Citizen's United v. FEC

Ken — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:46:37 +0000

Some of you may not follow Supreme Court cases as closely as I do. Maybe you're aware of the bombshell that the Court dropped a couple of days ago, in the case of Citizen's United v. Federal Election Commission. It boils down to this: The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are entitled to use unlimited amounts money from their general funds to finance political advertising, because (a) corporations are essentially people, (b) money is essentially speech, and (c) the First Amendment guarantees people the right to free speech.

Perhaps you have a vague sense of the implications of that, but let me lay out a few numbers for you. Exxon Mobil made $45 billion in profit last year (on $443 billion in revenue). If they spent just one percent on that profit (or just a tenth of one percent of their revenue) on political advertising, that would still be four times more money than Obama and McCain spent on their 2008 campaigns combined. That's one company, taking a tiny piece of their profits, dwarfing the combined campaign spending of two presidential candidates.

Now suppose you take the Fortune 500 list. Looking at the companies that were profitable in 2009, if they set aside four percent of those profits and put them towards political advertising, that would be enough to buy every ad spot on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and CW for an entire year. All of them. EVERY. SINGLE. AD.

We're talking about a lot of money, folks. Wait until you see what happens in the next couple of elections... if you thought political ads were bad in 2008, it'll be an order of magnitude worse in 2010 and 2012.

And that's not even the worst part.