If you think politicians care more about corporate cash than they care about average citizens, you’re not alone. Jim Hightower writes in his new column, “‘We The People,’ Not ‘We The Corporations'”:
A year from now, Americans will be caught in an unprecedented blizzard of presidential campaign ads. We’ll be blinded by the whiteout and buried in the storm’s negativity.
For the first time ever, most of this ad blizzard will not come from the candidates, but from ads secretly funded by huge corporations. This is because a five-man cabal on the Supreme Court issued an edict last year that perverts nature itself. In a case titled Citizens United, the five decreed that — shazam! — lifeless corporate entities are henceforth “persons” with more electioneering rights than … well, us real-life persons.
In a black-robed coup against our democracy, the Supremes ruled that a corporation’s money is “speech” and that CEOs may dump unlimited sums of it into their own ad campaigns to elect or defeat any candidates they choose.
Of course, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and the rest are nothing but legalistic constructs — really just pieces of paper issued by state governments. It’s a grotesque, Kafkaesque lie to say they are equal to — much less superior to — human beings. As a friend of mine puts it, “A corporation is not a person until Texas executes one!”
