Thom Hartmann: Mind-boggling news. Max Baucus, the wholly-owned appendage of the health insurance industry, apparently has a piece of legislation that is going to be coming out of the Senate Finance Committee. And according to Robert Gibbs, the folks on K Street saw it before the White House did. What a surprise! I would suggest probably the folks on K Street wrote it. In any case there’s a Supreme Court case coming up, Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, that may well make this, not just, I don’t know, as bizarre and corrupt as it seems, but actually make it up front and easy. Where a corporation will simply come in and say to a politician, 'you know, you do it our way or we will destroy you'. Or 'do it our way and we will make you President', or whatever. And we’re gonna end up with a, the senator from Standard Oil, the old phrase from the ‘20s. Or we’ll have the senator from Exxon, or the Senator of Microsoft, or whatever.

Jeff Milchen is with us, he is the co-founder of the American Independent Business Alliance, AMIBA.net, among many other great things. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Milchen: Thanks for having me Thom.

Thom Hartmann: Or I should say, welcome back. It’s been a while since you’ve been on.

Jeff Milchen: It has indeed.

Thom Hartmann: But you’ve certainly been with us many times in the past. Um, the case, Citizen’s United. You are, AMIBA, the American Independent Business Alliance, AMIBA.net, is one of the groups that has submitted a friend of the court brief, an amicus brief to the court on this case, if I have this right.

Jeff Milchen: Yes.

Thom Hartmann: And in your brief, you said what?

Jeff Milchen: Well, there are basically two arguments. One is that first of all corporations are properly constructed as business entities. When you start allowing business entities to control politics, you are endangering not only democracy but a healthy competitive marketplace because they’ll use that power, as we’ve already seen even without the proposed changes in place, they have a great ability to extract public subsidies, tax breaks, etc, that put smaller independent businesses at a competitive disadvantage.

The other part of the argument is based on the idea of a competitive marketplace, that if we allow businesses to compete based on political power rather than on providing the best goods and services at competitive prices, then that’s bad for business in general and certainly for our economy as a whole.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. Let me just reset the table here for our listeners and particularly for those people who may be just tuning in, because I did some set up in the last hour on this. But basically in 1907 Teddy Roosevelt and congress passed a law that said it was a crime for a corporation to give money to a politician. In 1947 that was amended with the Taft Hartley Act to say it’s also a crime for a union to give money to a politician. And we’ve had variations on that, these are both illegal in almost all the states as well. We’ve had variations on that and permutations and modifications, a whole series of them, leading up to most recently, McCain-Feingold that have continued to limit the scope of what corporations can do with politics. So right now, if GE, just to pull a corporation out of the air, wanted to be politically active, if they wanted to engage in giving money to politicians, the only way that they could do it is to create a not-profit organization, 501(c)(4) I believe it would have to be, a PAC, and that PAC would then go to employees of GE and solicit money from them and as I recall, the ceiling is $2400 per person per year. Do I have that right?

Jeff Milchen: I believe so.

Thom Hartmann: And so they could aggregate, say they could get a couple thousand, say they got a thousand employees to kick in $2400 each, they’ve got what, 2.4 million dollars and they could go out and give that money to a politician. But that’s the only way they could do it. This is a corporation, in the case of GE, that has you know, billions of dollars in profits. If we were to do away with that 102 years of a ban on corporations giving their money directly to politicians, then GE, or any other corporation, I don’t want to just pick on GE, there’s you know, there’s no particular reason I just kind of grabbed them out of the back of my brain, but it could be anybody. Any corporation could simply go to a politician and say, ‘here’s a check for a million dollars. Here’s a check for 10 million dollars, we’re going to make YOU the new senator from Connecticut.’ I mean they could do anything, absolutely anything. And that’s what’s going to be decided, that’s what’s being argued this afternoon before the Supreme Court.

Jeff Milchen: Well hopefully that won’t be decided. If any of the justices actually live up to their billing as conservatives then the case would be decided on pretty narrow procedural grounds. The whole constitutional question is one that a bank of the right wing of the court decided that they wanted to introduce. The case at hand, essentially had nothing to do with raising these constitutional questions. It could have easily been decided on very narrow grounds.

