Score another victory for free speech.

The L.A. Times reported Sunday that the beverage industry, led by Coke and Pepsi, has successfully quashed efforts in Congress to help pay for their contribution to the nation’s obesity epidemic with a tax on the nutrition-free products they sell.

Only months ago, public health advocates thought the tax would be a natural for congressional Democrats looking for revenue to fund expanded health insurance coverage. The soaring costs of treating ailments related to excess weight — including diabetes and heart disease — added urgency to the issue.

But the White House staff reviewing funding options never embraced the idea even after President Obama expressed interest last summer. A key congressional committee, after initially seeming receptive, ended up refusing to consider it. Several minority advocacy groups, including some committed to fighting obesity, lined up against the tax after years of receiving financial support from the industry.

So with the same astroturf strategy employed by the oil industry to sow doubt about climate change–fund a group fronting as a grassroots effort offering bogus science to sow doubt about the life-threatening effects of the product you sell–another big business group kills the public interest so it can go on reaping profits.

If corporations are people too, Coke and Pepsi are laughing all the way to the bank over this one.

In the past couple of decades, groups receiving funding from ExxonMobil and the like have convinced journalists of the need for “balance” in discussion about issues over which there is little or no debate, such as the human contribution to global warming, and consequently appeared in the media to debunk decades of independent research by many of the world’s best scientists. “Climate change” is a term invented by Republican pollster Frank Lutz which the Consumer Energy Alliance–which has nothing to do with consumers–and the Institute for Energy Research–whose research results are pre-oradained by their polluting funders–adopted as a harmless-sounding alternative.

It was a brilliant investment on the oil industry’s part, as the percentage of the American public recognizing the danger of climate…um, whoops, global warming…has diminished as its astroturf groups have grown more prominent, and meaningful legislation to reduce emissions is now stalled in the Senate (to put it optimistically).

This time, in a lobbying and PR effort well detailed by reporters Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, Coke and Pepsi went one step further. They not only erected the populist-sounding “Americans Against Food Taxes” to speak their case (never mind the only Americans they were representing were corporations, not people; and the tax was to be on drinks, not food) but funded existing groups supposedly acting in the interest of Latinos and placed industry representatives on their boards.

Using the argument that higher food and drink taxes would unfairly burden the poor, the coalition recruited a bevy of Latino groups, among them the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity Institute, the National Hispana Leadership Institute and the League of United Latin American Citizens…

“Why in the world would a Hispanic health advocacy group do this?” asked Kelly Brownell, the director of Yale University’s Rudd Center on Food Policy and Obesity.

A stunning chart in the Times’ print edition shows a rise from about $4,000,000 in spending by Coke, Pepsi, and their trade group the American Beverage Asssn. on lobbyists in 2008, to $37,500,000–nearly a tenfold rise–in 2009.

It sure paid off. Although Yale estimates

that a penny-an-ounce tax would induce a 23% drop in consumption, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a smaller tax could raise $50 billion over 10 years

the Times reported, industry’s success at misrepresenting available science and attacking some of the most respected nutritionists in the country as biased overcame such facts as what UCLA researchers found:

adults who drink one or more sodas per day are 27% more likely than non-soda drinkers to be overweight or obese.

This is a clear example of why the Supreme Court decision in January, unleashing corporate cash into the political process, is so dangerous: The ones with the most money get what they want, even though it’s bad for the citizens.

Soda is bad for people’s health (see the UCLA study). Taxing stuff that is bad for people discourages people from consuming the bad stuff (see: cigarettes). Fewer bad things happen to people as a result (diabetes, heart disease). What could be a more obvious case of the public interest?

Not in America, though, land of unfettered free speech for pieces of paper.

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Conservatives like to crow about how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by increasing military spending to such an extent that the Soviet Union couldn’t keep up, and went broke as a result. Historical shifts on the order of magnitude of the collapse of the Soviet system are usually a little more complicated than that, but for the sake of the argument let’s accept it, for a moment, as true.

Is al Qaeda doing the same thing to the US as the US did to the USSR?

