Jim Hightower | The Supreme Coup "Legal Perversion"

[kpete]

.............the Court has just handed these political powerhouses their wildest dream: access to the multi- trillion- dollar ocean of funds held within the corporate entities themselves. Every business empire -- from Wall Street to Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil to the China Overseas Shipping Company (yes, the five wise guys even waved foreign corporations into our political funfest) -- can now open the spigots of their vast corporate treasuries and send a raging torrent of their special interest cash into any and all of our national, state and local elections.

Two legal perversions are at work here. First, the Court has equated the freedom to spend money with the freedom of speech. But if money is speech, those with the most money get the most speech. That's plutocracy, not democracy, and it's totally alien to our Constitution, as well as a gross distortion of the crucial principle of one person-one vote.

Second, a corporation literally cannot speak. It has no lips, tongue, breath or brain. Far from being a "person," a corporation is nothing but a piece of paper -- a legal construct created by the state as a mechanism for its owners to make money.

Actual people in the mechanism (shareholders, executives, workers, retirees, lenders, et al.) can and do speak politically -- in many diverse voices that express very different viewpoints. But the corporate entity, which the court cabal is trying to turn into a Frankenstein monster, is inanimate, incapable of thought, inherently mute and, in itself, no more deserving of human rights than a trash can would be.

more:
http://www.truthout.org/jim-hightower-the-supreme-coup56438
(good for Obama for calling SCOTUS out at SOTUS!, kp
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4246014&mesg_id=4246014

....the behavior of Justice Alito at last night's State of the Union address -- visibly shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true" when Obama warned of the dangers of the Court's Citizens United ruling -- was a serious and substantive breach of protocol that reflects very poorly on Alito and only further undermines the credibility of the Court. It has nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with the Court's ability to adhere to its intended function...
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/28/alito/index.html

[texastoast]

1. I think we need a constitutional amendment

That a person has to have DNA.


Thanks for posting Jim. Love that man.