Citizen’s United v. FEC
Well, we need to have the discussion. There’s a lot to unpack on this grotesque Supreme Court decision; and a lot of people are going to be talking about it for quite a long while. When something is being chattered about like this is, and will be, then some of the most powerfully held and shared cultural tropes will be out there for examination. In this case, the very underwriting principles of liberal law will be discussed in ways that bring them into the light of public discourse: “judicial restraint,” stare decisis, and “full examination,” for example. Feingold penned a Counterpunch lead in response to the decision that briefly summarizes these notions, and how they were over-ridden in this case - important in itself because it exposes (1) how any of these principles can be over-ridden as liberal principles were from Dredd Scott to Bush v. Gore and (2) how the Game is organized, wherein a Congress largley captive of the very campaign payroll system that has triumphed here is the only body that can - hypothetically - overturn the result… which it will not.
There will also be a lot of opposition bombast, also filled with favored appeals about “restoration of the Constitution (which was disigned to produce exactly this result) and the way it was (not!) before our Republic was taken over (it has never changed hands). (Ask anyone who talks about “taking back the government of the people” to cite one of the years in history when it existed.)
One of my first jobs after I left the army was advocating for campaign finance reform, specifically public financing of campaigns, so I have been well-marianated in the pro-cons, sound-bytes, and background arguments on this issue. I was actually a registered lobbyist on the issue for a few years in North Carolina. I won’t dis the folks I worked with or those who massage the money-and-politics issue now, because they are only half wrong, and their hearts are right. There was never going to be public financing of campaigns (that’s the wrong part), but money-and-politics research is absolutely one of the most fertile and revealing investigative methods avbailable for understanding the nuts and bolts of American politics. Go visit Open Secrets, which has an amazingly comprehensive campaign finance database, and see how much fun it is to crunch these numbers.
Jon:
I believe this will be more momentous in its effects than 911. I believe the US has just been shot in the heart.
23 January 2010, 12:19 amRazer:
It’s NOT The Money… It’s What They Do With It
(Hint… It won’t be spent on get-out-the-vote phone banks.)
Neuropsychology, ‘BlipVertising’, And The USSC Ruling On Corporate Electioneering
23 January 2010, 12:58 pmStan:
Here’s the link to the article Razer linked to on his blog.
There is something to this, and most of us can understand it when it’s spelled out this way. But…
Observations of brain activity on a monitor do not tell us anything about why the brain and other organs are giving off these signatures in response to various stimuli.
The affects thus observed are still learned, and that learning is based in culture - a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to MRI patterns.
When an appeal, for example, to increased masculinity or femininity or sex appeal or germophobia or fear of mortality for self and others, is successful, based on manipulation of messaging and presentation (the movies have done this for decades, or we wouldn’t watch them), there’s far more going on there than Skinnerian mechanics.
Changes in culture, and even changes brought about through individual discipline, can eventually alter these reductive technological signatures… because they facilitate changes in persons, another irreducible phenomenon.
One of the manipulative appeals in this article is to fear, in the mistaken belief that this fear will motivate people to do something, however vague that something is. I’m sure that if we hooked somoene up to a bunch of brain-beam monitors and had them read the Alternet article, we’d see some kind of reptilian activity-singature.
The fantasy of total control is not shared only by those would-be controllers, but by many people who fear this kind of transient control as potentially permanent. It is not. Nothing is.
What control of political apparatuses - using money and other methods - gives those in power is not mind-control (except in limited, transient ways), but police, courts, armies, and prisons… for when the systems of dependency break down.
23 January 2010, 3:24 pmRazer:
One of my beloved reads is THomas Pynchon’s Gravitys Rainbow.
The Protagonist is a man who was used as an psychology experiment subject as a infant Pavlovian stimulated to respond to loud noises. The gist is that he could sense the V2s… Where they’d fall, days before.
In the book, Pynchon discusses stimulus and how it needs to be extinguished “Beyond the Zero” to eliminate it.
IOW, for every time GW equated Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda, you’d have to counter that argument at the same level of authority numerous times… That is NEVER going to happen.
If that is indeed the (Pavlovian) case, we’re constantly being bombarded by advertising based on fear, and there’s very little in the way of countervailing, extinguishing information filtering into our subconscious.
Indeed, the effect may not last forever, but it’s constant reinforcement (Adbusters magazine follows the ‘mental environment’s ‘pollution’ level on a regular basis and it’s MUCH more prevalent now than even ten years ago) leads me to be skeptical that fear-based reactive response to even the slightest stimulus is not always operational in the Western industrial human psyche.
