Reich: "the left has ideas and the right has discipline"

By John Ballard

Robert Reich doesn't post comments at his blog but the NY Times collects them.

You want to know why the left has ideas and the right has discipline? Because people who like ideas and dislike authority tend to identify with the Democratic left, while people who feel threatened by new ideas and more comfortable in a disciplined and ordered world tend to identify with the Republican right. Democrats and progressives let a thousand flowers bloom. Republicans and the right issue directives. This has been the yin and yang of American politics and culture. But it means that the Democratic left's new ideas often fall victim to its own notorious lack of organization and to the right's highly-organized fear mongering.

He's correct. Will Rogers' chestnut still applies. "I'm not a member of any organized political party.... I'm a Democrat."  That's the challenge when the political infrastructure of representative democracy consists of an assembly of big economic interests in one camp and everyone else in the other.

That divide widened with Buckley vs. Valeo (1976) when First Amendment rights were interpreted to mean that money equals speech. I'm no lawyer or expert on the history of legal decisions but seeing the imbalance of that decision requires neither legal expertise nor rocket science.

A Times Opinion piece now nearly ten years old summarizes a few problems.

''Money is property; it is not speech.'' So wrote Justice John Paul Stevens late last month, [January, 2000.] using his concurring opinion in a campaign finance case from Missouri [Nixon v. Shrink, which upheld the Buckley decision and allowed the same federal limits to apply to state laws as well] to attack the basic equation of money- equals-speech that was the analytical basis for the Supreme Court's 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision. In the helpful part of the Buckley decision, the court upheld the constitutionality of campaign contribution caps, a position wisely reaffirmed in the Missouri case. But it prohibited spending limits on spurious free-speech grounds. Any effective campaign finance law must address both contributions and spending. Justice Stevens' observation signals that the court may be getting ready to take another look at the question of spending limits.

Unfortunately, the court sidestepped that task in deciding the Missouri case. The majority opinion reaffirmed the principle that contribution limits help combat corruption, giving a boost to ongoing efforts in Congress to bar unregulated soft-money donations to the political parties by interest groups and wealthy individuals. But it studiously avoided confronting Buckley's core error of holding that mandatory limits on campaign spending would unconstitutionally limit free speech.

That part of the 1976 decision continues to inflict great harm on the political process. It gives rich candidates like Steve Forbes an unwarranted advantage over candidates without personal for tunes. It also guarantees a ceaseless chase for special-interest money by non-wealthy candidates. Reviewing this landscape in his dissenting opinion in the Missouri case, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared that ''Buckley has not worked,'' having created a ''misshapen system.'' He was correct, but his response -- a vote to overturn the sound portion of Buckley that preserved contribution limits -- was not. Even Justice Kennedy, though, left open the possibility that in a future case he might uphold limits on both expenditures and contributions.

When that case comes -- and it should not be long -- the court should take to heart Justice Stevens' admonition that money is not speech. It must also take a realistic look at what has occurred in the 24 years since Buckley. If experience has taught anything, it is that the corruption rationale the court used in Buckley, and has now reiterated in upholding contribution limits, applies no less on the spending side. The absence of mandatory spending limits pressures candidates to amass ever-larger war chests and produces a political finance system based on influence-peddling.

In another thoughtful concurring opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer began to provide a framework for the court's future review of campaign regulations, including spending limits. The opinion cited the valid role of restrictions in protecting ''the integrity of the electoral process'' and in enabling ''a fairer election debate.'' Justice Breyer also suggested that the compelling free-speech issue here was not the right of individual candidates to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. It is the right of all Americans to a campaign financing system that respects the democratic process.

This case may be up for review by the current court with the release of Hillary, the Movie."It should not take long" turns out to be nearly a decade.

The Supreme Court will cut short its summer break in early September to hear a new argument in a momentous case that could transform the way political campaigns are conducted.

The case, which arises from a minor political documentary called �Hillary: The Movie,� seemed an oddity when it was first argued in March. Just six months later, it has turned into a juggernaut with the potential to shatter a century-long understanding about the government�s ability to bar corporations from spending money to support political candidates.

