CT Blue

A couple of years ago I became involved with a local branch of the ACLU, but I found that I just didn’t have the time to attend the meetings. Even then, I had my doubts about the organization, when I learned from a state legislator that the ACLU had opposed attempts to outlaw political robo-calls. I know that they’ve been analogized to door knocking politicos or religious fanatics, but analogies often obscure as much as they enlighten. Robo-calls are not only a corrosive force in politics, but they are inexcusable incursions into one’s privacy. But to the ACLU, the right of the individual to be left alone must be subordinated to the “right” of a machine to intrude with a message more often than not consisting of lies. But as this article makes clear, the ACLU, along with some other rights organizations, have turned a blind eye to worker’s rights, while remaining solicitous of the “rights” of corporations. To my mind the author, Mark Ames, makes a persuasive case, and since the ACLU has been the recipient of Koch brothers largesse, it will have no further need of mine:

And that brings me to the ACLU today—the most depressing part of this story. I had an inkling that the ACLU had abandoned labor before my simple exercise check of their website. Mike Elk has shared with me some of his research into this subject. And it’s well known that the ACLU vigorously supported the disastrous Citizens United decision; the ACLU also took $20 million dollars from the Koch brothers, whose libertarian outfits have played a major role in making Citizens United a reality. Supposedly that money was meant to “fight the Patriot Act”—which is odd, considering that the director of the Koch brothers’ Center for Constitutional Studies at Cato and Vice President for Legal Affairs at Cato, Roger Pilon, explicitly supported the Patriot Act from 2002 through 2008, and that the Kochs’ Cato Institute hired John Yoo to serve on their editorial advisory board for the Cato Supreme Court Review. One should be skeptical when it comes to Koch “donations” sold to the public as charity work in the service of human rights.

Maybe there’s no connection there whatsoever between the Kochs’ $20 million gift to the ACLU, and the ACLU’s advocacy for the Kochs’ pet political issue, Citizens United, which transferred greater power from democracy and into the hands of billionaire oligarchs like the Kochs. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, I don’t know. But we do know that there is precedent for the ACLU taking money from corporations, advocating their cause under the guise of “protecting free speech” and hiding the conflict of interest from the public in order to make their defense seem more convincing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ACLU vigorously defended the interests of the tobacco lobby under the guise of protecting their “first amendment rights”—and they did it for payments in-kind. Leaked tobacco documents in the 1990s exposed the ACLU working out explicit deals with the tobacco industry to take their money in exchange for advocating their interests in public, without disclosing that gross conflict of interest and violation of the public trust. The documents and memos revealed that the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to the ACLU by the tobacco companies were payments in kind to for the ACLU’s defense of Big Tobacco, a relationship that both parties tried to hide in order to confuse the public into believing that the ACLU’s arguments for tobacco were motivated by purely altruistic constitutional arguments, rather than sleazy under-the-table cash payments. The ACLU is, after all, a trusted institution among progressives—that made them the ideal “Third Party Advocate” in PR terms for the tobacco industry’s interests.

(via Naked Capitalism)

It’s problematic in the extreme that the ACLU has abandoned labor, but even more problematic that it has lost sight of the free speech forest for the trees. The essence of the guarantee is that no subject matter is off-limits, which implies that there should be a wide ranging public debate. That also implies that government has a role, to be exercised judiciously to be sure, in making sure that no man or group of men (it’s always men) dominates the debate. I truly believe that James Madison was too keen a student of human nature to buy into the idea that money equals speech, or that a corporation was entitled to constitutional rights equivalent, and therefore by operation of reality, superior, to those of flesh and blood humans. A corporation is a creature of statute, and as the state’s creature it should be subject to whatever limits the state chooses to set. Lord knows that in the recent past, the state has chosen to set very few. We live in a nation where the discourse is dominated by corporations and billionaires. The ACLU, unfortunately, accepts this as an unfortunate by-product of a sacrosanct constitutional imperative, and has pretty much bought into the idea that if a person has the money to drown out other voices, than he has the right to do so. Money equals speech, and the more money you have, the more you get to talk, and the more other people have to listen.

Give a man a bullhorn, and he drowns out all other speakers, and imposes himself on his audience, whether it wishes to hear or no. The ACLU has helped hand that bullhorn to the corporations, and the end result will be the destruction of the republic.