A Green State of Mind

The recent Supreme Court decision on the Citizens United case has granted freedom of speech to corporate entities, and there is a need to illustrate how the unequal distribution of money results in the unequal right to free speech using the lens of a past Supreme Court case.

Any attempt to enact campaign finance reform in the United States must meet the obstacle of a Supreme Court decision on a case called Buckley versus Valeo in 1976. The case concerned the brother of conservative commentator and elder William Buckley. The brother, James Buckley, was a sitting U.S. Senator from New York and gigantic monetary contributions to campaigns were considered as a type of bribery due to campaign finance reform that was passed in 1974. The campaign finance law set limits to monetary contributions to campaigns. However, the Supreme Court did not agree, retaining some contribution limits in the law and officially stating that giving money to a campaign was an act of political speech and therefore was protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Since then, attempts to ban soft money and PAC contributions in campaigns have been hobbled by the argument that it is through these donations that individuals express their support and political beliefs. This connection of speech and money has been used to subsequently normalize the idea that large business interests and corporations also have the right to contribute money as free speech.

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A process toward democracy is also a process toward sustainability, and the two approaches support each other through an emphasis on immanent structures.

Democracy and sustainability have been two important elements within various leftist movements for at least the past twenty years. They have been addressed separately involving very vital issues of the environment and empowerment of the people, but there is also a deep connection between the two that may not be obvious at first. Some have argued that true sustainability is possible only through a unilateral top-down type of public management, but the goals that can be achieved through sustainability are most compatible with a democratic society. It is important to describe the characteristics of democracy and sustainability in order to see how they can converge and complement each other in such a way as to realize justice and the survival of ecosystems in tandem.

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The ideal of the free market obscures the reality of an economic system that perpetuates a strict division between worker and owner that also perpetuates systemic inequality.

The nature of capitalism may have the appearance of an economic system used to express the freedom of the individual, but it is also a system that strives to reproduce itself across space and time. Capitalism has a general characteristic and a particular characteristic. In general, the freedom of choice that might be perceived is in fact a local pocket of no restriction that is always embedded in a global restructuring of an ideology that presents capitalism as the only choice. On the other hand, capitalism in particular is an immanent structure created by humans like any economic system that eventually becomes a transcendent structure. It moves from being a specific tool to a universal law. When capitalism becomes this universal law, there is an inverting of the relationship between the social and the economic. The economic is expanded from its original use as a subset of a society to a containment of all social relationships. Capitalism therefore establishes a procedure of social control in the economic sphere as it grows and becomes a transcendent system.

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