Reclaim Democracy!

Archives for January 2010

Citizens United v. FEC Ruling & Selected Media Coverage

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Updated January 21, 2010

See our comprehensive introduction to Citizens United for background

Court Opinions (Issued January 20, 2010)

Notable Analysis and Commentary

There were 2000+ articles published within 24 hours of the Court’s announcement, this is just a sampling.

Pre-ruling coverage

 Notable Quotes

“The bottom line is, the Supreme Court has just predetermined the winners of next November’s election. It won’t be the Republican or the Democrats and it won’t be the American people; it will be Corporate America.” –Senator Charles Schumer

“While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” –Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent

“Five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” — Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter and commnetator at NY Times

ReclaimDemocracy.org and National Network Ready to Launch “Campaign to Amend”

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National coordinated campaign unites to revoke corporate “constitutional rights”

ReclaimDemocracy.org and a broad alliance of grassroots pro-democracy groups are preparing to make 2010 a breakthrough year for the Democracy Movement. To accomplish this, we’re building the broadest coalition yet to confront and revoke runaway corporate power. The focus: amending the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Court-created notion of applying constitutional rights to corporations.

While we have been calling for this action for almost the entire decade of our existence, we now find the idea reaching a “tipping point” among many other organizations.

A Teachable Moment 
MoveToAmend.org will debut publicly the day the U.S. Supreme Court announces a ruling in the potential landmark case, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. Despite enormous anger over public subsidies, systematic credit card rip-offs, and more, it’s widely expected the Court will give corporations even greater power over our government by allowing company funds to be spent in efforts to elect or defeat political candidates. If this happens, we will work quickly to channel anger where it needs to go: overruling the Court.

And after campaigning to bring “change” to Americans that included public health insurance and taking on Wall Street, President Obama and Congress have demonstrated they either are unwilling or unable to challenge the power of pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial corporations to correct our nation’s most urgent problems.

We don’t celebrate this failure, but we recognize the opportunity created by this disillusionment. When people believe in illusions, they are not receptive to confronting reality. One year ago, millions of Americans believed democracy could thrive and some of our worst crises improve if we elected Barack Obama and shifted control of Congress. That illusion is dead, but its demise gives birth to great opportunity.

We provoked debate over corporate “free speech” and personhood in dozens of media outlets that never had previously explored the issue when the Nike v Kasky case reached the Supreme Court. This time, however, we’ll have a broad alliance amplifying the message, with a collective reach many times greater than ReclaimDemocracy.org alone.

Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling (the second week of January is the next potential time for a ruling), we’ll post news on the new campaign, as will a dozen or more organizational partners.When we do, we’ll be looking to our readers to also jump into action with a barrage of calls to talk radio shows, letters to the editor of your local news outlets or favorite web outlets, and more. Stay tuned!

More on the Citizens United case
Read more on the underlying issue of Corporate Personhood