(Disclaimer… NOT a psychologist!)
23 January 2010, 11:41 pmStan:
The GWB association between Saddam and al Qaida was eventually eroded, first by rebuttal, and finally by the failure of the war to “succeed,” the latter undermining the credibility of the authors of the lie.
I don’t doubt the transient efficacy of manipulation. Anyone who has raised a small child knows how quickly manipulation becomes part of the human repertoire. It’s just not the whole story.
What never gets extinguished is the capacity for individuals to change, to create themselves anew, and herein lies the everpresent possibility of redemption.
That we can have this conversation is pretty strong evidence that we are not merely Skinnerian lab rats. That we agonize over such things is experiential evidence of the same.
Fear is a constant for mammals like us, but one of the interesting things about human beings is that they have shown - sometimes for great good and other times for great evil - that fear need not be determinative.
Both the moderators of this blog, as an example, have recently expatriated. Whether that is a good thing or not is a question we can set aside for the purpose of this discussion. In that process of giving things away and taking irrevocable steps and abandoning the familiar, there were countless moments of terrible, gaping fear. Neither of us can lay claim to any special genotype, so where did the capacity for resisting Skinnerian inertia come from? If you want a real mind-boggler, think about mirror-genes and the question of free-choice.
This is hazy philosophical terrain, this umwelt of simultaneous freedom and unfreedom; and it gets trickier when we begin to unpack our significations. That’s why we rely on art to do it when science reaches its limits.
Dylan Thomas poetic phrase, iirc, was “when I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
I don’t believe that the poet in each of us, or the spark of God in each of us, is easily suppressed, or deeply buried. I believe it is powerful and always in a state of emergence. Nor do I believe that the state of fusion with one another that might be called love is reducible to chemistry. It takes a lot of work for people to be warped and stunted and perverted… manipulation requires a lot of maintenance; and that is why manipulators have to be so relentless… with themselves as well as others.
Using an artful, as opposed to empirical, description, the spirit of love and the spirit of domination are in contention, struggling for possession of each of us, and we can support one another in our individual agency - the agency to choose - in this struggle. One of the embarrassments of Christianity in our own epoch is that Jesus was - among other things - an exorcist. I myself am not embarrased by that. It makes perfect sense to me.
The redemptive paradox that we cannot escape is that our greatest strength is in our most foolish hope.
I think people yearn against our superficiality, our manipulability, our entrained inertia, that no matter how much the money-makers might be possessed by the spirit of domination and the attendant illusion that we can be reduced to “models,” they can never get people to conform completely. The material condition of debt, for example, is recognizable as a trap; and the illusion that it is something else is not sustainable. Take that trap away, and see how long the other illusions last.
Illusion is transient, so the dream/nightmare of self-sustaining mind-control is simply not possible.
If this is incoherent, blame it on the fact that I woke up at 3AM and couldn’t go back so sleep.
The connection between money and politics is politics - power, that is. At the end of the day, that power is always maintained by naked force.
24 January 2010, 5:20 amDeAnander:
I think the essential human resistance to brainwashing can be found in all kinds of historical records; consider the deep, bitter cynicism and trenchant (if quietly-spoken) humour with which ordinary Russians learned to greet the overwhelming noise machine of Soviet propaganda… While the official government banners and talking heads proclaimed a heroic narrative of industrial utopia, the people in the street quipped “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” While the State exercised total control over the media, the people in the street joked “There is no Izvestia in Pravda, and no Pravda in Isvestia” footnote which translates to “In the ‘Truth’ there is no news, and in the ‘News’ there is no truth.”
A certain percentage of the population, it seems, are predisposed for whatever reasons to accept the overwhelming voice of authority and will defend hotly whatever the talking heads just said this morning (and will defend just as hotly the new official story a few weeks later, even if it contradicts the first one); others just tune it all out and get on with their lives as best they can, uninterested in any narratives larger than their own; and still others respond with a kind of intellectual/emotional immune reaction, becoming irritated by and antagonistic to the endless, insistent stimulus. I would guess that most of the dissident blogosphere (as with dissidents throughout human history) belong to group C…
24 January 2010, 3:04 pmStan:
Every person has different gifts. I use that term because if I can do higher math when I’m 3 years old, this is not something I myself caused. For whatever reason, bullshit discernment - whatever synthesis of nature and culture brings it about - is one of them.
