The distinguished Senator from theScrabbled
I’m surprised I haven’t seen any ranting by anyone (John) about this, the Supreme Courts decision to eliminate campaign finance laws, effectively freeing corporations, business interests, and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on politicians and political ads.
I think this could be good for us. What we need to do is get all of our money together, and put up our own candidate. We can start small, say, state senate or something. We’re a pretty savvy, and judging by our discourse on here, outspoken and, shall we say, direct bunch. I doubt many could stand to our biting attack ads and borderline slanderous accusations. Christina already has us covered from a “favorable” print angle. We could step up our plagiarist McSweeneys McSweeneys plagiarism campaign to get our Scrabbled search rating up. Then, once in office, our guy/girl could declare theScrabbled both a business and a tax exempt entity, and if that doesn’t benefit us, he/she could propose some sort of law that would make it do so.
Then, on to phase 2…
Comments
Oh I was plenty disappointed/angry when I heard that the other morning. I don’t know why no one else brought it up, either, but I really see this as quite a devastating blow to democracy.
How in the hell could that actually seem like a good idea?
Fucking assholes.
I’ll be honest with you, after the way things have netted out with the bank bailouts and the stimulus (or lack of an effective stimulus), and the healthcare debacle, with it seeming like the whole US government (with the exception of a small handful of senators and a small handful of representatives) going against popular sentiment and public will to do things that are detrimental to the people and favorable to corporations…..I’m not sure how this is going to be any different. I mean over the past year it’s been proven I think pretty heavily that both parties are more or less bought and sold by corporate america to do their bidding. So….what? This is going to make that WORSE? Hard to see how. So yeah, it sucks and it’s horrible but it’s pretty much making official what was already pretty obviously the case
but now corporations are allowed to spend an unlimited amount on campaign contributions directly.
No, I know. It’s bad. But my opinion is stated much better than I could in this article and this paragraph in particular:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/22/citizens_united/index.html
“I’m also quite skeptical of the apocalyptic claims about how this decision will radically transform and subvert our democracy by empowering corporate control over the political process. My skepticism is due to one principal fact: I really don’t see how things can get much worse in that regard. The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin: “banks own” the Congress). Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions — their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold — and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can’t imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There’s not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday’s issuance of this ruling?"
What’s been especially interesting to me is how this might pan out in the long run. I mean, Obama’s been vocally against it. And while Kev’s cynicism may turn out to be the ultimate truth of the matter, in the long-run, this could turn out to be a good thing as it forces a recently-populist congress to draft legislation to end this idea of corporate personhood once and for all. I mean, fact is, the Supreme Court decision was an interpretation of the law. It’s not worth getting into whether or not it was a correct interpretation because it’s easily remedied by drafting new laws. A number of senators in both parties are already crying foul. Who knows, we could see legislation by 2011. Whether the corporations they’re beholden to will have enough influence to neuter whatever legislation they come up with, however, is another thing entirely.
That said, I don’t think being so casually cynical does anyone any good.
A good start: the Business should mind it’s own business act, which imposes a 500% tax on political contributions from businesses.
Someone posted on reddit the other day that if Corporations have the right to free speech, do they also have the right to bear arms? Because I like all things crazy, this idea made me smile.
What say you?
“a recently populist congress”?!?!? Did I miss something? Did some sort of populist legislation get passed that I didn’t hear about?
Very recent. Like the past two or three weeks. Nothing’s passed yet, but all the stuff coming out of Congress, speech wise, is crazy populist and a number of bills on the floor are totally-crazy-but-make-people-happy type of things.
John said:Very recent. Like the past two or three weeks. Nothing’s passed yet, but all the stuff coming out of Congress, speech wise, is crazy populist and a number of bills on the floor are totally-crazy-but-make-people-happy type of things.
Exactly. Like I said there are a handful of Senators and probably slightly more representatives who are genuinely populist and make great speeches and throw great proposals out there. But nothing is going to be done with any of them. They’re great speeches. They’re great ideas. But the vast majority of members of both bodies of government are more worried about not pissing off corporate donors and with adhering to the repeatedly disproven notion of “trickle down” economics. The fact that oppossing Ben Bernake’s renomination is a controversial stance says a lot about the state of play.