Take a look at Pres. Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2011, then meet me back here in a sec.

See that giant portion of pink, in the circle on the right, labeled “defense”? Notice how spending on defense is greater than all other nondiscretionary spending combined?

From 1990-2002, the US enjoyed the “peace dividend” as a result of the end of the Cold War, with defense spending decreasing from $427bn in 1989 to $307bn in 2001 (including several years below $300bn). With inflation, that’s a decrease of 48%.

From 2002 to 2011, it’s gone from $328bn to a staggering $744bn! Even with inflation, that’s an increase of 95%.

The defense spending by this country is now greater than the next 14 countries combined, for 41.5% of the world total (based on 2008 figures). The rise began in the fiscal year following 9/11, and continues unabated today.

The military’s dominance of our budget it now such that even as sage and experienced a reporter as the New York Times’s David Sanger is unable to contemplate the possibility of its diminution. On Tuesday, he wrote:

Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors.

For real? No room at all? How about closing several dozen of the hundreds of military bases we operate in over 100 countries? Bringing home the men and women of our armed forces–gay and straight–from a pointless war in Afghanistan? (Why is the right of Afghani girls to go to school more important than the right of American boys and girls not to die, alone, thousands of miles from home?)

I’ve seen what the drone operators see as they remotely fly UAVs over Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and I’ve seen how much progress a ground war–which we were told six weeks after it started was over, yet continues today, 8 years later–has made. I feel confident that drones are the way to go. If the Taliban so much as pitches a tent we can see it and blow it up. Tent-pitching in Afghanistan, under this strategy, will be quickly eradicated.

Now I’m really going to generate some comments: How about we actually think about changing the policies that are pissing these people off, who send kids on airplanes to kill us?

I realize that there are many pseudo-Islamist radicals who will never be satisfied because they’re fucking psychos, but I also think that if we enforced international law in the Occupied Territories (i.e., eradicated the settlements and let the Palestinians build a functioning state, or fail trying); stopped killing civilians with abandon in Af-Pak; swore off starting illegal wars; and directed our limited resources to such things as keeping nuclear bombs out of the hands of unstable leaders and keeping college students with explosive briefs from getting visas, we would both have a lot fewer America-haters to contend with and a lot greater ability to deal with those that remained.

So this is the cost of an undeclared war against a group of a few hundred men who live in caves, whose preferred personnel carrier is the Toyota pickup truck, and who do battle with college students carrying explosives in their pants:

$744,000,000,000.

For this, we are bankrupting the nation? The future is laughing at us.

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The reason the Senate now requires 60 votes to pass a law is because of unforeseen consequences of a long-ago change in Senate rules implemented by Robert Byrd, I learned from Ezra Klein’s blog. Used to be, a filibuster ground all work to a halt. It was the nuclear option—which is why it was only employed in matters of the gravest importance, such as when Strom Thurmond and others wanted to make sure African-Americans remained second-class citizens.

Byrd introduced “dual tracking,” by which the Senate for the first time became able to consider more than one bill at a time. Suddenly, a commenter of Klein’s writes,

filibusters became almost pain-free. A Senator simply had to announce they intended to filibuster and the Majority Leader would use his dual track authority to move to other business and get around the road block. Over time, most leaders simply did a whip check and declined to schedule a bill if a filibuster was possible.

Klein adds,

Both Hill experts and political scientists argue that the reason [this has been allowed to stand], basically, is that…ending the dual tracking would be the same as shutting down the government. It would be a high-stakes showdown over a Senate rule change, which is not something that many in the Senate have evinced much interest in attempting.

I’ve got a simple solution: The Senate Majority leader declines to use dual track authority, and forces the other side to filibuster.

There was a time, before C-Span, when Senators opposed to some bill they found particularly heinous literally held the floor for 18 or 24 hours at a time. Let’s see them try that today. How do you think it’d look? Like Newt Gingrich shutting down the government in 90-whatever-it-was, that’s how.