Then something happens, some confluence, and conditions combine with discernment combine with historical opportunity - often those transience tremors in social systems - and the BS discerners are suddenly heard. This is when social movements take flight. (Not when “organizers” [think they] create movememts)
But those gifts have to continue to be exercised if they are to merge into these confluences. Number crunchers have to keep crunching numbers. Discerners must continue to discern. Healers must continue to heal. Caretakers must continue to care. Etc.
The rest is faith and patience.
25 January 2010, 5:42 amRazer:
DeAnder: “…consider the deep, bitter cynicism and trenchant (if quietly-spoken) humour with which ordinary Russians learned to greet the overwhelming noise machine of Soviet propaganda… While the official government banners and talking heads…”
Except for the “…deep, bitter cynicism and trenchant (if quietly-spoken) humour…”, you could be talking about the US.
Sooo… Still ‘loggerheads’ bout wherein lies the ability of AMERICAN (exceptional… right?) citizens to resist the onslaught of media telling them what they ‘need’, what constitutes a candidate to vote for?
Dimitry Orlov (ClubOrlov) wrote an article about what would happen if the US economy collapsed the way the Russian economy did a few years ago. He spells out certain social, political, and cultural differences that are telling.
Also, in a tangential way, apropos to a discussion of propaganda resistance.
Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
25 January 2010, 11:51 amDeAnander:
I guess it is the essential message of Andersen’s fairy story about the Emperor’s new clothes. Only one person in the crowd (the little boy in the story) had the BS-discernment gift and the courage (or naivete) to use it.
The weak spot of power-over is that its wielders are essentially ridiculous; they are mere human beings like the rest of us and their puffery and grandiose self-importance are fundamentally absurd… also of course criminal and shocking at times, but still absurd. The bad behaviour of mighty nations is as graceless and embarrassing as the bad manners of an unruly little boy at a party — trying to grab the biggest piece of cake before anyone else has had a chance to sit down, shoving others out of the way, flying into a tantrum and hitting anyone who interferes with his greedy obsession. It’s terrifying only because the little boy is so big and powerful — but still it’s embarrassing, graceless, juvenile.
Selfishness is immaturity is selfishness… I guess it should not surprise us that a social system predicated on “enlightened selfishness” — selfishness not only excused but valorised — would produce a technoculture of “enabled immaturity” — enormous technical resources, fantastic ingenuity, all directed to juvenile and selfish ends…?
25 January 2010, 1:11 pmDeAnander:
@Razer yes I admire Orlov’s wit and flashy prose, and his eyewitness experience of the Russian collapse. He’s both pessimistic and oddly cheerful, seeing creative and interesting possibilities where others see mostly Doom. But perhaps the most alarming thing about his writing is the frank admission that the Russians (for all the dysfunction of their social system) were *better* prepared for a collapse; the Socialist infrastructure of affordable housing with guaranteed tenure, public transport, etc softened the blow considerably. The USian burbs look far more fragile, both materially and socially.
25 January 2010, 1:16 pmDeAnander:
On the cusp of evil and absurdity:
The US Military’s Dream of Drone Warfare
It’s a juvenile dream: Tom Swift Jr and his Amazing Robot Plane! It’s also the lethal dream of empire: world domination without risk, no troop deaths to upset the populace, tidy little wars. It’s also a dream scenario for the industrial capitalists who would receive megamillions of dollars in juicy contracts.
And it’s wholly absurd. It’s an open question today, whether the biosphere can sustain the industrial technology we now own. Will the infrastructure be there for these grandiose dreams? How hacker-proof will these “automated” systems be? What happens when the first one is pwned, reprogrammed, and sent home to deliver a message?
But the juvenile minds in the expensive basement suites continue to churn out their boyish fantasies of ultimate domination via shiny technology.
Tom Swift, World Dictator of the Golden Future. Is it more horrible or more risible?
25 January 2010, 1:51 pmStan:
DeLanda, in his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, takes a long, hard look at this pipedream of perfect empire. Strongly recommended.
It occurs to me that when we raise our kids, the terms we most contest while steering them into maturity are “mine,” “more,” and “now.” Yet this is now a national ideology. We have raised up a violent, self-centered (masculine!) adolescence as our philosophical ideal. This, to me, defines decadence.
Root word: decay.
25 January 2010, 2:27 pmDeAnander:
Mine-More-Nowism. Succinct, accurate. I like it.
25 January 2010, 5:32 pmKim Sky:
“The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.
“The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.
“Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.””
above quote from latest article by Chris Hedges:
Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction
25 January 2010, 6:09 pmhttp://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124/
Stan:
FULL
25 January 2010, 8:55 pmStan:
If what I am about to say was written outside this blog, we’d be likely to hear frustrated protests about “always taking everything back to gender.”
In fact, the reason it always seems to go back to gender is that so many leftists absolutely, mule-headedly refuse to come to terms with their own blatant sexism and devotion to patriarchal tropes like sexual revenge in prison.
This article in Counterpunch yesterday, in response to Citizens United v. FEC, is not only an obtrusive example of this, it is - in its main point, that this opens corporations to prosecution as individuals - ignorant of the history of the law, and of the legal implications that we mentioned above.
Corporate personhood has become the favored whipping boy of “constitutional leftists” for some time now, a perfect example of the very idealism critiqued by Marx and others - that is, the notion that ideas carry more formational wieght than material conditions. This is the notion that I was nibbling at above in a couple of posts… that our reality can be bent primarily to ideas about which we are brainwashed, rather than the secular realities of property, power, and a state that weilds a legal monopoly on violence.
But I digress.
James Secor, the author of this manic and deeply sexist rant, concludes his piece with these words:
In other words, they will gleefully be reduced to the status of (ugh) women, sexual recepticles, fearful of rape, living in an atmosphere of predation and domination.
The unambiguous depreciation of women resident in this kind of language seems to be utterly lost on this author… and on many, many others. It is difficult to believe that a group so ostensibly dedicated to a culture of criticism could do this out of mere ignorance. It represents, in my view, an open devotion to patriarchy.
How much more clear can the theme of (penetrative, male) sex-as-violent-revenge be? And what does it mean that an avowedly leftist man will write this screed with the (reasonable) expectation that other leftists will understand and celebrate this sexual revenge fantasy?
What Secor is engaging in here is a probative masculinity display, strutting his bona fides as a Man.
It makes one angry, but also tired and sorrowful, that the people who represent themselves as partisans of the weak against systems of domination, can continue to refuse to allow women into their defintion of fully human.
26 January 2010, 7:44 amMichael Anderson:
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
26 January 2010, 9:13 amDeAnander:
I think there is a lot of subtext going on there — for one, the persistent male-left trope that upper-class men are “effete” and less than Manly, as compared to virtuous and studly, muscular and sweaty working-class heroes. And that it just ain’t fair for these sissy types to have so much power; in prison they’ll be restored to the “natural” world order where physically strong and violent men are boss, not lazy desk-jockeys. Remember that left/lib cartoonist who kept caricaturing George Bush Sr as a slender, suited figure carrying (gasp) a purse? [gee what was that guy’s name…]
The Right of course plays exactly the same tune with slightly different lyrics; for them, the “latte liberals” are the sissies who have no right to social power. Bush Jr was playing to this gender anxiety bigtime, of course, with the carefully constructed cowboy persona, the photo ops doing brush clearing and other Manly outdoor pursuits, the flight deck photo op (debate still smoulders over the presence or absence of padding in the flight suit).
Anyway, the gender tropes never go away. They lurk. If exposed to light of day — like other forms of arbitrary ranking-obsession — they look rather silly, juvenile (”girls have cooties eeeewww”); but as subtext they have enormous power, I think, to sway preverbal judgment. Obviously
or self-conscious, intellectual leftists like CP contributors would not find themselves betraying every principle they claim to hold dear, by openly advocating the use of rape as vengeance/punishment, and the righteousness of gang violence. Same commentators probably deplore the US govt’s endless justifications of torture, too. Go figure.
26 January 2010, 12:27 pmkathy:
I have to read all this material–this entry and the associated CP entry which i just printed up. However, another “trope” favored by the CP-er crowd is “whore” or “prostitute” which is consistently used to refer to entities/organizations, etc that are actually pimping.
I don’t think that this is just a case of metaphor or symbolic meaning– I don’t know what to call it though- it just think its more weighty than “symbolic” since it’s so related to the normalization of “trafficking” (in many senses of the term) in women. It’s not arbitrary ranking, and does not seem silly to most people-except when raised by feminists in objection!! It’s taken for granted, and goes unremarked, and I think this level of misogyny has grown more not less rancorous within the Left, the male Left, as attached to the trivialization-thus-deeper embedding of sexual exploitation within popular culture. (For TV watchers you might notice how sexual harassment is a stock joke of sitcoms and serials alike. I think that in many ways TV embodies the neo-liberal patriarchal imagination which liberal feminism of course can not contest given its complicitous relationship with this same imagination)…
26 January 2010, 12:45 pmStan:
In the same day, Bob Jensen was featured in CP (on Haiti), a consistent critic of leftist masculinism.
