Posts tagged citizens

Citizens United to be Overturned? Yeah Right……

.

http://occupywallst.org/
http://www.occupytogether.org/
TheAlyonaShow RT

The Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United Ruling, which allows for unlimited flows of money from corporations and unions into our elections, is finally getting challenged on Capitol Hill. Last night, six Democratic Senators introduced a constitutional amendment that would in effect overturn the ruling, and restore the authority to Congress and the States to regulate the campaign finance system. But, what are the chancesof an amendment actually going through? Ana Kasparian, co-host of The Young Turks weighs in.
—————————————————————————
http://www.occupytogether.org/

—————————————————————————
For at least 30 years our government, ran by Corporate America and Mega-Banking Cartels, have shipped hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas, to exploit the poor around the world, in the name of higher profits, and boosting the Stock Market. Profits that could have been made right here in the good old USA, but shipping jobs overseas means even higher profits. The greed of Corporate America has become so disgusting, that Congress actually allowed our country’s credit rating to be lowered in 2011, just so the wealthy won’t have to pay higher taxes. The greed has become so disgusting, that when Wall Street does well, the average American does poor. 

Campaign Finance Reform must be enacted to get Corporate America out of our electoral process, or at least to the point that they have no more power over our election process than the average citizen of the United States. The Federal Reserve must also be abolished, or at least be monitored under strict regulations. There has got to be a change in America or our Democracy will die, or should we say that this Republic should be changed into a real Democracy…

.

 


1 note 

Rachel Maddow on Citizens United v. FEC - A Disaster For Free Speech In America

.

.

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot restrict corporate spending in candidate elections. Sweeping aside a century of legal precedent, the 5-4 majority opened the floodgates for companies to support candidates they consider friendly to their agenda and carpet-bomb ones who would oppose that agenda.

Which means, for instance, that health insurance companies making a killing now could use every last cent of their resources to elect candidates who oppose health reform.

As for the argument that letting corporations give however much they want is a matter of free speech, U.S. Representative Barney Frank has said:

“If you need to have this to have free speech, as the right-wing majority on the court says, then there’s no free speech anywhere else in the world. Because no other country that I’m aware of, no functioning democracy, allows this unlimited corporate spending on campaigns.”

 If you’re thinking this is potentially disastrous for the American political process, then you’re thinking a lot like Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, whowrites about watching Justice John Paul Stevens read from his partial dissent:

Stevens hammers more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations “are not human beings” and “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” He insists that “they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens’ eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality.” Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

 

 

5 notes 

Keith Olbermann on “Citizens United” - In The United States, Our Politicians Will Now Become Prostitutes.



In 2010, the Supreme Court, of Chief Justice John Roberts, in a decision that might actually have more dire implications than “Dred Scott v Sandford,” declared that because of the alchemy of its 19th Century predecessors in deciding that corporations had all the rights of people, any restrictions on how these corporate-beings spend their money on political advertising, are unconstitutional.

In short, the first amendment — free speech for persons — which went into affect in 1791, applies to corporations, which were not recognized as the equivalents of persons until 1886. In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections.

None. They can spend all the money they want. And if they can spend all the money they want — sooner, rather than later — they will implant the legislators of their choice in every office from President to head of the Visiting Nurse Service. …

6 notes