Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

Roberts
Chief Justice
   
Stevens
Wrote a dissent
   
Scalia
Voted with the majority, wrote a special concurrence

Kennedy
Wrote the majority opinion
   
Thomas
Voted with the majority, wrote a special concurrence
   
Ginsburg
Voted with the minority, joined Stevens' dissent

Breyer
Voted with the minority, joined Stevens' dissent
   
Alito
Voted with the majority, joined Roberts' concurrence
   
Sotomayor
Voted with the minority, joined Stevens’ dissent 

Facts of the Case:

Citizens United sought an injunction against the Federal Election Commission in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to prevent the application of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) to its film Hillary: The Movie. The Movie expressed opinions about whether Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president.

In an attempt to regulate "big money" campaign contributions, the BCRA applies a variety of restrictions to "electioneering communications."

Citizens United argued that the First Amendment on its face is violated and when applied to The Movie and its related advertisements,  is unconstitutional as applied to the circumstances.

The United States District Court denied the injunction. The amendment on its face was not unconstitutional because the Supreme Court in McConnell v. FEC had already reached that determination.

The District Court also held that The Movie was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, as it attempted to inform voters that Senator Clinton was unfit for office, and thus the First Amendment  was not unconstitutionally applied.

Lastly, it held that the Amendment was  not unconstitutional as applied to the The Movie or its advertisements. The court reasoned that the McConnell decision recognized that disclosure of donors "might be unconstitutional if it imposed an unconstitutional burden on the freedom to associate in support of a particular cause," but those circumstances did not exist in Citizen United's claim.

Conclusion:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Antonin G. Scalia, Samuel A. Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Sonia Sotamayor.

The majority maintained that political speech is indispensable to a democracy, which is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. The majority also held that the BCRA's disclosure requirements as applied to The Movie were constitutional, reasoning that disclosure is justified by a "governmental interest" in providing the "electorate with information" about election-related spending resources.

The Court also upheld the disclosure requirements for political advertising sponsors and it upheld the ban on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

SEC Sues Goldman Sachs

US “Shocked, Shocked,” to Find Wall Street Fraud

Crooks to the right of us...
Crooks to the left of us...
Crooks all around us...
Hedging and plundered...

By Scarecrow, firedoglake, April 16, 2010 
   
Let the litigation games and perp walks begin. The Securities and Exchange Commission, virtually moribund for the last decade while giant vampire squids looted local, state and union pension funds and misled investors, has finally chosen to take on Goldman Sachs for conning everyone. Who knew?

The New York Times’  Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson tell the story:

    Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.

    The move marks the first time that regulators have taken action against a Wall Street deal that helped investors capitalize on the collapse of the housing market. Goldman itself profited by betting against the very mortgage investments that it sold to its customers. . .

    The instrument in the S.E.C. case, called Abacus 2007-AC1, was one of 25 deals that Goldman created so the bank and select clients could bet against the housing market. Those deals, which were the subject of an article in The New York Times in December, initially protected Goldman from losses when the mortgage market disintegrated and later yielded profits for the bank.

    As the Abacus deals plunged in value, Goldman and certain hedge funds made money on their negative bets, while the Goldman clients who bought the $10.9 billion in investments lost billions of dollars.

    According to the complaint, Goldman created Abacus 2007-AC1 in February 2007, at the request of John A. Paulson, a prominent hedge fund manager who earned an estimated $3.7 billion in 2007 by correctly wagering that the housing bubble would burst.

    Goldman let Mr. Paulson select mortgage bonds that he wanted to bet against — the ones he believed were most likely to lose value — and packaged those bonds into Abacus 2007-AC1, according to the S.E.C. complaint. Goldman then sold the Abacus deal to investors like foreign banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other hedge funds.

This is just the beginning of what looks like many likely civil suits and, one hopes, criminal complaints against Wall Street giants. There have been numerous similar reports recently involving other Wall Street firms that suggest the housing bubble was artificially sustained through fraud long after the market had become saturated under any reasonable, non-predatory lending practices.

It seems the demand for highly risky mortgages — and hence the plague of predatory lending practices — was goosed by Wall Street firms that created collateral debt obligations from junk mortgages primarily to bet against them. The Wall Street hustlers then duped investors to pour billions into CDO securities they had designed to fail. The whole point was to make money by betting against securities the hustler and/or its CDO maker created to fail.

What’s astonishing is that it has taken this long after the initial 2007-2008 bailouts to awaken the regulators to their duties. (On the other hand, the Bushies did hollow out the agency.)

Update: Felix Salmon in Goldman’s Abacus Lies parses the SEC complaint to get to what Goldman was allegedly doing:

    With this suit, the SEC has finally uncovered the real scandal behind the Abacus deals. The NYT tried, back in December, but it didn’t quite get to the nub of the story — although Paulson was mentioned in the NYT story as someone who was generally short the subprime market, there was no indication that he played any role in structuring the deals. Neither was there any mention of ACA.

    The scandal here is not that Goldman was short the subprime market at the same time as marketing the Abacus deal. The scandal is that Goldman sold the contents of Abacus as being handpicked by managers at ACA when in fact it was handpicked by Paulson; and that it told ACA that Paulson had a long position in the deal when in fact he was entirely short.