Shut up, we want to regulate you — VOICES for REASON

Jeff Scialabba and I have already addressed most of the substantive arguments Ralph Nader and Robert Weissman raise in their Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Case Against Corporate Speech” (see here, here, and here). But this is revealing:

Corporations know that money makes a big difference when it comes to blocking protections for workers, consumers and the environment. Wall Street, health insurance and drug companies, fossil fuel and nuclear power companies, and defense corporations have been hard at work defeating common-sense reforms that would make them more accountable.

Do we want more elected officials to believe that to challenge corporate agendas is to risk their career?

This means: “We should restrict corporate speech because it interferes with us passing our anti-corporate agenda.” As my colleague Onkar Ghate has pointed out, the same argument could have been made by segregationalists during the sixties: “We should restrict speech by blacks because it interferes with our anti-black agenda.”

Image: flickr