Think Humanely

UPDATED BELOW

Only in a depraved, oligarchic society such as ours, in which materialism and capital are the entire points of living and the only barometer of success, can spending money be equated to free speech. The United States Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on regulations limiting the influence and participation of corporations in our elections were unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy, who had recently speculated that the Civil Rights Act was unfair (don’t you feel bad for all those poor racists who don’t want the niggers to vote?), wrote, “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.” Kennedy is begging the question. He sets up a false premise in order to justify his erroneous conclusion. Corporations spending millions of dollars in order to campaign on behalf on certain candidates isn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they protected individual citizens from government reprisal for voicing dissent, disapproval, etc. And it’s not as if these multi-billion dollar corporations have been disenfranchised (like African-Americans in the South whom the ‘unfair’ Civil Rights Act was meant to protect). In fact, all this depraved ruling does is help this country move the democratic process one step further away from ordinary citizens and toward the oligarchic factions of our society, the wealthy-elite.

Justice Stevens wrote, “”The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.” This is no mere threat – it is a de facto inevitability. Those in California will well remember what happened in the despicable Prop. 8 election and subsequent scandal, when it was revealed that the Mormon church spent obscene amounts of money to alter the outcome of a sovereign state’s election and, in doing so, managed to use it’s vast wealth (and thus influence) to change public opinion. That’s not free speech. That’s just manipulation. And now corporate America has been given free reign to manipulate the voting public ad nauseam.

UPDATE:

The President had the following to say about this travesty of a decision: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington—while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.”

Corporate money has already eroded the effectiveness of representative democracy in this country. Those who doubt this need only look to the pathetic attempts at health care “reform” that have been molested time and time again by insurance companies and the health care industry. Now watering down bills, influencing legislation, and putting in corporate-constructed Manchurian candidates will be even easier. And perfectly legal.