Kathy, your point is taken on the “whore” talk, which gets even more entangled given the left’s (and the pomo’s) insistence on reducing prostitution to “sex-work,” a fairly transparent ploy to pull questions of sex back into the exclusive ambit of the workerist left, on the one hand, or into the (free-choice) consumer-feminism of liberals on the other. Either way, sex-as-power analysis gets shouldered out of the room. It must be dangerous, or there wouldn’t be such sustained effort to conceal it.
26 January 2010, 1:31 pmm.c.:
A lot of Boris Yeltsin’s Neo-Liberal Policies were written at the desk of Larry Summers when he was in the Clinton administration. Hopefully Boris wasn’t too drunk when he gave his speeches. I guess if you screw up badley enough you don’t get sacked but promoted….
26 January 2010, 1:41 pmkathy:
re: Stan’s comment. Yes, exactly– I like the way you put the two poles. It’s always ironic the way that for the left, prostitution is something bad when applied to any thing other than prostitution. Prostitution itself is defended as good i.e. as choice, work, even sexual expression ye gads.
26 January 2010, 3:35 pmDeAnander:
“prostitution is something bad when applied to anything other than prostitution” — surely there must be a word for this, as it applies to all kinds of gender, race, and cultural tropes. quality X is despicable in Us, but is appropriate in the inferior Them. so, for example, femininity is “disgusting” in a male — metaphors of femaleness and femininity are used, scatter-shot, to express loathing, badness, servility, incompetence, dishonesty, cowardice, etc. — yet is allegedly “appropriate” in women and not at all deprecated, oh dear me no. the essence of the double standard, that what is virtuous in person A is considered vicious or risible (or dangerous) in person B.
I’m troubled by my own use of “barbarism” for lack of a better word. “barbaric” is what the Civilised call the unCivilised, but as we know by now, the cruelties of civilisation far outstrip those of “primitive” people in both ingenuity and sheer volume… however, for the moment it may serve. I’m thinking of Curtis White’s essay The Barbaric Heart in which he touches — though gingerly, with gloves on as you might say — on the connection between Manliness and barbarism.
So how would we define barbarism? as the failure of empathy and compassion? the ability to dehumanise the Other? the inability to respond to the Thou in the Other, seeing only the Them? the singleminded pursuit of Mine/More/Now? or something more dangerous yet: the valorisation and celebration of these failures of humanity, their redefinition as Heroic? all the above, of course, are required for the effective training of warriors.
26 January 2010, 4:55 pmStan:
A flip side… it’s okay to stress over my own becoming fat (devlorization), but that doesn’t mean - mercy sakes no - that I hold being fat against anyone else.
I know this is drifting far afield of a court decision, and this thought is more stream of consciousness than thought through yet.
26 January 2010, 7:30 pmStan:
FULL
27 January 2010, 7:28 amDeAnander:
I would say rather…
The SCOTUS decision confirms the long-standing corporate [that is, ruling-class, that being presently finance and technomanagerial rather than, say, knights in armour holding land grants from the King] domination of “our democracy” and possibly marks an era in which it becomes open rather than semicovert.
27 January 2010, 12:24 pmKim Sky:
Think: Manchurian candidates, Al-qaeda donation for Sarah Palin
“The potential for foreign infiltration of what remains of our democracy is an adjunct of the fact that the source and control money from corporate treasuries (unlike registered PACs), is necessarily hidden. Who the heck are the real stockholders? Or as Butch asked Sundance, “Who are these guys?”
We’ll never know.
Hidden money funding, whether foreign or domestic, is the new venom that the Court has injected into the system by its expansive decision in Citizens United.
http://www.gregpalast.com/supreme-court-to-ok-al-qaeda-donation-for-sarah-palin/
If Greg Palast is correct on this one — YIKES sounds frightening!!!
27 January 2010, 2:07 pmAllen:
I’m reading all of this very quickly in between bouts of PhD study and a rush to watch the president’s state of the union comedy show. Mother of pearl, I’ve struggled to finance an education through military and Peace Corps service, having never taken out a loan, and I’m about to go into the job market with a head full of knowledge and a snowball’s chance of ever being financially comfortable in spite of it all. It is real, real hard for a working class individual with an education to understand how anyone who has ever swung a hammer or turned a wrench can stand for what is going on in our country. Howard Zinn just got off light…
27 January 2010, 8:57 pm