Citizens United

[I-mon]

Surprised I haven't heard this mentioned here (I like to get my american politics through the RSF filter it's good value). Looks like seriously bad news to me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html

WASHINGTON — Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission-campaign-finance-2560799.html

"Today's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process."

Thoughts?

[internalenthusiast]

it's been mentioned on here a lot, i think.

yep, your concerns are valid, i think.

thanks for picking up on this. i think it's terribly important.

[bailewen]

Yeah.

It's a month or two old already.

That's the part that should have been on the "Democracy Dead" thread.

Not only have all limits on campaign contributions been removed, they don't even have to report where the money came from. Since the decision, campaign spending has exploded with something like a 7:1 increase in spending on the Republican side...this time. More troubling still is that most of these big corporations are not even really American. They are multinational conglomerates. Since there's no transparency, there's no way to tell where the money comes from.

*sigh*

Game over.

[yieldingxxx]

Game over indeed. I've been bringing this up everywhere I go, and nobody I know thinks it's ethical but five extreme right wing conservative justices do, so that's it. The people have been denied once again and the corporate bought and sold republicans and the blue dog democrats are forever entrenched. Unless this can be overturned, I see no way aorund this. Imho, this is the single most important issue of all, since it will eventually affect ever single one of us (and not in a good way).

Does anybody find it funny that all this foreign and corporate money is going to the Republicans and NOT the democrats? Hmmm.

[Dmitri]

This will change nothing at all.

[affa]