Here’s another way to get around a filibuster of the health-care bill: The Majority Leader brings to the floor another bill the 40-vote group won’t vote for. Say, a 95% income tax on Senators from the minority party. A ban on Viagra.

Then what are they gonna do?

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Say goodbye to the American experiment in democracy. Thanks to the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, as of today it’s of Citibank, by ExxonMobil, and for Duke Energy.

“The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in the dissenting opinion. And that’s putting it mildly.

As of today, there is literally nothing to prevent Wal-mart from spending a billion dollars on a candidate it likes, or against a candidate it doesn’t like. One who favors allowing workers to unionize, for instance. Goldman Sachs could spend its entire bonus pool on defeating any member of Congress who votes for derivatives to be regulated (or bonuses limited).

That’s because of its ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC. The details of the case can be read here, but the effect is this: Unlimited campaign contributions from corporations.

Conservatives will say that unions have the ability to do the same. That’s true. But unions don’t have as much money as corporations, and they never will. In fact, corporations could buy politicians who they’d send to Washington to outlaw unions. The reverse is impossible. (The unions would sue, citing freedom of association, but the Supreme Court, if it can overrule several longstanding precedents, fundamental principles of logic, and a century of law—as it did today—would probably just rule against them.)

Associates like Alito, and Chief Roberts repeatedly stated in confirmation hearings their profound respect for the principle of stare decisis, or “the decision must stand.” Roberts: “If an overruling of a prior precedent is a jolt to the legal system, it is inconsistent with the principles of stability…Those precedents that were overruled [e.g., in Brown vs. Board of Education] had proved unworkable.”)

Today they were proven liars. They decided that the decision reached in a previous case, known as Austin, as well as parts of decisions that have stood for much longer, must not stand.

As Justice Stevens wrote in the dissent, the Court in the past has accepted

special limitations on campaign spending by corporations ever since the passage of the Tillman Act in 1907 [and] …unanimously concluded that this “reflects a permissible assessment of the dangers posed by those entities to the electoral process,” [FEC v. National Right to Work Comm.], and [has] accepted the “legislative judgment that the special characteristics of the corporate structure require particularly careful regulation.”

The Court today rejects a century of history when it treats the distinction between corporate and individual campaign spending as an invidious novelty born of Austin. Relying largely on individual dissenting opinions, the majority blazes through our precedents, overruling or disavowing a body of case law.

What’s their reason for making this exception? Because one of their own—the most right-wing (”conservative” is a disservice) member of the court since the 19th century, Antonin Scalia—wrote three years ago that

Austin was a significant departure from ancient First Amendment principles.

In other words, “because we said so.”

Overturning Austin, besides departing from the significant precedent it rests on, relies on the notion that the speech of a corporation is equivalent to that of a human being because a corporation can be composed of an “association of citizens.”

But a corporation can also be composed of an association of non-citizens, or of non-residents to the area whose representative it is helping to choose, or of people who do not agree with the course of action undertaken by the corporation in a particular election. Or, indeed, of any group of individuals who decides to sign a piece of paper, open a bank account, and endow it with an unlimited sum of money, which it can as of today spend on campaign commercials and donations to candidates. This the majority seems to have forgotten, or decided to ignore.

The Court did not have to rule so widely in order to decide for the appellant in this case. Citizens United is not a corporation, but a non-profit. The relevant part of the statute barred it from running what amounted to a campaign ad within 30 days of the election. It wasn’t “banned” from engaging in speech, or even this kind of speech.

The restriction was very specific, but the majority decided to reach far beyond the issues raised by this case in order to make a much broader ruling affecting a much larger class of entities. The difference is known as that between “partial” and “facial” rulings, and as Stevens noted in his dissent, “This Court has repeatedly emphasized in recent years that “[f]acial challenges are disfavored.” [emphasis mine]. So a Republican-majority court isn’t even holding to its own precedents. Its overruling itself, in this one instance, because it feels like it.

