Chipping Away Our First Amendment Rights

By: W. Earle Simpson

More than seventy years ago, Adolf Berle and Gardener Means said that, “the rise of the modern corporation has brought a concentration of economic power which can compete on equal terms with the modern state.”
By equating the rising power of corporation to that of a state, the men took a prescient look at modern potential constitutional conflict within the United States. If a corporation becomes as powerful as a state, might it not violate the people’s rights in ways similar to those that a state can?
Indeed, some modern United States corporations are already more financially and politically powerful than some states. For example, with assets at $797 billion and annual sales of $182 billion, General Electric is ranked the largest global company by Forbes Magazine.
Conversely, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the 2007 gross state product of Alaska was 44.9 billion. That is four times less than the annual sales of General Electric. It can therefore be reasonably said that General Electric is four times more financially powerful than the government of Alaska. If that is true, might corporations, like General Electric, be that much more enabled to violate the rights of Americans than are states like Alaska?
I believe that corporations like General Electric potentially pose more of a threat to our liberties than do some states.
Indeed, the ongoing case of Citizens United v. FEC serves to highlight my point. In this case, Citizens United sues the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over its rights to air the documentary Hillary: The Movie. The FEC classifies the movie as a campaign ad under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Under this act, “Big Money” cannot unfairly influence elections, and if they sponsor campaigns like Hillary: The Movie, they have to disclose such sponsorship.
But Citizens United does not want to disclose the involvement of “Big Money.” Instead they have asked the US Supreme Court to rule that this movie is not a campaign ad, and further, to state whether corporations have a First Amendment Right to spend money on election campaigns.
According to Erwin Chemerinski, dean of the school of law at University of California at Irvine, “This is one of the most important First Amendment cases in years…[because] many believe that the Supreme Court might say that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend money in political campaigns.”
If the Supreme Court agrees with Citizens United and grant corporations the unfair advantage that “big money” provides, I believe that the First Amendment rights of the people will then be gradually whittled away, and the people would be placed where they started when ‘We the people’ were when the constitution was first being written.
At the time of the constitution’s writing, the Fathers deeply considered the words of John Milton: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” he had said. From these words grew the idea of “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
The Fathers deemed freedom of the press an absolutely essential aspect of the fragile democracy that they constructed. If this democracy was going to survive and flourish, then freedom, they thought, belonged not to the government, its representatives or corporations, but to “We the people.” And they were right.
To support their liberties, the people deliberately established a plethora of newspapers and pamphlets within which they expressed their points of view and maintained their freedoms. The idea was to have as many news papers as possible and by as many individuals as possible. The more single individuals owning a paper, the more diverse the opinion pool would be, and the more sides to the truth the public would be made to have. The people’s press got the people’s voices heard, and helped them to bring down the corrupt governments and corporations of their time.
In fact, because of the people’s press, slavery, labor rights, civil rights, women’s rights, birth control and sex education were all brought to the people’s attention, and each got its just attention. The people’s press kept governments and corporations from abusing the rights of the people.
But today, corporations are fighting back. In recent years, corporations have found effective ways of wrestling away the people’s freedoms. Using the model of freedom of the press, corporations have self-define themselves as individuals, and of such, have succeeded in re-branding themselves “we the people.”
Under this guise, corporations, with their ‘big money,’ have established news media where there were none, and bought others that already existed. This creates a new model that gives corporation a power that effectively silences the people.
An example of this new phenomenon at work can be seen on the documentary “Out Foxed.” In this documentary, reporters took a close-up view of the news reporting practices of Fox News. The report suggests that the corporate head of the network became involved in the news agenda little by little until, over time, it totally took over and now, entirely, sets the agenda - daily directives would indicate the tone and content of the news.
Corporations are seeking to contain more and more of the people’s rights, and they see the case of the Hillary movie as a great springboard for completing their take over. As a result of this, they have filed numerous amicus curiae briefs in support of Citizens United in this case.
If the Supreme Court rules in the favor of Citizens United, ‘Big Money’ with its relatively influential political power, would succeed in their plan take over bid. I believe that such an outcome would place corporations in a position to gradually chip away at the First Amendment rights of the people in ways similar to those in which governments have done. In fact, corporations would become the new governments.
If you believe that governments are bad, wait until they are replaced by corporations. I prefer to be at war with them over my rights than with corporations. There are fifty one governments in the United States, but there are thousands of corporations. God help the people if corporations become the new government.
If the Supreme Court were to use Hillary: The Movie to fast advance the reign of ‘Big Money,’ I believe that corporation would un-ceremonially bury the freedoms of the people. The people would loose, and everyone taken back to the year 1787, in search again for “We the people.”