Access To Democracy

     I thought the United States Supreme Court could never make a worst decision than Bush v. Gore, in which they decided, 5-4, a Presidential election.  I was wrong.

     In another 5-4 decision, made today, the Court decided that the First Amendment grants the same rights to corporations as it does to you and me.  McCain-Feingold is virtually out the window, and with it your vote and mine.  Now, unfettered by any regulation, corporations can spend unlimited amounts to back political candidates of their choice, just as they can on issues.  They can literally buy legislators of their choosing.  And they will.

     As the only industrialized nation without universal health care, we have just endured a painful lesson in how lies, distortion, and corporate money can defeat a proposal that would not only have been cost-effective for us, but would have improved our medical capability.  That’s gone, it’s over;  corporate money has defeated health care.

     Now, on top of that, corporations and big business can spend as much as they like to elect the politicians they can control.  Pour money into elections, win elections;  in our sound-bite society that’s enough to sway people, to fill the airwaves with well-crafted and glossy falsehoods which will be deceptively, cunningly fodder for the naive, for those who don’t know to dig beneath the surface to find the truth.  Corporations have the same rights as we do, except for one thing — they can’t vote but they don’t need to; they can buy election results.  We, as individuals,  can vote but there is no way we can compete against that.  It’s a stacked election.  We vote, they win.

     The First Amendment is probably one of the most precious gifts from our Founding Fathers, but could they have ever forseen today’s decision?  Well,  Thomas Jefferson wanted to put constraints, and even term limits, on corporations, but he was unsuccessful.  There cannot be any justification to suck the blood out of our democracy, and our world as we know it.  But I fear it is coming.

And it’s all based on the note of a Supreme Court reporter of decisions, not the words of the Justices.

     In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway Co., in 1886 (118 U.S. 394) the court reporter, in his summary, stated that the Court had held that corporations are persons within the intent of the 14th Amendment. 

     They are not — corporations are artificial entities, not persons, and while they certainly are entitled to the protection of their rights, there is a fine line which has to differentiate a corporation from a living, breathing person –they should not have the protections of the individual.   Corporations did not flee oppression in Europe, nor did they spill their blood to secure our liberty.  President Dwight Eisenhower was prescient when he warned, over a half centruy ago, of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. 

     The incredible thing is that the decision of the Court in the Santa Clara County case no place held what the court reporter (a former employee of a railroad, incidentally) stated.  And yet it has somehow found its way into our jurisprudence.  Thus, our country turns on a statement which is not within the language of the Supreme Court in the seminal case, now taken many steps further by today’s Supreme Court majority, who have fashioned one of the most destructive decisions  to our democracy that one could imagine, and one that will cast the majority in infamy.

     My vote has become meaningless, and so has yours.  If not democracy in America, where?