You have to admire his tenacity. Last month, US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), one of the more dedicated anti-business activists in congress, proposed an amendment to the constitution, which among other things, effectively banned any incorporated business from engaging in political spending whatsoever. The amendment is a response to the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling that upheld independent expenditures in political campaigns.
Bernie’s amendment has some telling language. Section 1 states that “the rights protected by the constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.”
The intended effect is obvious. Bernie’s amendment has no intention of returning the campaign finance system to individuals exclusively, as Thom Hartmann advocates, removing the ability to advocate or petition the government from all groups of individuals in favor of the sovereignty of the individual voter. Rather, it is clear the amendment was designed to push Sanders’s political agenda and effectively tip the scales away from not just large corporations, but all for-profit businesses, while leaving the speech rights of Big Labor, progressive non-profits and other groups untouched. Non-profit attorney Greg Colvin gushed over this fact on www.ourfuture.org: “the Sanders/Deutch amendment would allow [non-profits] to spend on elections solong as they were not fronting for the economic interests of the business sector.”
Fortunately we have great socialist thinkers like Senator Sanders to tell us that organizations that favor free enterprise are just plain wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to advocate for “the economic interests of the business sector” since those dreadful and malicious corporations are clearly out to enslave us all. Sanders’s amendment could lead to the muzzling of AEI, Heritage, Cato, and virtually every other conservative non-profit organization and prohibit any organization from advocating for free-market principles, because the language “…other private entities established… to promote business interests” effectively removes the right to free speech from such organizations, unless the courts qualify them as “the press”, for which Sanders’s amendment has made an exception.
Assuredly, Sanders would argue that the $95,000 he received for the Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union PAC, the $81,450 from the Teamsters Union PAC, or the other millions of dollars in union PAC contributions he has received since 1989 are somehow legitimate speech because they are not fromthose villainous for-profit interests. Perhaps he can assure his donors howjustified their interests are when his hostility toward American businesses has sent most of their jobs overseas.
You can see the Sanders Amendment here:
http://sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/S.J.Res..pdf
You can read the aforementioned commentary on it here:
You can see Sander’s campaign contributions at www.opensecrets.org
