Good Times

Two outraged posts in two days gives me that good ol' 2004 feeling.

In your busy life, do you take a moment to spare a thought for the victimized, the downtrodden, those who are without voice and without power? And when you do, which corporation comes to mind first? Is it poor, beleaguered Citigroup? Is it Wal-Mart, so nobly promoting "Buy American" campaigns against so much opposition?

Well, fear not, friends, because 5 men in black robes have come to the rescue (which makes it feel very 2000 around here). Through blinding leaps of logic, they have determined that money is the same thing as speech, and that therefore money is protected under the First Amendment in the same way as, say, an unknown blog written by some outraged grad student somewhere. And if money is speech, then your right to put your money where your mouth is cannot be abridged. From here it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to remember that 1) somehow corporations have the same rights as individual people, that is, that they are treated as persons under the law, and 2) these corporate personages coincidentally have a lot of money, which they would like to give to political causes just out of the goodness of their hearts, for the betterment of society yet 3) are unable to do so because of mean rules made up by elected people so therefore 4) the right of corporations to free speech has been abridged, which is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

So brace yourselves for the absolute ungodliness of what is about to follow: the floodgates have been opened (in an election year, no less) and there is now no limit to what corporations can spend on elections and candidates. Whereas before, our elected officials were kind of like a high-class escort service, discreet negotiations in nice hotels, now it's going to be more like crack-hungry prostitutes in the back seat of a Mazda.

What is also awesome about this ruling is that it makes a lovely Orwellian (sorry, sorry, I know anything Orwellian is now cliche, which should really tell us something about the current state of affairs) point. All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal than others. All of us have the right to free speech, but some of us have a LOT more free speech than others.

Alex Pareene at Gawker said it better: "The Conservative Justices are all Constitutional Originalists who don't believe in Judicial overreach or legislating from the bench, which is why they completely overturned decades of established campaign finance law and negated previous Supreme Court decisions. Because, you know, it's what the original Framers intended: multinational corporations, unlike black people, are 5/5ths of a person."