The case has also deepened a profound split among liberals, dividing those who view government regulation of political speech as an affront to the First Amendment from those who believe that unlimited corporate campaign spending is a threat to democracy.

At issue is whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates. Re-arguments in the Supreme Court are rare, and the justices� decision to call for one here may have been prompted by lingering questions about just how far campaign finance laws, including McCain-Feingold, may go in regulating campaign spending by corporations.

The argument, scheduled for Sept. 9, comes at a crucial historical moment, as corporations today almost certainly have more to gain or fear from government action than at any time since the New Deal.

Damn right they do. It's too bad the real corporate cartels, insurance and pharmaceuticals, are not part of their scrutiny. I realized years ago that business and commerce ran past political, even national interests sometime in the first half of the Twentieth Century. The rise and empowerment of multi-national corporations, starting with the defense industry and the post-WWII seeds planted by the Marshall Plan, the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan, then continuing with oil, sugar, rubber and other neo-colonial enterprises, took only a few decades to secure the cooperation of politicians all over the world, hungry for respectable ways to stabilize power. Corporate interests, which make few distinctions between tyranny and representative forms, always prevail, with China as our most recent case in point. But I digress...

Buckley dealt specifically with campaign contributions, but the larger question of how political campaigns take shape seems to have been an unexpected, perhaps unwanted, unintended consequence. Eliot Spitzer's comments in Slate includes this.

An important distinction: This case has nothing to do with contributions to a candidate. Strict contribution limits have long been upheld as constitutional. This case is about the ability of corporations and unions to act independently�to air, distribute, circulate "electioneering communications" independent of the candidate.

There is no dispute that barring the advertisement of Hillary: The Movie would constrain free speech. There is also no dispute that limiting the ability of huge entities�corporations and unions�to aggregate dollars and bombard us over the airwaves with their political views would make it easier for less-well-funded citizens to make their political views heard.

As an elected official who often tangled with wealthy corporations, I recognize that there is a superficial appeal in the prospect of being able to silence their political voices. Of course that is precisely why the First Amendment protects them and why I find myself sympathetic to the First Amendment absolutists in this case. What distinguishes what Citizens United did and what Bill O'Reilly on Fox News�Rachel Maddow on MSNBC�does every day? Fox and MSNBC are corporations bombarding the airwaves with political rhetoric, from the right and left, that is as close to "electioneering communications" as anything I can imagine. The McCain-Feingold statute excluded "media companies" from its limitations, a distinction that makes no logical sense. The constitutionality of Citizens United's speech should have nothing to do with what else may or may not go on at the corporation it is part of.

It is not surprising that the ACLU, wearing its First Amendment fundamentalist hat, and the NRA and the Chamber of Commerce, trying to protect corporate power and speech rights, are urging the court to find the provision unconstitutional.

There is no shortage of reading about this story. Any issue that has The ACLU and the NRA on the same side of an argument is sure to generate a lot of fire and smoke.

The court�s order calling for re-argument, issued in June, has generated more than 40 friend-of-the-court briefs. As a group, they depict an array of strange bedfellows and uneasy alliances as they debate whether corporations should be free to spend millions of dollars to support the candidates of their choice.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its usual allies are on opposite sides, with the civil rights group fighting shoulder to shoulder with the National Rifle Association to support the corporation that made the film.

To the dismay of many of his liberal friends and clients, Floyd Abrams, the celebrated First Amendment lawyer, is representing Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, a longtime foe of campaign finance laws.

�Criminalizing a movie about Hillary Clinton is a constitutional desecration,� Mr. Abrams said.

Most of the rest of the liberal establishment is on the other side, saying that allowing corporate money to flood the airwaves would pollute and corrupt political discourse.

This story, though interesting and important, illustrates how easy it is to miss the forest for a tree or two. 

Robert Reich's comments above spotlight the larger picture, because the health care reform argument is not, as most believe, a partisan issue but the most vivid illustration to date of how powerful corporate interests work together to divide and conquer the political will to the ultimate advantage of ever more corporate profits. Dwight Eisenhower saw and warned against the dangers of a military-industrial complex long ago, but he would be blown away by today's medical industrial complex, a benign, even humane-looking couple (medicine and doctors) whose integrity, like that of priests, is thought to be above reproach.

