Not content to be able to own the government of the United States of America (a former democracy) by its ability to ONLY bribe politicians, the Ruling Class has just given itself new powers of “persuasion” in politics.
It can now spend all the money it wants to to drown out any competing political message, spend all the money it wants to buy ads to smear and swiftboat candidates it doesn’t like…or that are a threat to it, The Ruling Class can now effectively spend all the money it wants….to do anything it wants, at any time politically. Or at least it will be when The Ruling Classes lawyers get done with reinterpreting the ruling the way The Ruling Class wants it interpreted.
This is just a HUGE blow to the notion that The People run this country.
There has always, at least since the beginning of mass communication through newspapers, been a war of Money vs The People in politics. The Ruling Class just won a HUGE battle in that war, which at this point can only be labeled as a Class War (Even though the Ruling Class has used its influence to try to effectively ‘ban’ the term Class War from the public discourse.)
This decision takes that war to a new level. But just as with all of the manipulations and corruption that are taking place in our government and courts right now, the naked buying of Congress by the InsCos in the HCR process being the most glaring….this one is right out in the open, for all to see. But just as with all of the engineered divides that separate The People from the Right to run their own government, it is also hidden. Hidden in so far as that there is not a PERSON deeply subverting democracy, but a faceless and nameless group of people, hiding behind the legal fiction of corporate personhood, that is deeply subverting American democracy.
Subverting democracy…by outright buying it.
From Justics Stevens’ dissent (with a big Hat Tip to Adam B)
In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure,and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.
The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind. While individuals might join together to exercise their speech rights, business corporations, at least, were plainly not seen as facilitating such associational or expressive ends. Even “the notion that business corporations could invoke the First Amendment would probably have been quite a novelty,”given that “at the time, the legitimacy of every corporate activity was thought to rest entirely in a concession of the sovereign.”
FN54 See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Tom Logan (Nov. 12, 1816), in 12 The Works of Thomas Jefferson 42, 44 (P. Ford ed. 1905) (“I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”).
America was founded as a democracy in part as a response to the corruption and oppression of the European aristocracy. It was founded to PREVENT monied aristocrats….The Ruling Class ….from owning and running the government.
Now after 230 years, we are watching the naked dismantling of tenet after tenet of democracy, and the establishment and entrenchment of a new aristocracy.
Approved and made legal by a Supreme Court made up of Justices selected and approved by The Ruling Class to do exactly ….this.
More from Stevens….
In a democratic society, the longstanding consensus on the need to limit corporate campaign spending should outweigh the wooden application of judge-made rules. The majority’s rejection of this principle “elevate[s] corporations to a level of deference which has not been seen at least since the days when substantive due process was regularly used to invalidate regulatory legislation thought to unfairly impinge upon established economic interests.” At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
The Court’s blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve. It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process. Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.
It has never been more apparent that we are in a Class War.
The People vs the Aristocrats.
Again.
Now……what are we going to do about it?
What is OUR strategy, The People’s Strategy, in the Class War?
.
At least we have one politician on our side….go here and sign Alan Grayson’s petition.
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What IS our strategy? I’m starting to think curling up in the fetal position might be just as effective as anything else we do.
there towards the end.
Welcome to the American remake of the Weimar Republic. Within a few years, every last member of Congress will be a Corpocrat. Then comes conscription and the police state. We have seen this movie before in Germany in the 1930s. We know how it turns out.
Decent Germans and intelligent endangered minorities got the hell out of Germany in the ’30s, and that is my advice to intelligent and decent Americans, particularly those with draft-age children. If you don’t want your kids fed into the American war machine, find a foreign refuge for them.
Once the engines of unlimited corporate control of American politics are running at full speed, global war, the ultimate perversion of unchecked power, will result, and this evil war will destroy our nation. You can’t reason with the American equivalents of Krupp and IG Farben (Lockheed Martin and Halliburton). The arrow of American fascist ascendancy is in flight, and only a fool will stand in its path.
and one in the White House with the intestinal fortitude to go through with it, we could pass public financing of campaigns, and laws to require prior shareholder approval of corporate political spending. And when the Republicans tried to filibuster, the VP could be sent to Capitol Hill to preside over the Senate, and issue a ruling from the chair declaring the filibuster unconstitutional.
And of course, if pigs had wings they could fly. So I guess we’re pretty much left with direct action.
This is no coincidence. This decision comes on the heels of the death of the labor movement, anti-trust ideology, banking regulation, “civilian control” of the military and the notion of one man one vote etc. etc.
This decision is the economic equivalent of the Dred Scott decision i.e. the people have no standing. This my friends is the worst calamity post Civil War. This decision effectively means that “campaigning”, which has historically been identical to public persuasion on behalf of positions taken by political parties, can now be carried out in the form of continuous, mass propaganda by Corporations whose interests reflect only their immediate profits. Corporations have no children and do not suffer physical pain. But in our country, they now have inalienable rights, not granted by the creator nor discoverable in the natural rights of man, but bought from the government itself.
This decision will link corporate advertising to politics. The distinction between commercial advertising and propaganda will vanish. This is the apotheosis of raw capitalism, where the state becomes the agent of large corporate interests, as the “political/cultural world view” conflates the consumer with the voter.
This is downright apocalyptic. But only a few will notice.
We have devolved from one man one vote, to one consumer one vote. And if people see themselves as merely consumers, then the patient is clearly on life support and the Democratic Experiment awaiting Code Blue.
I hate to be so negative, but I now see Obama as simply a tool, a stand in for the official commonly known as the President. All three branches are so corrupt and rotten that to call them collectively as “government of the people” can only be seriously contemplated by lovers of fiction.
with a rec list diary at orange… will have a special comment tonight, but in his diary he drops this….
and this
wow
The opposition never showed up. Still hasn’t. All they do is blog and vote. Both activities are about as passive as you can get.
Money talks, bullshit walks.
in the voting booth is in for a shock.
It won’t be won by one party, two parties, a third party–or the party of the 3rd part.
The website is gone to the original arrogance and description about how wonderful it is to have the ability to plant opinions in the minds of you peasants.