Month: June 2011

So, I may be writing about education around these parts a good deal more in coming weeks. This is because I have decided to change my beat at Forbes to an issue that, I admit, sits nearer and dearer to my heart: the War on Drugs and the militarization of our police.

Education is something I do care about a great deal, but it’s not something I can blog about on a daily basis. No-knock raids and the policies surrounding the drug war, on the other hand, are not only extremely important but also something I can write about with more regularity, and with a clearer sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Matt Yglesias makes a number of good points about campaign finance reform, money, and free speech:

My starting point is that the “money isn’t speech” mantra clearly has some real problems with it. It’s true that a law saying “Noam Chomsky can’t publish anymore books” isn’t the exact same thing as a law saying “Nobody can pay money to buy a Noam Chomsky book or donate money to non-profit institutions that employ Noam Chomsky.” But that’s still an effort to censor Noam Chomsky. Right? Money isn’t speech, but we’re talking about enacting regulations whose purpose is to limit people’s ability to disseminate Noam Chomsky’s ideas. Shifting the law to make it less Chomsky-focued makes it less unfair. We could have an even-handed rule prohibited the sale or financing of foreign policy commentary in general. But making the rule fair and agent-blind in that case also means it’s a more draconian censorship regime.

However,

I will say is that even though you can’t just waive away free speech objections by saying that “money isn’t speech” you can certainly restrict the permitted activities of certain kinds of corporate forms. Least controversially (for now) a non-profit organization that wants to be eligible for tax-exempt status can’t be primarily engaged in political activities. That’s fine by me. Publicly traded corporations are already required to engage in lots of different kinds of financial disclosure, and beefing up disclosure requirements about political spending would be a very reasonable extension of that.

It’s important to note that money will find a way into politics one way or another. Citizens United didn’t open the floodgates for unlimited corporate cash. Those gates were largely open to begin with – if you could afford to jump through a few legal hoops. A lot of small players couldn’t, and Citizens United in many ways actually leveled the playing field.

The real problem with all of this is lack of transparency. I see no reason why anonymity should be protected. Speech, sure, but if Target is donating large sums of money to a group that wants to quash gay marriage, don’t you think Target should have to disclose that? We’re talking about public policy, and while I think speech should be fully protected when it comes to politics – including speech that comes at a financial cost – I don’t think it should all be done in secret.

We need a transparent political process both before and after elections.