Monopoly Corporatocracy Replaces Democracy

Dave Johnson January 21, 2010 - 1:39pm ET

From:  Campaign for America’s Future

The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to make George W. Bush President allow large corporations to spend as much as needed to place their candidates in office, so that they will pass laws:

• giving them access to government funds
• restricting their smaller competitors
• allowing them to dump toxins in the water and air
• requiring people to purchase health insurance - (already in progress)
• anything else they want

This ruling unleashes monopoly corporatocracy. The - currently - biggest corporations win. This sets in place that they get to run things now, and stay biggest. Of course first and foremost the biggest companies will use their vast resources to keep the playing field rigged to their advantage so they stay biggest. And then to get bigger. How long before they get antitrust laws off the books? And then of course we will see things like Exxon will get laws passed restricting alternate energy.

Imagine being a state legislator and a company tells you they will spend ten or a hundred million against you - smearing you like the Hillary documentary this case was about - if you don’t do what they say. No one can stand up against that and if they DO they’ll be out of office in a heartbeat.

This one-dollar-one-vote ruling is a sad day for one-person-one-vote democracy.

“I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816

From Windancer:

Bob Edgar, of Common Cause, gets it exactly right when he said this morning:

“The breadth of this decision is stunning. It declares — with no factual record before it to review — that corporate political spending does not corrupt elected officials, that influencing lawmakers is not corruption, and that the appearance of influence will not cause the public to lose faith in our democracy.  This is judicial activism at its worst.”

“Justice John Paul Stevens gets it right when he says in his dissent that, ‘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.”