The Supreme Court’s decision to throw out all laws on campaign financing dating all the way back to 1907 should leave no doubt in our mind where this country is headed, with accelerating speed.
It’s not just that politicians will be advertising through puppets wearing Nascar jumpsuits, the problem is the concentration of power. As we all know, advertisers lie. Now these same misleading advertisers will have the power over commercials to elect manufactured politicians, just like any other product they’re trying to fool us on. Reality has become a commodity.
Along with free speech comes the responsibility of citizens to be well informed. In a consumerism culture, citizens don’t want to be challenged and the advertisers know this. Being well informed is time consuming and many people only have time to listen to the TV news, owned by the corporations, where thirty second news bites are substitutes for informative journalism. Subsequently, society is less able to differentiate between truth and fiction; shop for facts and take any one’s word for anything, regardless of credentials when it suits their opinion. Opinion is not fact, but when marketed correctly it wins elections.
Lastly, the finding by the Supreme Court that corporations are people implies that we are no longer human beings. We are not on par with corporations, people die, corporations don’t. Corporations have time on their side, we don’t.
Our country was founded on radical ideas, now it is being revoked by a court that as Justice Stevens said, “has it exactly backwards. It is this court decision that is the radical departure from what had been settled First Amendment law."
Thomas Jefferson said in 1821-”Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, as its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal Judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments” This corrupted government is playing us like fiddles.
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