"The Court's blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve. It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process. Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today." - Justice John Paul Stevens, from his Dissenting Opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. January 21, 2010
Days before the third anniversary of the Citizens United v. SEC Supreme Court case ruling, Occupy Wall Street organized an extravagant piece of political street theater: a wedding ceremony in which seven brides were to marry seven Corporations in a ceremony across the street from the New York Stock exchange. The honorable Reverend Billy from The Church of Stop Shopping presided over the ceremony. One of the brides, Monica Hunken in a wedding dress bedazzled with real dollar bills, interrupted the ceremony just as her betrothed was about to take her hand in marriage. What followed is not to be missed: Why protest against the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision? nday, January 21, 2013 was the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's favorable ruling for Citizens United against the Federal election Commission that has opened the floodgates for a truly pornographic amount of money into our political process. Don't get me wrong; I am not suggesting that we wax poetic about the glory days before 2009 when the U.S. political process was paramour of virtue. The Citizens United ruling has become a symbol for what the Supreme Court has been doing for about 100 years, slowly empowering corporations until they have now been granted personhood status and putting how money is spent in elections on par with free speech. How did this happen? One does not think of corporate shills as activists, but that is label that one of the most powerful corporate shills in the world, Justice John Roberts, has earned in his short time heading the Supreme Court: An activist judge. What other word is there to describe the brazen behavior of the Roberts' Supreme Court that looked at the vast wasteland of cases seeking to be heard in the Fall of 2009 and picked a little case brought by a corporate front group -- Citizens United- and then rewrote the complaint to reframe the question completely? Oh, and then convened court a month earlier than was the usual giving lawyers who had to prepare oral arguments only a month to deal with the new, large, and obscene question of whether corporations had constitutionally protected electioneering rights- like people? As a result of the Supreme Court's Citizen United decree, unlimited and unreported sums of corporate money are now allowed in all US elections. Bottom line: The elite ruling class and Corporate Political Interests have rendered the individual citizen nearly obsolete in the electoral process. Now that corporate power has been constitutionalized via this Supreme Court precedent, how long will it be before all elected officials are 21st Century versions Manchurian Candidate's or Stepford Wives mindlessly regurgitating talking points programmed by the ultra rich?
Love, love me, baby, money money money, i love you, wedding, funny, failing, Obama, forever wedding, dancing, debate, revolution, Acronym TV, money in politics, move to amend, mta,
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