Jim Hightower: The Supreme Coup

[undeterred]

Wednesday 27 January 2010
by: Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Despite 234 years of progress toward the American ideal of equality for all, we still have to battle unfairness. How happy, then, to learn that a handful of our leaders in Washington took bold and forceful action last week to lift another group of downtrodden Americans from the pits of injustice, helping them gain more political and governmental power. I refer, of course, to corporations.

Say what? Corporations should get more power over our elected officials? "Free the corporate money," cried the movement's leaders, demanding that America sever the few legal restraints that remain on corporate efforts to buy our elections. "Si, se puede," chanted these assertive champions of corporate supremacy -- "Yes, we can!" So, they did. "They" being the five doctrinaire corporatists who now form the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Let's remember their names: Sam Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. These five men, on their own whim, have executed a black-robed coup against the American people's democratic authority.

They took an obscure case involving a minor violation of election funding law and turned it into a constitutional upheaval. Rushing their handpicked case through the system, they issued a 5-4 decision on Jan. 21 that overturns a century of settled American law and more than two centuries of deep agreement in our Land of the Free that the narrow interests of corporations must be subjugated to the public interest.

Indeed, the founders of our Republic saw corporate power as an inherently selfish and perpetual danger to democracy, and most leaders of that day believed that corporate entities should have no role whatsoever in politics. Thomas Jefferson bluntly declared in 1816 that the country must "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations." The Alito-Kennedy-Roberts-Scalia-Thomas cabal, however, has unceremoniously dumped the wisdom of the founders, along with volumes of American judicial precedent, to assert that poor little corporations today are victims of political "censorship" by Congress, states and cities that have outlawed the use of corporate funds in elections. Such restrictions, ruled the five usurpers, violate the "free speech rights" of corporations, putting corporate interests at a disadvantage with other political interests.

http://www.truthout.org/jim-hightower-the-supreme-coup56438

[yourout]

1. Hell yea it gets a KnR.

[Gregorian]

2. The Supreme Court must be wondering where they are going to hide.

I'm glad to see so many criticizing this lame decision. The Court is going to have to hide somewhere, because it is clear there are five justices who shouldn't have the power they do.

[tom_paine]

3. They can always hire one half of we serfs to kill the other half.

This line is attributed to one aristocrat, but I would guess that, amongst themselves, the line has been spoke literally billions of times since the dawn of human history.

It is as succinct a description of the relationship between the Aristocratic Owners and the 99.9% of the rest of humanity as was ever spoken, and most poltics since the dawn of human history have functioned along the lines of this immutable principle of human interaction.

Sadly.

[Land Shark]

4. Corporate coup n/t

[TexasObserver]

5. Jimbo is awesome.

I was disappointed with his decision in 2000 to support Nader, and told him so. But I still like him and enjoy his columns. We go way back to the 1970s.

When Jim was much younger, he worked Fred Harris' short lived campaign for president. I can't remember which year, but I think it was 1976. They got hammered in early caucuses or primaries, and afterwards Hightower said "we aimed our campaign at the little people, but it seems they were too short to reach the voting levers." That was the gist of it.

I worked with him in some of his campaigns, and he's truly a charming guy and a real progressive.

[tbyg52]

6. >>I was disappointed with his decision in 2000 to support Nader

Some kind of case can be made for that, at least. There is *no* way to make a case for supporting Kinky. I've emailed Hightower, through his website and in reply to a mailing list email, three times, and haven't received a peep in response.

[TexasObserver]

8. Well, I give everyone a pass on Kinky.

I wouldn't support Kinky, but I understand those who do. He's a character. He says some outrageous things.

[tbyg52]

9. Yeah, but

a) He has no qualifications that I'm aware of to hold elected office of any sort, certainly not governor against Bill White (the first thing he tried) nor ag commissioner against Hank Gilbert.

b) He split the vote when we had a chance for a Democratic governor, and may be the reason we don't right now. (Whereas Nader did not cause Bush to win in 2000 - the SCOTUS did.)

[midnight]

7. I say this cabal usurped the power to grant freedoms of person hood where it does not exist.

I wonder how many people slipping through the cracks have time to monitor these unconstitutional events and vote accordingly against those who will not fight against them..

[demigoddess]

10. I thought that freedom of speech meant that the government could not

put us in jail for saying what we thought. But that doesn't mean that we can libel people, or spread lies, or shout fire in a crowded theatre. Seems to me that corporations spending money on these things is the antithesis of freedom of speech.