Corporate campaign contributions: It’s what’s for dinner.
In the midst of one of the most ambitious (and contentious) attempts at massive government reform our nation has ever seen, the Supreme Court has seemingly dished up
a devastating blow for any sort of it, including (but not limited to) “food reform.”
Last week’s litigious 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision to repeal century-old campaign finance restrictions — which banned corporate funding of political campaigns — has stunned, infuriated and disheartened Americans, advocates of agricultural reform and the president alike.
But what exactly do campaign finance restrictions (or rather the new lack thereof) have to do with what we eat?
Absolutely everything.
“With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics,” President Barack Obama said in a statement last Thursday. “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
Let me just humbly insert under the “other powerful interests” category, those of big Agribusiness.
Which, as an industry plagued with the practices of factory farming and agricultural subsidies — while poor regulation continues to result in rampant food borne illness and a nearly immeasurable environmental impact — currently has quite the image to manage.
And in an ever increasingly food aware, environmentally conscious world, it’s more important than ever for big Agribusiness to manage government expectation through lobbyists or face major regulatory backlash. But luckily for them, it would appear that the Supreme Court has now made it easier than ever to “buy a congressman.”
Advocates of the industry’s reform, foodies and activists have banded together in recent years to champion the slow food, organic and eat local movements as grassroots efforts to try to force the industry to adopt better policies. In hopes that consumer demand for greener, healthier options and alternatives when it comes to what we eat, would garner the attention of the industry and regulators, as well as politicians.
But as food policy expert
Marion Nestle points out, “When corporations fund campaigns, representatives make decisions in the corporate interest. It’s that simple.”
Nestle, the author of several food policy books, including “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health,” lamented on
her Blog Friday that for those who, “care about creating a good, clean, fair and sustainable food system,” it’s going to be a lot harder now.
The already unfair fight between animal, farmer, food-safety and consumer rights activists verses a multi-billion dollar industry just became an even taller order.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy called the ruling a defense of the First Amendment and wrote for the majority, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
But in subscribing to this school of thinking the Supreme Court seems to blatantly disregard the implications for purely profit-driven corporations to be written off as “benign ‘associations of citizens’ who should be allowed to do with their money
(millions of dollars) as they please.”
And fails to acknowledge that billion-dollar big business, such as Tyson and ConAgra, wield more game-changing heft than the average politically inclined knitting circle.Allowing industry to flood the political forum with their form of “green encouragement” shifts the power from the people and into the hands of faceless conglomerates and their CEOs, promoting the same mismanagement (or complete lack thereof) that led to the bank collapse and financial crisis.
What is seemingly lost on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and the ruling majority of the Supreme Court is the real difference between average citizens and the multi-billion dollar corporations now free to plug whatever candidate will do the most to serve their bottom line: a conscience.
This isn’t and shouldn’t be an issue of left verses right, it’s an issue of We The People verses We The Faceless Unaccountable Profit-Driven Corporations. While the Justices claim to be to strengthening the First Amendment, they’re actually circumventing its importance all together.
Upon first glance it might not appear to directly slight the true average citizen’s free speech and that’s because it doesn’t; it simply increases the corporate-funded din, over which we will no longer be heard.