Friends,
Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling which will impact the course of our nation and the quality of our lives in ways we can only begin to fathom for generations to come. If we do not get angrier than we have ever been and demand that our congresspersons and president act right now to stop it, then we will lose what little power we have left in our democracy and we will only have ourselves to blame.
Yesterday’s ruling declared open season on our democracy’s political process for corporations and their rich shareholders and CEOs. In a 5-4 decision split evenly along ideological lines, the Conservative wing of the court ruled that corporations are “natural persons” and are, as such, afforded the same protections under our Constitution as you and me—as real human people.
Or that’s what they said. What’s truly terrifying about this ruling is that it really gives our country’s corporations MORE protections and MORE power than you and I have. It allows them to spend as much money as they want on every candidate in every election in this country. You and I can spend a maximum of $2,400 each on any one candidate. Haliburton, Enron, CIGNA, Sony, and Bank of America can spend millions on tax deductible campaign contributions. They can spend even more on their own political advertising and PR spin.
This is not a harmless decision. If you don’t think corporate influence has held sway over our government since Reagan, you haven’t been paying attention.
Main Street Americans’ quality of life has stagnated thanks to laws that sent our middle class manufacturing jobs and customer service jobs to Asia and Mexico and India; Thanks to laws that deregulated our financial system and allowed banks to gamble recklessly with our money and lose it while saddling you and me with historic levels of debt that’ll take years for us to dig out of now that they castrated our bankruptcy protections; Thanks to laws that favor argibusiness and big pharma so that they can ruin our health and drug us into numb ignorance while they stuff us full of corn and Xanax; and Thanks to the failure of meaningful healthcare reform that will only allow the quality of our health care system to plummet further while its costs to you and me continue to increase. What’s more, our nation has gone to war in our names with a country that didn’t attack us, a war we now know is based solely on false pretenses. That war has ruined our moral standing in the international community and is only serving to fuel anti-American sentiment and compromise our security the world over.
We didn’t benefit from these decisions, you and me. But check out the profit margins of the nation’s manufacturers, the bottom lines of its banks and agribusinesses and pharmaceutical companies and health insurance providers over the last decade. Look at the proliferation of independent military contractors and the skyrocketing profits of Haliburton and Lockheed-Martin and Blackwater. Check out the Forbes-reported net worth of our nation’s CEOs and hedge fund managers who invest in those companies. And then check out who benefitted from the TARP bailouts this year.
Did you and I make out with fat million dollar bonuses like the bandits on Wall Street who crashed our economy a year ago?
While our middle class has dwindled and our wages have stagnated and our jobs growth has been negligible and our individual and national debt has skyrocketed, the richest 2% of our nation has gotten astronomically wealthier and lost little.
The American People didn’t benefit from the most important legislations of the last two-plus decades; American corporations did. They did it through perversions of the legislative process using a battalion of K-street lobbyists and millions upon millions of corporate dollars to persuade and cajole our elected officials to do what’s in their best interests and not ours. They got laws passed that consolidated their controls and protected their profits. And we got the shaft.
This is not a harmless decision. Setting aside debates of Constitutionality, this decision flies in the face of our Declaration of Independence. When we freed ourselves from our colonial masters, we weren’t just freeing ourselves from the British monarchy. We were freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the monarchy’s chartered corporations—the British Wast Indies Trading Company and its peers—and those corporations’ stranglehold over the Thirteen Colonies’ prosperity and quality of life. We declared our independence from the dehumanizing influence of kings and corporations. We fought for it and we won it.
This decision hands those rights and freedoms right back to the corporations and their kings.
If you’re not furious right now, you have to get mad. You can’t sit by and do nothing. If you’re already angry, you’ve got to get angrier. We have to get mad and we have to stay mad, and we have to tell everyone we know and every newspaper and newscaster and elected official just how mad we are. We can’t be afraid of being uncool or doing something embarrassing. What’s uncool and embarrassing is for us to sit on our asses and do nothing while Corporations buy our government. You’ve got to get mad and you have to get everyone you know mad, too.
I don’t know what the right answer is to solve this attack on our democracy, but I do know that the only way we’re going to begin to fight this is for us to get as angry as our colonial forefathers got and to stay as angry as they stayed until they won the freedoms they believed they deserved. We deserve those very freedoms, too, and we’ve got to stay mad until those freedoms are secured.
