Steve Fischmann
Folks from both the political left and right are understandably furious. The lion’s share of our national wealth and income is increasingly concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of the population while the ranks of the poor continue to grow – almost 25 percent of our children live in poverty – and the middle class sees less opportunity in its future than at any time since the Great Depression.
Everywhere we look, the game appears to be rigged. Large corporations receive huge subsidies and often pay no taxes, while bad actors at banks and on Wall Street not only go unpunished for misdeeds that brought our economy to its knees, but continue to earn hefty bonuses. Sweetheart government contracts are uncovered everywhere we turn and most of the largess winds up in the hands of big campaign contributors. Money’s corrupting influence on politics is impossible to ignore.
Working inside the system as a state senator, I can confirm that the game favors wealthy interests in a thousand ways both large and small. It’s not just the huge giveaways that are outrageous; it’s the Rube Goldberg contortions of law that have been put in place to protect them. You don’t need to read Catch 22 to appreciate this sampling of doozies:
- Laws that prohibit disclosure of the size of specialized tax breaks to specific corporate taxpayers. Our government can give the money away, but is mysteriously barred from telling us who’s getting how much.
- A law prohibiting cash-strapped Medicare from negotiating reduced prices from fabulously profitable pharmaceutical companies.
- Health-care reform that purports to protect the public from private insurance abuses by requiring folks to buy private health insurance!
- Laws that leave consumers paying the hefty legal and administrative costs utility companies incur when they file to raise your rates – even when the rate hike request is substantially reduced!
- Laws that allow corporations producing genetically modified seed to sue a farmer for patent infringement if that seed accidentally blows onto his land.
- Exemptions from basic water protection regulations for fracking operations by oil and gas drillers. I cannot think of any other industry where regulators have decided an inherently risky process is so perfect that it requires no monitoring at all!
- And underlying it all, campaign finance and lobbying laws so full of loopholes that big money is driving our politics more than ever before.
Supreme Court is confused about what free speech means
The question I have to ask is, how much worse can it get when our own Supreme Court piles on by allowing corporate insiders to usurp our basic civil rights? By virtue of its recent Citizens United decision, the court effectively ruled that every elected office is up for corporate auction using your money.
Citizens United allows corporate managers to invest unlimited shareholder funds to promote political candidates of their choice. No shareholder or board approval is required. Finessed properly, management is not even legally required to report a political donation. If you thought public officials were bought before, you haven’t seen anything yet.
The court justified its Citizens United decision as protection of free speech. They seem to be confused about what free speech means. Most of us think the First Amendment is meant to ensure that every individual is free to say what he or she wants. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment ensures corporate insiders the right to use our invested money to promote their personal political picks for free!
Every one of us is invested in corporate America through the stock market, an investment fund, pension fund, or as a citizen of New Mexico who benefits from investments by our state severance tax fund. None of us signed a proxy asking corporations to support political candidates on our behalf. When corporate insiders spend investor money to support political candidates without investor approval, it is a blatant violation of our First Amendment rights.
Proposals to correct the Citizens United decision through constitutional amendments have been made by a number of federal legislators, including New Mexico’s Senator Tom Udall and Congressman Martin Heinrich. I will be co-sponsoring a resolution in the upcoming New Mexico legislative session supporting a U.S. constitutional amendment that corrects the Citizens United fiasco. I will also support measures that protect us from corporate dominance of elections at the state level.
Let your senators and congressmen know we want our elections and our government back. We must not stand idly by while a misguided Supreme Court allows multi-national corporations to commandeer our wealth, our laws, and our individual free speech.
Fischmann, a Democrat, is the state senator representing District 37, which includes parts of Doña Ana and Sierra counties.