My letter of concern to MoveOn.org re: its new campaign opposing the Citizens United Supreme Court decision

I wrote this critical letter to MoveOn.org’s office on August 19th. As I had expected, I have received no response at all as of today (six days later), other than an automatically generated one. I wanted to share it with my readers as I continue to hear how widespread are these concerns from among its millions of members…..

---

Friends,

I have been involved for 15 years now with the growing national movement to dismantle corporate constitutional so-called "rights". MoveOn recently launched its own related campaign, but has muddied the framing so badly that it's making it difficult for those of us who have done this work for years now to be doing much more than damage control, as you are "teaching" your members one inaccurate fact after another. Why have you not met with the folks who have been doing this work for years already to ensure that you're doing the best framing and outreach you can? People like Jane Anne Morris and Greg Coleridge from the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy, or Thomas Linzey from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund are a few of the key players, who have done this work for YEARS. And why have you not even acknowledged the existence of the leading campaign against corporate "rights" in this country, MoveToAmend.org? Why are you unwilling to collaborate with already existing major campaigns?

Here's just one example of the problem with your framing:

"The retail company Target just gave over $150,000 to buy ads supporting a far-right Republican candidate..."

So if Target had donated its money to a left wing candidate, there would be no problem with that?! Don't you think we need to be reaching EVERYONE across the political spectrum, who believes that corporate manipulation of our elections is wrong and must be stopped? A majority of Republicans believes this too, according to polls!  So why are you targeting only companies funding right-wing candidates? It makes no sense.

I'm also very concerned with your framing of the Citizens United case. Reading your emails, you would think this Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to corporate funding of elections. But that's not true, at all!  The floodgates were opened in the 1970s with the Supreme Court's Buckley v Valeo case, which stated that to limit how much $ a corporation could donate was to limit their so-called "right to speak". You MUST know this already, right? Yet you deceive your millions of loyal members. Why? A much more accurate description of what little has changed with Citizens United is here:

"Court's Campaign Money Ruling is a Red Herring" by Jane Anne Morris.

I am DEEPLY CONCERNED at how often you are giving historically inaccurate and poorly framed messages to your members, and in so doing creating an enormous amount of wasted citizen time and energy!  You are doing an enormous disservice to any kind of possible deepening of our progressive movement. Yes, you are mobilizing people in very large numbers, but towards WHAT?

I have waited now for years for you to reach out to your very smart members for a PROPER dialogue with us, so that major campaigns could be co-conceptualized with us. But instead, you simplify everything down to meaningless poll questions. And of course, all you then end up with is yet another top-down progressive group, run by a few insulated individuals. Is that really the best we can do as progressives?

Signed, a very concerned long-time MoveOn member, Paul Cienfuegos, Manila, CA