No matter what they decide, I will be combing the opinions of the court looking for some recognition that not just media types, but corporate entities of all stripes, have amassed power to manipulate public opinion and political outcomes way out of proportion to any individual citizen or assembly of citizens who cannot marshal enough money to present their interests. 

August was a spectacular case in point. It was bad enough that nothing conclusive came from either the House or Senate. In the short span of a few weeks opponents of meaningful change set loose a fear campaign that effectively brought to a dead stop any forward momentum Congress may have had in it's already turgid, messy, contentious deliberations. 

Which leads me to the point of this post: fear is a paralyzing phenomenon blocking rational thought and behavior.

As this story played on today's Morning Edition I recalled the old lady I heard last week who was persuaded that the president had deliberately planned a flu pandemic so that the government could take children away from parents for some sinister reason. Her bizarre thinking was underscored in the last thirty-six hours by yet another incredible, irrational public backlash at the president's planned pep-talk next week to the nation's children marking the opening of another school year. 

Fear.
Irrational, unprovoked, blood-freezing fear. 
Think about it as you read this.  (Or listen at the link. It's only about four minutes.)

Scientists are beginning to understand why fearful memories are so persistent in the brain, and how they can be erased.

The research could help thousands of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, including many veterans, says Kerry Ressler, a psychiatrist at Emory University and investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In recent years, Ressler says, he's been working with veterans from Iraq who survived incidents like being in a Humvee that was blown up by a bomb. Many are haunted by the memories.

Behavioral therapies can help these PTSD patients cope with their fears, Ressler says. They learn to believe that a car ride doesn't have to end in violence.

But the traumatic memory is still there and can be set off again by almost any emotional event.

The Root Of Fear
That's because fear comes from a part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala isn't logical, Ressler says. It just reacts.

"Before we are even consciously aware of something the amygdala has activated the fight-or-flight reflex," he says, "and activated the fear system.

So to understand why fearful memories are so persistent, researchers have been studying the amygdala. And a Swiss team seems to have found some clues � at least in rats.

The team worked with rats that had learned to associate a certain sound with an electric shock, says Andreas Luthi of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.

Even after researchers stopped administering the shocks, the rats would freeze for several seconds when they heard the sound.

Luthi and his team showed that adult rats never lost their fear of that sound.

Erasing Memories
But it was a different story for baby rats. They did eventually forget, and could hear the sound without reacting in fear. The memory was erased. And the team thinks it knows why.

When rats are about three weeks old, brain cells in the amygdala acquire a protective molecular sheath. The researchers thought that sheath might make it harder to erase memories.

To test the hypothesis, they injected adult rats with a drug that dissolved the sheath. The adult rats forgot their fear. The scientists restored their early ability to erase fearful memories.

The experiment, published in the journal Science on Friday, shows that "you can recover the ability of these animals to erase fear memories," Luthi says.

But What About People?
When it comes to fear, rats and people have a lot in common, says Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and one of the nation's most prominent fear researchers.

You can see the similarities by watching a video taken during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, LeDoux says. It shows a crowd of people watching a concert. Then a bomb explodes "and everyone is hunkered down in a freezing posture," he says.

LeDoux says he is confident that rat experiments like the one done by Luthi's team will lead to better treatments for humans. Human brain cells have sheaths like those in rats, and these could become a target for new drugs.

Research on ways to erase memories has some people worried about the potential for misuse by governments or the military.

But LeDoux says it would be wrong to halt experiments that could help people with phobias, panic disorder, or PTSD.

"Any PTSD patient I've talked to has been willing to sacrifice a few normal memories for the bad ones they may get rid of if these experiments are successful," he says.

As I said at the start, this isn't rocket science. Well actually it literally is science, but the conclusions are not shocking. In fact, they are very close to what most of us would call "common sense"....until, of course, they are meant to apply to you and me.
We know ourselves to be immune from irrational thought. Particularly irrational thought resulting from fear. Right?