Thom Hartmann: But that was this spring. And the court had the option of doing that this spring, and instead John Roberts, who used to make 2 million dollars a year as a lawyer arguing for corporate personhood, what we’re talking about here, I mean, defending corporate personhood. That was his big bailiwick. John Roberts said, ‘come on back in the fall and argue this in a much larger context than just McCain-Feingold.’

Jeff Milchen: Exactly. And the oral arguments concluded about half an hour ago and it was interesting to note that Judge Sotomayor was the only one that I’ve heard thus far from the notes I’ve seen articulating a conservative view; that the case should be decided on narrow grounds rather than making this leap without legal cause to take on a major revision of constitutional precedent overturning, you know, not only 100 years of precedent of congressional law, but also 20 years of Supreme Court precedent.

Thom Hartmann: Right. Jeff Milchen, AMIBA.net, the American Independent Business Alliance, small businesses would be whacked if this is decided on this large constitutional basis, as is the basis of your argument. The arguments just ended, as you said, a half hour ago, before the Supreme Court. I haven’t had an opportunity to look through the notes of them, apparently you have. What’s your carry away? Does it look like this is going to be a 5 to 4?

Jeff Milchen: Well, so far I’ve only been able to get the notes half way through. They’ve been being blogged. Certainly that’s the likelihood. That the key question is, you know, whether that 5/4 will include both Justice Alito and Roberts siding with the other, right wing of the court to take a pretty bold step in judicial activism or whether they will choose the more narrow path. You know, one of the things you touched on about corporations coming to politicians and saying, 'hey we want to give you some money', that also is concerning in the opposite direction. Because politicians will certainly be engaging in shakedowns of corporations.

Thom Hartmann: Right. ‘You want to, Hey, Dow Chemical, you don’t want to be so tightly regulated by the EPA? I can make that happen.’

Jeff Milchen: Exactly. And that’s why, you know, amongst the business groups that have filed in the case, there are three that I’m seeing. One of them is the US Chamber of Commerce, which comes down firmly on the side of creating additional fictional rights for corporations. Interesting point there, if this law changes, corporations very likely are not going to want to write a check directly to candidates. The US chamber of commerce will be a very handy conduit, because it would look rather unseemly if Exxon writes a check directly to Senator X and then Senator X proposes a piece of legislation.

Thom Hartmann: Well we would have a lot more astro-turf groups. I mean we already have that right now.

Jeff Milchen: Well the US chamber of Commerce is very likely to be the collecting point, to filter those contributions, so they have a, they could easily become the most powerful entity in the world.

Thom Hartmann: Wow. So this is full circle for Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo to the President of the Chamber, isn’t it?

Jeff Milchen: Exactly. The US Chamber could become vastly more powerful than it is today.

Thom Hartmann: It could be more powerful than the US Congress.

Jeff Milchen: In some ways, yes. The other group engaged in the case, the Committee on Economic Development. Interestingly, even though it’s largely funded by major corporations, they make the arguments, both that you know, this issue of politicians shaking down corporate officers would be a concern but they also take a little more far-sighted view that the Chamber does not. They say that inevitably the corruption that follows will undermine trust in both government and business. And they see it as in the long term a detriment to society and business to have this kind of invitation to corruption.

Thom Hartmann: We have about a half a minute left, Jeff Milchen. I’m curious if you think that this might be a Dredd Scott kind of decision, something that provokes an enormous backlash.

Jeff Milchen: I hope so. If indeed the justices do decide to take the radical course of overturning 100 years of precedence that you cited, I hope folks who care about democracy will get serious and look at amending the US Constitution, specifically to say corporations are not …

Thom Hartmann: To put the word natural before the word person in the 14th amendment, for example.

Jeff Milchen: Right. And I serve on the board of another organization, ReclaimDemocracy.org/, that has explicitly advanced that argument, that constitutional amendment for many years, a well as some of the other groups engaged in filing briefs in the case.

Thom Hartmann: Yep. Jeff Milchen, two great web sites. AMIBA.net, the American Independent Business Alliance and of course, ReclaimDemocracy.org. Jeff, always great talking with you, thanks so much.

Jeff Milchen: Thank you, Thom.

Thom Hartmann: Up next, I’m having a shoot-out on the issue. I’ll be challenging Robert Pilon, who says corporations should give as much money in politics as they want! To hell with you and me! Yeah, great strategy. We’ll be back with the Cato Institute.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.