A front page article in today’s New York Times details how a SuperPAC organized by Joe Ricketts, the billionaire owner of TD Ameritrade, is about to dump $10 million dollars into an ad campaign to defeat “Barack Hussein Obama.” The ads feature the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, and they will be vicious.
The whole election process is being corrupted by SuperPACs. I’m worried that the legitimacy of the election is being undermined by voter suppression tactics along with unregulated expenditures. A democracy depends on the losing side accepting the winners. In this election, that whole idea is in question.
How did we get into this position?
You can thank the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest issue of the New Yorker has an article by Jeffrey Toobin explaining just what the Court did in the “Citizens United” decision. Five justices basically made law, and made it to benefit the Republican Party. If you think I’m just being partisan, let me quote from the dissent from Justice Stevens.
The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues [the conservative majority on the Court], 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.
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.
Stevens’ dissent was 90 pages long--the longest of his career. Of course, it is just a dissent. The important thing is that five justices decided to wreck American elections and American democracy in the service of partisan goals.
This is a form of class warfare AGAINST the middle class. See the 1% does not have the votes needed to control the government so it does the next best thing. The 1% makes it too expensive not to either be rich or cater to the rich in order to get elected.
ReplyDeleteIf America does not soon wake up, we will be in trouble. We need higher taxes on the rich, improve wealth inequality, income inequality and debt inequality.
The 1% have taken the best economic system in the world and destroyed it. I am not a class warrior but someone who is seeking to preserve capitalism. I want to see everyone thrive under a highly taxed and regulated capitalistic structure.
I echo the above comments.
ReplyDeleteWe need to get a constitutional amendment to change this ruling by the the Supreme Court. I think that all candidates running for office should be asked if they would support this amendment. That way we would have them on record with their position. This ruling by the Supreme Court will totally destroy democracy if left in place.