Basically, the Supreme Court just said that corporations can run any sort of ad that they want:
A divided U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending, reversing two of its precedents and freeing companies to conduct advertising campaigns that explicitly try to sway voters.
The 5-4 majority, invoking the Constitution’s free-speech clause, said the government lacks a legitimate basis to restrict independent campaign expenditures by companies. The ruling went well beyond the circumstances in the case before the justices, a dispute over a documentary film attacking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”
They have just deliberately created a “Wild West” for campaign finance, and they did it because they bought into the myth of Obama small donors (he out-raised from Wall Street fat cats against both Clinton and McCain).
About the only bright spot on this is that Sotomayor has given indications that she opposes she is dubious of the according of “person” status to corporations, which was done by a court clerk in the footnotes (no, I am not joking) in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. (see Sotomayor’s comments here)
There is a decent chance that Obama will get another opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court justice before 2012, and it’s very important to counterbalance the nut-jobs that Bush put in.
> and they did it because they bought into the myth of Obama small donors
Why would you say that? Myths such as the small-donations story are for popular consumption, not for elites. The supreme court oligarchy simply wants to shift more political power to the rich.
Because one of the artifacts of oligarchy is that they tend to believe their own PR buzz.
It makes lying easier.
Dear God!
Imagine the outrage if the local paper ran a story where, when a gun wielding thug held up a store, the cops came in and read the gun it's Miranda Rights and then read the same rights to the thug?
That's the bare bones logic behind "Corporate Personhood." These paper "people" have all the same rights as us merely fleshy humans.
No wonder it's hard to jail corporate criminals. They have two sets of rights to use to fend off prosecution.
There simply must be a widespread campaign from across the political spectrum to outlaw "Corporate Personhood" or our democracy-weak as it is-is completely in the crapper.
You want post apocalypse, you got it.
Only a concerted, almost revolutionary resistance movement to revoke Corporate Personhood would seem to be able to rescue us from this.
I'm beginning to be glad that my years are numbered. That my life will be over before the full force of this monstrocity takes hold of all our throats throttling our freedoms.
When I die, perhaps I will still be of use. Soylent Green anyone?
I don't know why all that crap shows up in my comment, but it did. I'm a Neanderthal as far as technology is concerned so I'm clueless. My sin, I think, is that I tried to use MS Word to construct an error free comment and the crap came along for the ride.
God only knows, and I'm too old to be able to figure it out and too damn disgusted to try.
> Because one of the artifacts of oligarchy is that they tend to believe their own PR buzz. It makes lying easier.
How could the elites believe the small-donations nonsense? They know that their big donations get results. If they didn't they would not bother giving them. Besides, do you really believe that if this case had been decided before 2008 it would have turned out any differently?
What they do believe is that it is just and natural that their money would give them more political power. They call this "freedom of speech".
Paste the document into notepad, and then copy and paste from notepad into word.
yeah, it sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
You mean paste from Word into Notepad and then into your comment section, yes?
(In otherwords, buy a MAC.)
Actually, the problem is more MS word than anythkng else.
There are actually programs out there to make MS Word play nice with the web, one is called the de-moronizer.
Seeing as how you need magnification, you might want one of the freeware improved notepads out there on the web.
Because the elites, to a large degree, believe their own PR.
As Upton Sinclair noted, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."