THE SUPREME COURT DECISION ON CORPORATE CAMPAIGN
SPENDINGA while ago the lunatic fringe of the Supreme Court went activist and gave giant corporations permission to spend as much as they want, handing them the means to quash any candidate who might want to limit corporate power. The reason for this pronouncement--one that flies in the face of a hundred years of precedent? They feel that poor, powerless corporations (a word which, we might point out has the same derivation as coprolite, which is a chunk of fossilized dinosaur shit) have been wrongly deprived the same rights as persons.
Well, great. Now we have to pass laws to keep this ideological idiocy from further curtailing our control over our country.
But in the meantime, let's get literal. Let's get all strict constructionist. Next time Halliburton or Blackwater or some other defense contractor screws us over in the war effort, let's try them for treason or war crimes. Next time a corporation kills someone with bad practices or shoddy merchandise, let's charge them with murder and try to apply the death penalty. Which I'm pretty much against in normal circumstances, but corporations long ago proved that to them there is no such thing as cruel and unusual.
The Tea Party screamers wail about creeping socialism--not that any of them know socialism from fascism from Nazism from pantagruelism(1)--but what they're really worried about is totalitarianism.
Well, so am I. But not from our government, which is, let's face it, touchingly ineffectual more often than not.
I'm worried about corporate totalitarianism. We already have the oil and coal companies spending mind-boggling sums to slow or stop any rational response to climate change and dwindling resources. We've had Big Med funding the attempts to poison health care reform. The banks--don't get me started about the banks and financial sector. Big companies, big money; we raise a hand to speak up, they swing a sledgehammer. We patiently try to plant democracy and fairness with a trowel, they claw it up with a thousand horsepower steam shovel. Truth gets spoken with a shaky voice, lies are blasted through a million megaphones.
Saddest of all, but not particularly surprising, a lot of the Tea Party movement and right wing scream machine is funded by big money from big corporations. They yell that they're protecting our freedom while actually handing our fate over to giant oligarchic structures that will silence dissent and render choice in what we consume or believe to only what they're selling at the moment.
Some day I hope the Supreme Court's fanatic five are condemned by history for the ideological crime they perpetrated, and I hope we don't have to claw our way up out of the ruins of a free society to get there.
(1)pantagruelism -from pantagruelian; satiric, though ribald; from Rabelais' PANTAGRUEL -thank you Mrs. Byrne
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