Dear Supporter,
Today is the fourth anniversay of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are allowed to make unlimited political expenditures.
Wealthy individuals, corporations and Super PACs are now free to spend millions on advertisements for the same candidates and elected officials who will be expected to protect consumers from those corporations once they are elected. In 2012, corporations and Super PACs spent over $1 billion on our elections, much of which was not publicly disclosed.
The Green Party believes that a level playing field for all candidates for public office is vital to a functional American democracy. We call for the overturning of the Citizens United decision. We support amending the Constitution to ensure that only human beings – not corporations – are considered persons with free speech rights.
This is why the Green Party is the only national political party that refuses all contributions from corporations and political action committees. The Green Party is leading by example – leading the way to elections free of corporate influence, undisclosed cash, and democracy sold to the highest bidder.
Please help us lead the way with a contribution today.
The Green Party piece overlooks the fact that the group Citizens United — which brought the famous Supreme Court case because it had its political speech censored — was not a corporation.
Citizens United was and is a non-profit group with a political agenda, funded largely by individual donors (see http://tinyurl.com/opensecrets-2014citizensunited ). In other words, essentially no different than the Green Party itself, though obviously with a different ideology.
Preventing groups like these from airing political views close to elections is not somehow keeping the democratic process pure — it is making that process safer for incumbents and the political establishment, by helping to ensure that material critical of them is not funded and brought before the public.
The Supreme Court made the correct decision in the Citizens United case.
Wealthy individuals have had the right to make independent expenditures ever since 1976, when the US Supreme Court ruled that independent expenditures by individuals can’t be limited.