If you value the environment, you have to get mad. Energy companies and natural resource extraction companies—Exxon-Mobil and BP and coal companies and strip miners—can invest millions in candidates who will not only halt passage of environmental and green energy legislation but who will turn back what progress we’ve made thus far. You have to get mad!
If you’re angry about the worst recession in our lifetimes and the financial institutions and hedge funds that brought it on us, you need only watch those companies’ CEOs testify before congress and read about the historic bonuses they’ve given themselves during the worst financial and job-loss crisis in our lifetimes to realize how utterly contemptuous those men are of our government and of us as a people. Imagine the deregulations they’ll pay for with the elected officials they’ll back. The last decade has shown us exactly where that will lead us. You have to get angry!
If you’re ashamed of the foreign wars we’re in and if you believe they’re causing more death and suffering to the peoples we’re supposedly fighting for and wasting the lives and energy of our American servicemen-and-women, then you have to get mad. If you’re outraged that our government has hired independent contractors to torture suspects in our names, you have to get angry. This decision invites military contractors like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater, and more to invest millions in hawk candidates who will only grow our military and expand our wars on terror and drugs for years to come. You have to get angry!
If you’ve file shared music files by downloading music from blogs or giving music CDs to your friends or ripping music off library CDs or downloaded tons of free music and movies off BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay, be prepared for an all-out assault on your person by Sony Music, BMG, and the other music industry leaders. The money they throw behind candidates will insure that electronic music and movie filesharing becomes not only a bigger crime but one our government does a lot more to investigate and prosecute. You have got to get angry!
If you are a small business owner trying to grow your company and struggling against costs of business your much larger corporate comptetitors can just shrug off, you've got to get angry. The fat cats aren't going to do anything to help you. Youv'e got to get mad!
If you think it’s a travesty that companies like Pepsi and NewsCorp and wealthy fat cats like Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet pay less in taxes than you and I do—like a $1 a year—then you need to get angry because their million dollar campaign contributions are going to be every bit as tax deductible as our $2,400.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. And this is an American issue. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Paine rallied an entire colony of people against exactly the kind of tyranny the Conservative Supreme Court judges have now invited.
With several congressional elections coming due this year, we have precious little time to act. The Corporations are going to kick their campaign financing into overdrive so that they can load our Congress with legislators who will do their bidding, not ours. We have right now, we have this year to decide the course of our democracy. Will it continue to be for the people and by the people, or will we allow it to become for the corporations and by the corporations? Whatever happens, you and I—ordinary Main Street Americans—will be accountable and will pay the price.
You can’t sit this one out. You can’t idly suck down the Starbucks caramel macchiato you charged to your MasterCard and let this happen. You can’t fatten your lazy asses with Big Macs and CocaCola while you sit in your LazyBoy and give precious hours of your life to American Idol and AxeMen and let this happen. You can’t stuff your kids full of Aderol while numbing yourselves with Xanax and let this happen. Our Supreme Court just sold our democracy to the highest bidder.
You have to get off your asses and you have to get mad. You have to stay mad. You have to get your friends and family mad. We’ve all got to contact newspaper editors and news shows and tell them how angry we are. We have to write our congress people and tell them what an outrage this assault on our rights is. Even more importantly, we need to CALL our congress people and tell them the same thing. If there’s a rally in your community, you’ve got to add your body to its count and your voice to its calls.
This can’t be lip service. If we’re going to save our democracy, we can’t just join a fucking club and enter our email addresses and zip codes into a bunch of pussy internet petitions. We have to get off our fucking asses. We have to write people, we have to call people, we have to show up to rallies and we can not let this go.
We have to get mad and we have to start shouting and we have to do it right now. If you sit on your asses and let this one slide, then you sell out our democracy and you sell out America; you dishonor the service men and women who have fought on your behalf from the Revolution to today and you overturn the ideals and accomplishments of our Founding Fathers; and you damn future generations Americans to powerlessness before corporate control.
True patriotism in this country has always meant standing against the tyranny of selfish, wealthy men who put their moneyed interests before our own. We have to be patriots now.
