The
Supreme Court’s Right-Wing Clique has Given Us a Great
Opportunity - Americans
29 January 2010By Dave Lindorff
Flash! The Supreme Court’s latest 5-4 decision
overturning the over 60-year-old ban on corporations
giving money to political campaigns is not the end of
democracy as we know it, or the onset of fascism in
America, as some of hyperventilating progressives have
been claiming.
Sure it’s an outrage to say, as the court majority
did, that corporations have the same rights as people.
But let’s face it: Corporations have long dominated
the American political scene. They didn’t need to be
free to donate in their own corporate names. They have
had their political action committees and their fake
"research foundations" to do the job, and that’s
worked just fine for them, as witness the current
state of the two pro-corporate parties in Congress,
and the string of blatantly pro-corporate presidents
we’ve had for as far back as I can remember.
In fact, the way I see it, this latest decision is a
huge improvement. Having been granted the same First
Amendment rights as individuals when it comes to free
speech, corporations now can honestly and openly buy
elections and lobby in their own names, instead of
hiding behind such deceptive PAC names as the American
Solutions for Winning the Future (oil industry) or
Grassroots Arizona (real estate interests), and such
deceptive "think tanks" and "research foundations" as
the Center for Consumer Freedom (tobacco and alcohol
industries) or the Global Climate Coalition (utilities
and the nuclear industry).
Now perhaps American voters will be able to see more
clearly just who these companies are that own our
politicians. We will be able to understand much more
easily how our own interests are being trampled by the
money and power of corporations.
It’s a terrible thing to have a supposedly democratic
government that is actually owned by corporations, of
course, and this certainly was not by any stretch of
the imagination what the Founders had in mind when
they spoke of “all men” being “born equal,” or what
Abe Lincoln had in mind when he spoke of a government
“of the people, by the people and for the people,” but
that’s what we’ve got. We might as well make that as
clear as possible, and this latest court decision does
that really well.
Now we can tackle the problem frontally, instead of
with the Rube Goldberg approach we’ve had up to now
with PACs and campaign finance laws that really just
forced the reality of corporate influence into hiding.
We now have the opportunity to unite people on the
left, middle and right who find the idea of corporate
money buying votes and government officials to be
repugnant--and this is not just a concern of the
left--to once and for all root out this evil.
The best solution would be a national campaign for a
new Constitutional Amendment--one which would
specifically define the First Amendment as applying to
individual human beings. And there is such a campaign!
Check it out at: Move to Amend
This could also be a great teachable moment. If
corporations are to have the same free speech rights
as a person, shouldn’t corporations also have the same
responsibilities and the same punishments when they
break the law? For example, if a corporation takes
actions which cause workers to die, or which destroy
the environment of a community and cause widespread
cancers, shouldn’t the people who made those
criminals--the managers and the major shareholders who
backed those managers--be held criminally
responsible?
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