This is the definition of judicial activism, which conservatives so like to decry—as a matter of principle, they say. Except when it goes against them. Bush v. Gore was the exact same thing, as was the overturning of a 1911 Supreme Court case in 2007 and a racial discrimination case it ruled on that same year, in which it essentially said that racial discrimination in education is no longer a problem (despite mounds of data to the contrary).

The majority in the Citizens United decision, in addition to favoring both this abandonment of precedent and the belief that a corporation is human, declares its belief that restricting some forms of corporate involvement in the electoral process during certain time periods “fails to serve any substantial governmental interest in stemming the reality or appearance of corruption in the electoral process.”

How can anyone who has read a newspaper in the last forty years believe this to be true? The Senator who used to represent Washington was known as “the Senator from Boeing.”

Moreover: If there is no corruption in the electoral process, why do corporations seek to influence it? They don’t get a tax write-off, and by law they act only in the interest of their own growth, profit, and extension.

You can go one of two ways on this:

Either you recognize that corporations are influencing the electoral process—in which case, by the majority’s own reasoning, it merits restriction—or you have to prosecute any corporation that donates to candidates, or buys campaign ads, or pays a lobbyist, for wasting shareholder money. You can’t do neither.

And if speech by a corporation cannot be banned in any context, as the Court ruled today, how is bribery illegal?

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Massachusetts voters are in for another disappointment when Scott Brown takes office. They voted, according to conventional wisdom, for “change” by electing a member of the non-ruling party to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. But Brown—like Coakley, like Kennedy, and like Obama—is part of the same corrupt, broken system that voters are supposedly rejecting.

Just fourteen months ago, Massachusetts and most of the rest of the nation famously voted for “change,” too. But what’s changed? Corporations still write the laws and the leader of the Democratic party never met an issue he wouldn’t capitulate on.

How many failures of the politicians to actually effect change, and subsequent disappointments of the people who nominally elect them, is it going to take for people to learn that Republicans and Democrats aren’t the answer? Republocrats are incapable of effective government that represents the people because they are both beholden to the same interests: their donors’ and their own. Kent Conrad was a helluva guy when he went to Congress—a populist with a policy—now he does the bidding of the insurance companies.

Each party has betrayed the ideals of its founders: Republicans are supposed to be fiscally conservative, yet implemented the biggest unfunded mandate in history with the Medicare prescription program—expiration of the pay-as-you-go rule in effect during Bush I and Clinton was the only reason this was possible—and a war of choice the true cost of which was hidden from the Pentagon and Omnibus spending bills.

This is a story that’s been told before, but it bears repeating: Pharmaceutical companies flooded Capitol Hill with lobbyists and donations in the weeks and months before the vote. They basically wrote the bill themselves to make sure that cheaper drugs couldn’t be imported from Canada, and that the government was prohibited from negotiating purchases as a group, just like every insurance company does with its prescription drugs and every medical service it pays for, which would have meant tremendous bargaining power to lower prices. Either would have reduced the drug companies’ profits to the benefit of taxpayers, but the alleged representatives of the people couldn’t be bothered.

(Footnote: The vote took place at 3 am. “I think a lot of the shenanigans that were going on that night, they didn’t want on national television in primetime,” Rep. Dan Burton told 60 Minutes. The Congressman who played a major role in shepherding the bill through the House became the head of the pharmaceutical lobby just fourteen months later.)

But guess who did the same deal with PhrRMA in April? President Obama. So much for standing up for the common people against powerful interests—like the Democratic Party of FDR and LBJ. And so much for “change we can believe in.”

In barely more than a year, the president has gone, in the eyes of the people, from being the outsider candidate they hoped would alter what they’re dissatisfied with to the insider they’re dissatisfied with. But just as with Conrad and others, his first year has shown that you can’t play ball in Washington without sucking up to the checkwriters that are the cause of the problem.

Scott Brown is making his victory speech as I write this. He’s trumpeting the power of “the independent majority” that elected him (51% of voters in Mass. are “unenrolled,” i.e. affiliated with no party). “This is the people’s seat,” he’s saying. How long before he fails the people who pulled the levers for him? My guess is right around the time he needs Republican Party money to get re-elected.

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