Saturday, January 21 st marks the 2 nd anniversary of the "Citizens United v/s Federal Election Commission" ruling handed down by the Supreme Court.
It gave corporations the First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to support or defeat candidates for office.
That ruling is the greatest threat to our democracy.
It has skewed the electoral process completely in favor of the big moneyed and special interests so that every issue and problem of consequence, every law and regulation enacted and the oversight and enforcement of such can be traced to the money underwriting the campaigns of candidates that were put in office.
This effect is not lost on most people who readily see the corruption and illegality of that money in the electoral process, but apparently not the five justices on the Supreme Court that made it completely legal.
It must be overturned.
This is not a partisan issue because it affects conservatives and fundamentalists as well as liberals and progressives alike. It affects all of us.
Of course most office holders, whether they be local, state or federal deny the corrupting influence of money in their decisions. For sure the days of accepting outright bribes i.e. money under the table may be a thing of the past. But when an election campaign is primarily funded by big moneyed and special interest largesse and that individual is elected and his (her) voting record is seen clearly benefitting the interests that underwrote his campaign, that vote is clearly tainted.
Whether it's their support of defense spending, war, the environment, education, health care, deregulation of the finance industry, the bailouts, who is held to account, gets fined or who goes to jail et al, is all connected to the money that put these marionettes in office.
So we don't have outright bags of money transferring directly to our office holders or the outright nepotism and cronyism of 3 rd world kleptocracies.
No, in the U.S. it's more sophisticated and now made completely legal by the highest Court in the land.
Well slavery and segregation were once legal and sanctified by the Court. But eventually these wrongs were overturned by amending the Constitution and appropriately relegated to the dustbin of our ignoble history as the evil they once were.
Overturning the evil consequences of "Citizens United" is of no lesser importance. It is the blatant usurpation of this country by the corporate oligarchs who have transformed our representative democracy into a plutocracy that serves them.
Fortunately we have a legal process in this country that can overrule the serious misjudgment of this Supreme Court and that's amending the Constitution.
Some brave representatives in the House and Senate have put forth Bills calling for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn "Citizens".
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