Another nasty development due to "Citizens United"

Yes, yet one more ugly result from the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision last year that ended up allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money, literally, to buy elections here in the good old US of A.


This one close to home, right next door in Kansas, thanks to the Koch Brothers:

Koch Industries Coerced Employees During The 2010 Midterm Elections

Writing today in the Nation, Mark Ames and Mike Elk reveal that Koch Industries mailed a letters to 50,000 employees instructing them on who to vote for in the 2010 midterm elections. The Koch packet given to employees included candidate names, a letter from a Koch lobbyist, and a right-wing screed from the company and the Washington Examiner, an outlet owned by Phil Anschutz, a billionaire who is close to the Koch family.  

Corporate coercion of employees is perhaps the most profound repercussion from the Supreme Court’s Citizens Uniteddecision last year. The Nation spoke to several law experts who noted that “Citizens United frees Koch Industries and other corporations to propagandize their employees with their political preferences.” Before the decision, businesses were prohibited from instructing their employees to vote a certain way.

This is so disgusting it's difficult to describe.

Your boss can now tell you, in essence, how you should vote.

Sure, you don't have to follow his advice and he won't know how you voted (yet.  Who knows?  Maybe wealthy Republicans are working on that)  but now the boss man can give you his opinion on how to vote and tell you why.

Independence?

Fugghedaboudit.

And naturally, when the Koch brothers won their Citizens United case--it wasn't technically their case but they supported it going their way, financially, of course--they figured why stop there?

Not only was Koch active in helping push the Citizens United decision (several of the groups filing amicus briefs supporting unlimited corporate spending were funded by Koch), but Koch actively planned for exploiting the decision. When we exposed a memo outlining the 2010 secret Koch political strategy meeting with fellow right-wing donors, we noted that the summit included a presentation from Karl Crow. Crow is a Koch operative who had penned a memo calling for corporations to exploit Citizens Unitedand aggressively use “employees, vendors, and customers” as tools for advancing business interests in the political sphere...
The end result, folks, for now, is that the upcoming 2012 election will be, by far, the most expensive election ever here in the US.  And that's saying something.

And the corporations and wealthy of this country are going to do everything they can and spend all they can in order to buy every election they can so more things can go their way.

God help us--the little guys.