Having decreed that Corporations have a free speech “right ” to spend unlimited sums from their massive corporate treasuries to elect or defeat candidates in our elections, the Supreme Court’s five-man corporatist majority has opened a colossal can of worms. One of those worrisome squigglies is this question: Does the Court’s newly-fabricated political right extend to foreign corporations?
In their ruling, the answer from the five judicial monkeywrenchers was… silence. How sly. With no explicit ban to rule out foreign corporate money, the justices have implicitly ruled it in. After all, argue apologists for this constitutional l perversion, a corporation is a corporation, and its official domicile is irrelevant in determining its political rights.
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So, not only have the Supremes magically endowed all inanimate corporate things with the human ability to speak, but they’ve also granted corporate “persons” more speech than actual people-people have. Start with the fact that the Court’s ruling equates our freedom of speech with the freedom to spend money – a plutocratic contortion of democracy that gives the most speech to those with the most money. American corporations alone have trillions of dollars they can draw from to shout down the voices of us mere humans.
But it appears that Toyota, Unilever, Deutsche Bank, Bin Laden construction company and thousands of other foreign entities can also add their trillions of dollars to drown out the democratic voices of real Americans. Interestingly, foreign humans are banned from spending money to influence our elections – so the Court has decreed that corporate foreigners have superior rights to human foreigners.
To help reverse this Supreme insanity, link up with the grassroots coalition called Move To Amend: www.movetoamend.org.
“Should Foreign Corpoations Spend Money on U.S. Political Candidates?” www.newsweek.com, January 22, 2010.
“The Supreme Court Just Handed Anyone, Including bin Laden or the Chinese Government, Control of Our Democracy,” www.alternet.org, January 22, 2010.
“Will the Citizens United Ruling Let Hugo Chavez and King Abdullah Buy U.S. Elections?”www.publicintegrity.org, January 22, 2010.
“Watchdog groups warn ‘Corporate globalization’ of U.S. elections is upon us,” www.rawstory.com, January 23, 2010.
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