EDITORIAL : THE NEW YORK TIMES, USA

 

Unfettered Money

When the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech 35 years ago, it was responding to forces of technology and economics reshaping American politics that made it much more expensive to run a campaign. While ruling that public financing and limits on contributions are valid ways to limit donors’ undue influence, it struck down candidate, campaign and independent spending limits.

Now the court’s conservative majority is again reshaping politics, ruling that what matters most for money and speech is their “fair market” impact. The result will be closer scrutiny of public financing, while enabling even more rampant spending by wealthy candidates.

In the landmark 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the court said that “virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money,” so restricting campaign spending meant restricting political speech. The First Amendment required that political speech be unfettered, so the same was required for political spending.

But when the court ruled that money equals speech, it didn’t mean, literally, that money is speech. It meant that money enabled speech. A political contribution enabled the symbolic, or indirect, speech of the donor and the actual speech of the candidate — and may the best speech win. The focus was on enabling the speech, not the money.

That changed in 2008 when the conservative majority struck down a federal rule that had tripled the limit on campaign contributions for a candidate outspent by a rich, self-financed opponent. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote that the rule diminished “the effectiveness” of the rich candidate’s spending and of his speech.

In oral argument recently, the court’s conservatives appeared ready to take their next step in restricting campaign finance reform and to strike down Arizona’s public financing mechanism called triggered matching funds. This is one of the most compelling innovations in the country. The state will match for a state-financed candidate what an opponent raises in private contributions up to triple the initial amount of state financing.

To William Maurer, the lawyer opposing the Arizona mechanism, whenever “a privately financed candidate speaks above a certain amount, the government creates real penalties for them to have engaged in unfettered political expression.” That “speaks” was not a slip, but a reinforcement of the money-equals-speech notion.

The fundamental problem, he said, is “the government turning my speech into the vehicle by which my entire political message is undercut,” because the public funds triggered are a penalty that reduces the impact of the privately financed candidate’s spending and speech. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. made clear in the argument that he, too, sees triggered matching public funds as a limit on the privately financed candidate’s speech.

That makes no sense. Arizona’s mechanism means more candidates — not just the wealthy — will be able to run in elections. And that means more political speech, not less. But that view depends on seeing money as enabling speech, not vice versa. Money already has far too much sway everywhere in politics. If the court continues this way, the damage and corruption will be enormous.

Investing in the Dark

So what did Jamie Dimon know and when did he know it?

New documents unsealed recently in a class-action lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase — some of which name Mr. Dimon, the chief executive — paint yet another picture of a bank profiting while its clients suffer. At issue is a precrash investment vehicle, named Sigma, in which the bank had invested $500 million in assets from pension funds and other clients, nearly all of which the clients say was lost when the investment tanked in 2008.

The clients were blindsided because they believed that Sigma was a safe way to invest. JPMorgan was not taken by surprise. As Louise Story reported in The Times on Monday, court documents show that warnings by top bank officials about Sigma and similar investments went all the way up to Mr. Dimon’s office.

The gist of the warnings was not how to protect clients, but how the ailing Sigma presented the bank with what one e-mail described as “very big moneymaking opportunities as the market deteriorates.”

When Sigma did indeed collapse, JPMorgan collected nearly $1.9 billion, according to the suit, a figure the bank disputes, without providing any alternative figure.

It is possible that JPMorgan did nothing wrong legally — and that is precisely the problem. It clearly stinks to withhold information that may well have caused clients to change their minds — in effect, for the bank to treat clients’ money with less care than it treats its own. As long as banks operate that way, there is no restoring trust in the financial system, or, by extension, in the political system that props it up.

But is it illegal? JPMorgan has said that the unit of the bank that handled the clients’ investments in Sigma was not, by law, allowed to confer with the unit of the bank that benefited from Sigma’s demise. That may be true, but as Ms. Story pointed out, in this case, the information rose to executives who oversee the entire company and were in a position to intervene. That they did not is a failure to do the right thing, even if the court decides that the bank did not break the law.

In the meantime, efforts to write new rules to try to curb such conflicts is hamstrung by a Republican backlash against the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that was passed last year. There is proposed legislation to repeal provisions of the law, and the agencies that have to implement the law are in danger of not getting enough money to do the job. As the pension funds in the class-action suit against JPMorgan can certainly attest, only the banks will benefit from business as usual.

Government-Enforced Bigotry in France

The formal imposition on Monday of the French ban on the full-face veil, which led to the prompt arrest of two women protesting the law, has been accompanied by the usual government invocations of French values, as well as issues of security and gender equality.

But there’s no question about the real purpose of this giant step backward — or of an earlier law banning Muslim veils in schools, or the “debates” organized by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, Union for a Popular Movement, on “French identity” and secularism. They are all cynical attacks on Islam, the religion of about a tenth of France’s population, to curry favor with France’s increasingly anti-immigrant right wing.

Barring the niqab from government buildings, public services, streets and entertainment venues has been the most passionately debated of these measures, with some arguing that it is a symbol of the subjugation of women. But only a tiny handful of France’s five million to six million Muslims ever don the full veil, and their decision to do so is patently not the business of the government or the police.

The ban serves only to encourage the spread of Muslim-bashing in France and elsewhere in Europe, helped along by statements like this one from the interior minister, Claude Guéant, blatantly portraying Islam as a religion alien to France: “There is no reason why the nation should accord to one particular religion more rights than religions that were formerly anchored in our country.”

Fortunately, even some of Mr. Sarkozy’s own officials have seen through these ploys. The prime minister, François Fillon, quietly put an end to the embarrassing “national debate” on French identity a year ago, and, more recently, he refused to take part in a similarly tainted debate on secularism. All major religious leaders, including the Catholic archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, also shunned the discussion.

Mr. Sarkozy and the rest of his party should follow these examples and stop their shameless exploitation of intolerance for political gain.

Tumbling Along With the Political Tumbleweed

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, drew the contempt of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and several conservative members of Congress last month when he cited the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., as an example of the good things that come from federal support for the arts.

Ms. Palin wrote on Twitter that “rodeo clowns still want to fund Cowboy Poetry Party,” and she and others have called it an example of wasteful federal spending that must end.

Senator Reid’s description of the event was overstated. He said the gathering draws tens of thousands of people and wouldn’t exist without support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In fact, it draws about 8,000 people annually and was begun with two small seed grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. It has become so popular that it would surely continue even if its sponsor, the Western Folklife Center in Elko, lost the $45,000 it receives annually from the N.E.A. — about 3 percent of its budget, most of which is used for exhibitions.

But on the fundamental point Mr. Reid was right: A very little bit of federal assistance can go a very long way in promoting culture and art that is fundamental to our identity as Americans.

The gathering began in 1985 as a serious effort to help the Western Folklife Center record a dying breed of cowboy poets and rescue a historic art form. The center has since grown into a cultural hub for all the living arts associated with working cowboys and ranch life. Each January, it draws people from across the country, regardless of whether they can ride or write. This is something all Americans can celebrate. Anybody who ridicules it never bothered to listen in.