Welcome to America, Inc.
January has sure been a month for game changes. First there was a book of that name written by a coupla gossip columnists disguised as journalists. That’s the one that revealed Harry Reid had accidentally told the truth about reasons Barack Obama actually could be elected president.
And just when we thought we were getting away from the political Kitty Kelleys, comes the Massachusetts Senate race in which a lousy Democratic candidate lost to a lousy Republican candidate because 1) she was a lousy candidate, 2) she couldn’t keep her feet out of her mouth, 3) Massachusetts voters apparently like their candidates to be centerfolds, 4) progressives were pissed about a lot of things, especially the public option, and forgot what happened in 2000, 5) Mass voters actually believed Scott Brown when he said he was an independent, 6) the end is nigh.
But now comes the real game changer. Chief Justice John Roberts Wednesday accomplished what he was appointed to the court to do: He eliminated limits on federal campaign spending by corporations. Silly Teabaggers. They probably thought his purpose was to kill Roe v. Wade. Nah. The guys with money coming out of their ears don’t give a shit about that. Stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with conservatives had just one goal.
Mission accomplished. Welcome to America, Inc., where corporations are considered citizens. And John Roberts didn’t even have to wear a flight suit.
Yay! Bribery is now legal!
So now, every incorporated entity in the United States — from Goldman Sachs to the ACLU to News Corp. to the AFL-CIO to BP to Eggleston Children’s Hospital to Bristol-Myers Squibb to Greenpeace — can pour as much money as they want into politics.
They can’t – yet – give all those millions to individual candidates. I’m sure that’s next, but they can make ads, commercials, infomercials – anything they want – for or against a candidate or an issue.
I know it’s asking a lot — but real Americans, the pro-democracy, pro-individual liberties types — could probably see a teeny-tiny problem with that, if they only looked really, really hard, not to mention that some of those special interests have a heckuva lot more spare change laying around than others, Exxon.
Of course, the ones who’ll benefit from this unleashing of corporate mania onto the American citizenry think it’s great. Ed Rollins, GOP strategist and CNN political analyst, says it’s g-r-r-r-r-eat! Because it’ll make political races more competitive.
More competitive? On whose planet does having corporate backing makes this more competitive? You know that, I know that. Hell, Teabaggers know that. But their masters are lobbyists, so we know that’ll change soon.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote for the majority in the 5-4 ruling, said that laws preventing companies from spending this kind of money somehow violated a First Amendment right “to think for ourselves.”
When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,
Kennedy is right that the citizens are free to get their information from wherever they want, whether it’s legitimate or not. And yes, we do indeed have the freedom to think for ourselves.
But a corporation should not have the right to pour unlimited amounts of money into their political agendas and foist those agendas onto potentially unsuspecting citizens. Faux News already does that quite well. But there’s far too much information to sort through.
It’s no wonder so many citizens latch onto some ideology and then cling to it for dear life.
Read the entire post at A World of Progress.
Whenever the power of an individual in the political process is increased, a democracy is strengthened. This was the case when women and blacks were given the right to vote, for example.
However, when the power of an individual in the political process is weakened, or in this case diluted by corporate influence, a democracy is weakened.
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