It's not funny anymore.
There's another joke, a bumper sticker which reads "We don't have a democracy. We have an auction!"
It's not funny anymore, either.
SCOTUS has removed restrictions on corporations donating to candidates and causes in federal elections. This means from now on, big businesses can donate all they like to the candidates and causes they support. Corporate personhood (a phrase and a concept which is utterly ludicrous to anyone with a functioning brain) has taken another huge step forward. While those who support this erosion of democracy are quick to point out that the new deregulation of campaign spending also affects nonprofits and unions, let's be real here. Who has all the money, again? Nonprofits quite often struggle simply to keep their doors open. How could they possibly come up with the funds to compete against huge corporations in the purchase of friendly, and indebted, Congresspeople?
Quick, someone remind me why it's the liberal "activist" judges we should be worried about...
In case this doesn't terrify you yet...in case it hasn't sunk in quite yet that what this could mean is the complete disenfranchisement of the common voter (who, after all, has only ves vote to offer, and not millions of dollars of campaign financing) in favor of corporations handpicking the Congress they want, that the kind of grassroots campaign that brought Obama to the White House could easily become a dream of a distant past...read this, and tell me you still aren't scared fuckless by it. From Laurence Britt's 14 Principles of Facism, a cross-cultural analysis of fascism which identified 14 common threads between seven different fascist regimes:
9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.
Sound familiar?
The good ol' American one-man-one-vote power-of-the-people democracy we learn about in grade school never truly existed as the purist principle we were taught...but today, we took another giant step away from that ideal.
Tonight, I mourn for the democracy I so fervently believed in.
Tomorrow, I start planning my probable, eventual emigration to Canada. Just in case.
