Blog Catalog

Thursday, April 3, 2014

SCOTUS to the 99%: Screw you people


Yesterday, our own US Supreme Court took ur, all of us, the entire nation, yet further down the deep, dark hole--the money hole--in our politics. It was huge, ugly news for the country and an extremely dark day for the nation:

Supreme Court's abomination: How the McCutcheon decision will destroy American politics


In case you haven't been following this or aren't aware of what was possibly going down:
“Money talks,” Elvis Costello once observed, “and it’s persuasive.” The belief that this is especially true in the world of politics led to the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act. In the aftermath of Watergate the FECA was strengthened in an attempt to limit the corrupting influence of money on politics, and, until 2010, the Supreme Court largely upheld Congress’s power to do so.
That year the Citizens United case, which essentially found that the free speech rights of corporations were more important than legislative attempts to keep money from corrupting the political process, occasioned a great deal of outrage. But that case marked merely the beginning of what is likely to prove to be a series of increasingly successful assaults on campaign finance laws.
And now, Wednesday, the next blow to attempting to keep the rich from being able to buy politicians as effortlessly as they purchase anything else has been struck by McCutcheon v. FEC, a Supreme Court case dealing with limits on how much money individuals can contribute to candidates.
McCutcheon has now struck down overall limits on individual campaign contributions. This latest outburst of judicial activism in the struggle to render campaign finance laws completely toothless is merely accelerating a historical process that is coming to seem almost inevitable.
So it's been decided by the Court and now the wealthy and corporations have even fewer limitations on the amounts of their millions and billions of dollars they can use to buy, well, every legislator and every possible government bill and law and so, ultimately, our own government, even more than they're already doing now.

And no, it's not that it wasn't unexpected. Too many of us thought this Court might well come down on the side of that same wealthy and corporations but still, here it is. The worst we thought might happen, has, in fact, occurred.

Fortunately, not everyone on the Court voted for the 1%. It just wasn't enough of them.


The fact is, we, the people have to stand up and demand an end to the money, the big, ugly, corrupting, pervasive money of the wealthy and corporations that's buying our legislators, our laws and so, our government.  It has to come from us.  It will only happen if we stand up. we have to take our government back. It can happen but it has to come from us. We must demand it.

Link to pdf of the Court's decision:   McCutcheon v. Federal Election Comm'n - Supreme Court

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