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Corporations really are not persons
When the Republican Five on the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case and handed to corporations nearly full human rights of free speech, it didn’t come out of the blue. Although no bill in Congress from the time of George Washington to Barack Obama had declared that corporations should have these “human rights” (to the contrary, multiple laws had said the opposite), and no president had ever spoken in favor of corporate human rights, the five men in the majority on the Supreme Court took it upon themselves to hand our country over to the tender mercies of the world’s largest transnational corporations.
The Court’s Minority Pushed Back. Justice John Paul Stevens, with the concurrence of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote the dissenting opinion.
The dissenting Justices argued that the majority’s ruling wasn’t merely wrong, both in a contemporary and a historical sense, but that it was dangerous. The dissent was explicit, clear, and shocking in how bluntly the three most senior members of the Court (along with the newbie, Sotomayor) called out their colleagues, two of whom (Roberts and Alito) had been just recently appointed by George W. Bush.
Just the fact that corporations can participate on an unlimited basis as actors in the political process will, inevitably, cause average working Americans—the 99 percent who make less than $300,000 a year—to conclude that their “democracy” is now rigged.
The result will be that more and more people will simply stop participating in politics (it’s interesting to note how many politicians announced within weeks of this decision that they would not run for reelection), stop being informed about politics, and stop voting. Our democracy might wither and could even die.
Learn more about the reasons for dissenting to the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling in chapter ten, "Wal-Mart Is Not A Person!", of " Rebooting the American Dream". (on Kindle too). |
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