The Best "free Speech" Money Can Buy!

Last week's 5-4 Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to advocate for and against policy issues and candidates during election cycles is nothing less than a corporate coup d'état. What's left of American democracy is now as endangered as if fascist troops had rolled up D.C.

You thought influence peddling was rampant before. You ain't seen nothin' yet! This will be sleaze on steroids. Corporate America -- yeah, and unions and special interests also but clearly without the resources corporations can muster -- through attack groups like the 2004 Swiftboaters can now pour millions of dollars into political races to affect outcomes to their liking. We're talking NASCAR jumpsuits; congress creatures with corporate logos stitched to their souls. Even more worrisome, the impact on American foreign and trade policies from "political investments" by international corporations and sovereign wealth funds registered as American shell corporations.

Instead of the Court leaving in place a hundred years of precedent including rulings as recently as 1990, 2003 and 2007, this overreaching verdict places a dramatic asterisk on the Court's conservative majority's illusory veneration of judicial restraint and caps five years of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. unrelentingly kowtowing to Big Business over the interests of workers, consumers and the environment.

Supporters of this atrocity claim restrictions on corporations' political speech are an infringement on their First Amendment rights. But why in the world would corporations have rights to free speech in the first place? Why is ExxonMobil considered an "artificial person" but one of it's gas pumps is not? Neither is a human being. Well, it seems during another period of corporate debauchery following the Civil War, sympathetic Justices determined the 14th Amendment, intended to protect the rights of freed slaves, also protected the rights of "corporate citizens" from the strict regulatory controls from which their corporate patrons sought relief.

These were the same hacks that distinguished themselves for okaying Jim Crow laws, child sweatshops and robber-baron monopolies throughout the end of the 19th century, who in 1886 enshrined the concept of "corporate personhood" in the constitutional lexicon thereby creating "rights" for corporations not then even realized by women, blacks and native Americans. So essentially last week's ruling relied on the constitutional acumen of a group of racist, sexist, anti-democratic corporate lackeys from 125 years ago. Talk about déjà vu all over again.

I will be interested to see how the teabaggers respond. If they are truly populists they will be appalled by this ruling. On the other hand if they are, as I suspect, simply Obama harpies lacking in any true moral grounding, they will find the decision useful in its hugely partisan impact on Democrats. We shall see.