Supreme Court sells elections to the highest (corporate) bidder
Disappointed that there were remaining pockets of the American political system not completely dominated by Wall Street executives, conservatives on the Supreme Court issued an opinion yesterday overturning a 63-year old ban or corporate money in federal elections.
The five most conservative judges joined together to equate corporate income with free speech, at the detriment to fair and free elections in which all sides have the ability to communicate freely. And in an astonishingly brazen act of "judicial activism" that conservatives so often decry, the conservative justices took on the question of corporate money in elections when the question wasn't even in the case before them.
Consider this scenario: President Obama is seeking to recoup $90 billion in taxpayers used to bail out the banks, a plan widely supported by the public, but one that needs congressional approval. The banks, realizing they are about to lose $90 billion dollars ($90 billion that was about to go to CEOs in desperate need of bonuses on top of their lavish salaries) if they do nothing, figure that losing $10 billion is much better than losing $90 billion, get together and launch $10 billion in ads targeting members of Congress up for election in November. Several members of Congress switch their votes, and Obama is thwarted. (The banks, incidentally, pass along the added $10 billion in costs to you through increased fees).
Under the old rules, there were at least some regulations on this. Under the new rules, the banks would be seriously incompetent if they didn't employ that strategy.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote eloquently in his dissent:
"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 end result is that you will see an unprecedented and rapid increase in the amount of ads and political materials you see at election time, and corporations will dominate the funding for elections. And those of us committed to a fair economy that isn't completely run by CEOs will have to work that much harder to get the message out in the next election.
