THIS WEEK in The Halls of Power: NYC and California resolutions against Citizens United ruling, 2012 energy policy perspectives and more!
We are off to a busy start here and are anticipating a busy month. Much of our activity will focus on our campaign for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Ele
ction Commission, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the right to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. The second anniversary of that decision is Jan. 21, and we are helping activists mobilize actions across the country that week.
In the meantime, elected officials throughout the country are becoming increasingly aware of how dangerous the court ruling is and are doing something about it. Today, our coalition partners in California will be holding a press conference announcing the introduction of a state resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. See the statement from our Democracy is For People Campaign for more information. Participants will include Assemblymembers Bob Wieckowski and Michael Allen as well as representatives from Common Cause, AFSCME and Church IMPACT.
On Wednesday, Jonah Minkoff-Zern, a senior organizer with our Democracy Is For People campaign, will be traveling to New York City. There, the Council is going to vote on a similar resolution criticizing Citizens United and calling for a constitutional amendment. Stay tuned to www.CitizenVox.org for a blog post on that tomorrow, and follow live tweets by @RuleByUs for the latest real-time information on this and other efforts!
We will be waiting to see if President Obama follows the advice of our Congress Watch division Director David Arkush and moves forward with a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We don’t want to see another global financial meltdown happen thanks to lax regulation of Wall Street. The U.S. economy is already in enough of a mess- waiting any longer to give this new bureau wings would be criminal.
And, if you’ve ever wondered where your bag of frozen stir-fry comes from — you will want to tune in to hear Lori Wallach on the Kojo Nnamdi Show tomorrow as she discusses Country of Origin Labels (COOL), spoiler alert– it’s not actually COOL what is happening with COOL!
And on Thursday, Robert Weissman, Public Citizen’s president, will be giving a keynote address at the American Association of Law Schools’ Society of Socio-Economics’ meeting. He will be talking about the corporate campaign to roll back regulatory controls.
Also this week, we are taking the fight to curb corporate buy-out of our elections to the corporations themselves. On Friday, we will join Common Cause in calling for the top 500 corporations to abstain from campaign spending in 2012. We hope you will join us in this petition to publicly challenge the ethics of box-mart retailers like Wall-Mart and too-big-to-fail companies like Bank of America.
Finally, Public Citizen Energy Program Director Tyson Slocum took on the challenge of looking ahead to the 2012 energy policy landscape, scroll to his post on the National Journal Energy blog entitled “Energy for the 99%” to see if you agree with his perspective and predictions!
Rachel Lewis is a policy wonk turned New Media strategist for Public Citizen. She translates wonk and legalese into 140 characters or less on a daily basis and hopes you follow @Public_Citizen and/or @citvox for the latest happenings this week in the halls of power.