majority that is willing to go there. It's only a matter of time.

No one should be shocked either, that the court's right-wing (the term 'conservative' would be an insult to real conservative jurists in this context) majority is oblivious/hostile to worker rights. They have demonstrated that proclivity at every opportunity. ...

The Supreme Court of the United States has been dominated by politicized hacks since Bush v. Gore, although too many Dems have trod gingerly around the strong language needed to make it a front and center issue. The Hobby Lobby decision sends a clear warning that those days should be over. And if we needed an additional reminder that employer-linked insurance is a booby-trapped mess, and we really need to push harder for a single-payer system, here it is.

Hobby Lobby is a booby-trapped mess, but more broadly the case represents the ongoing project of a corrupt Supreme Court and its allies.

The presence of insidious forces embedded in our community, bursting with bad intentions, amoral character and rapacious appetites is a fact that cannot be ignored if our country is to continue to bear any resemblance to a classical liberal, constitutional democracy in the future.

Obama May Issue Order Exposing Big Corporate Political Spenders in Citizens United Era

A executive order requiring that federal contractors disclose their electoral spending—by top officers and as corporations—is being reconsidered by the White House despite stiff opposition from the business lobby after it was first proposed last spring, according to civil rights attorneys working on the issue.

By Steven Rosenfeld

“There’s a lot of movement at the White House,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. “I just had a meeting at the White House counsel’s office, trying to encourage them to move forward with the executive order. They have the perfect window of opportunity to get the executive order done.”

“It’s simple—any company that is paid with taxpayer dollars should be required to disclose political contributions,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who has pushed for the White House to issue the order. “With public dollars come public responsibilities, and I hope President Obama will issue his executive order right away.”

The order, if issued, would likely be the only campaign finance initiative to emerge from Washington this year as nothing is expected from Congress. It would take effect after the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council adopts new disclosure rules. That could come as the 2012 election season moves beyond the primaries and it would offer a new way to see who is behind the newest independent groups spending millions on political attack ads.

“Most of the major corporate players are also government contractors,” Holman said. “So if we get this executive order approved, we will get a comprehensive picture of how corporations are spending money in elections.”

Spending on federal contracts was $541 billion in 2010, which was about 4 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Research Service, and almost 15 percent of the federal budget. The top 100 contractors are some of America’s biggest firms, and include support services for the military overseas, weapons makers, computer companies, telecommunication firms and other service providers. Companies that could fall under the disclosure order employ about 22 percent of the domestic workforce, CRS said.

The proposed executive order emerged last April, where it swiftly drew condemnation from some of Washington’s biggest business lobbies, including the Professional Services Council, the Aerospace Industries Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Almost immediately, Republicans in the House and Senate began adding amendments to appropriations bills prohibiting federal agencies from collecting the political contribution information as part of the procurement process.

Rep. Eshoo led the Democrats' response by making floor speeches and introducing short amendments to spending bills requiring the contractor disclosure.

“I rise to call for transparency and disclosure in our system and throughout our government,” Eshoo said, in a typical speech. “In 2002, when we voted to pass the historic McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, most Republicans voted no, saying we needed disclosure….They said we needed to put spending out in the open and let the voters assess it. Today, when the president proposes requiring contractors to disclose their spending and not to limit it, Republicans are up in arms. They say it will politicize the contracting process. But when contractors can spend money in elections, the contracting process is already politicized.”

In July 2011, Eshoo sent a letter, signed by 62 other House Democrats, urging President Obama to issue the executive order. That letter noted that a handful of states ban forms of political spending by contractors, citing Connecticut, New Jersey, West Virginia and Hawaii. It also noted that since 1994, the Securities and Exchange Commission has barred brokers and securities dealers and their PACs from making campaign contributions to bond-issuing officials. The SEC rule was upheld in court.

“Political expenditures are already well-known to those that make them and to the officials who benefit,” she concluded in the letter urging the administration to action.

However, the White House took no further action after last summer. Meanwhile, every time Eshoo offered a disclosure amendment it prompted a counter measure from House Republicans. The stalemate ended in December, when a compromise was reached. The GOP’s stated objections concerned disclosing political contributions before contracts were awarded—in the bidding stage. The House Republicans withdrew their objection once Eshoo and Democratic leaders agreed to limit disclosure to after federal contracts had been awarded.

The most recent spending bill to pass the House removed those barriers, Eshoo said last month. “Today's compromise omnibus spending bill leaves the president free to require disclosure from any company receiving taxpayer dollars,” she said, alluding to the new window for the White House to move ahead with an executive order.

“Now we have the perfect window to get it done,” Holman said. “The [Republicans' legislative] riders have been removed.”

Neither Eshoo’s office nor Public Citizen’s Holman have seen newer drafts of the executive order since it circulated in April. That initial draft would report contributions to third-party groups, including the super PACs that spent millions on television ads before the Iowa caucuses—supposedly independent of candidates.

Should the executive order be signed, it would not stop the deluge of campaign cash into all flavors of political committees. However, lawyers for the super PACs have sought to delay reporting their contributions and expenditures until after the earliest presidential primaries. Thus, if adopted, it would force additional transparency on some of this political season’s stealthiest operators and might give some pause before acting.

Holman hoped the White House would issue the order before the upcoming State of the Union address. In the meantime, he said the White House’s lawyers were “attentive, polite and noncommittal” during their most recent meeting.

“With the two-year anniversary of Citizens United upon us, President Obama should seize the opportunity to address voter frustration and anger by putting in place meaningful transparency and disclosure,” Eshoo said.