THE SUPREMES COURT
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING
I actually thought highly of the Supreme court and the fairness of the individuals selected for it. That changed two days ago.
The two conservatives who were brought on board by GWB voted for and turned the 5-4 decision to amend the nation's federal campaign finance laws, free-speech rights permit groups like corporations and labor unions to directly spend on political campaigns, prompting the White House to pledge "forceful" action to undercut the decision.
President Obama said the high court had "given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics." He called it a "major victory" for Wall Street, health insurance companies and other interests which would diminish the influence of Americans who give small donations. Obama pledged to "work immediately" with Congress to develop a "forceful response."
Now special interest groups, aka corporations can contribute anything they want to the political coffers of the party or person they choose. Corporations have the same rights now as people, persons, you, me, they, them, and those.
So if General Electric who paid no income tax last year and a few years before that, decides to give members of Congress millions of dollars to keep legislation, taxation and regulation away from General Electric. It's OK.
Sen. Feingold issued a statement that notes the decision does not overturn the ban on soft money donations to political parties, which can then distribute cash to candidates.
"But this decision was a terrible mistake," he said. "This court has just upended that prohibition, and a century's worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government. The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections.
"In a stinging dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”
SPECIAL INTEREST WINS
President Obama led a chorus of Democrats and public interest groups attacking the decision, saying in a statement that the court “has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics,” and vowing that he will work with congressional leaders “to develop a forceful response.”
“It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” the President said. “This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington—while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates."
Many will simply ask, “What are they smoking and where can we buy some? Are the Judges out of tune with today? Could they be going feeble? In the halls of corruption, bribes and payoffs, (CONGRESS) they got to be dancing and holding week long toga parties.
Individual votes and contributions when uncontrolled corporate media money can buy all the TV time and who is giving this money to them, the taxpayers, the folks paying insurance and many struggling to survive. If the President of Pharma Care decides he wants to contribute 100 million dollars to killing health care, do you really believe the millions under his judgment who are the source of the money have a say in this. Or the other board members would take sides against it. Corporations are not and should not be granted the right of the individual.
And unions can take union money in support of those who would cover for them, forgetting it just might be money they might need one day if they go out.
The game is called simply “CORRUPTION”. Soon the People will of had enough. The problem is how do we separate the corrupt from the good. Next….
DUMBED DOWN BY LAW
The ruling of the Supreme Court to allow corporations to donate unlimited funds to politicians really opened Pandoras Box. This is one reason the phrase "Here comes Da Judge" takes on a new meaning. The Judge will see to it the Big Corporations spend their money wisely.
Since one of my favorite gybes is "sure and the tooth fairey is real" fits the last line, I called the Tooth Fairey and asked her what she thought. I cannot reapeat the answer.
Our court is comprised of a group of folks selected for life who really need a Supreme Court to explain and check some of their actions. I am not impressed with them.
The Supreme court handled hundreds more cases 100 years ago. Arlen Spector on his way out after failing to get support for re-election from either party he ran with took some loud shots at them in Congress. More TV promos and book signings than work for the people. We need to get younger, less intellectual judges with more common frickin sense working for the people not against them.
WE ARE LOOKING AT CLASS WAR IN THE FUTURE
The 2010 - 2012 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it. This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine, and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.
Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources. The chamber piously insists that none of the cash from abroad is going into its ad campaigns. But without full disclosure, there's no way of knowing if that's true or simply an accounting trick. And the chamber is just one of many groups engaged in an election-year spending spree.
This extraordinary state of affairs was facilitated by the U.S. Supreme Court's scandalous Citizens United decision, which swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections. The Republicans' success in blocking legislation that would at least have required the big spenders to disclose the sources of their money means voters have to operate in the dark. It is rightfully so to call them the Supremes, only I really prefer the music than the rhetoric.
WHATS IN THE PRESS (WIKI and VARIOUS SOURCES)
The Supreme's conservative majority, have declared America's Money is a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution — that's what the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions have decreed and we have been told to man up and live with it.
A handful of billionaires who get to be the most powerful influence on the content and character of the nation's political conversation. Few support liberals, but the biggest spenders are on the Right. In particular the secretive Koch brothers have received the lion's share of media attention and scrutiny, especially during the past few months, thanks in large part to Democratic efforts to highlight the scope of their spending on behalf of Republicans and against President Obama and his party.
Much of this attention is deserved. Whereas leading liberal donor George Soros "spent between $2 million and $3 million during the 2012 election cycle, Charles and David Koch funneled in the same period something in the range of 122-million to Republican candidates and right-wing nonprofit groups such as Americans for Prosperity.
The Kochs reportedly plan to spend at least as much on the 2014 midterm elections, which will no doubt presage even higher spending in the 2016 presidential race.
The Koch brothers' influence on American politics is enormous. But they have co-conspirators, among them is casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose spending rivals that of the Kochs, and whose influence on the Republican Party — and through the GOP, the American political system as a whole — may be even more significant. He is the 11th-richest person on the planet, Adelson reportedly spent roughly $150 million trying to defeat President Obama in 2012 he blew it with"$15 million he sank into Newt Gingrich's ill-fated primary campaign during the winter of 2012.
The issue that Adelson cares about most is Israel — above all ensuring that Republican candidates for high office unconditionally support the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, very much including its drive to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank. If this support includes expressions of skepticism about the prospect for peace talks with the Palestinians and promises of war with Iran to destroy its nuclear program, all the better.
The Kochs, by contrast, tend to follow their libertarian convictions in supporting -gay-marriage-pot-legalization-and-ending-wars-opposing military interventionism. And yet it's Adelson's über-hawkish position that consistently prevails among leading Republicans.
Witness the abject pandering on display in March, when several prospective GOP presidential candidates traveled to Las Vegas to kiss-up-to-billionaire Adelson's ring. In his public remarks at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting at Adelson's Las Vegas Venetian hotel and casino, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker noted the Hebrew meaning of his son Matthew's name and claimed that the Walker family displays a menorah along with a Christmas tree in their home during holiday season.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, meanwhile, made the mortifying mistake of (accurately) describing the West Bank as the "occupied territories" — a gaffe that he immediately attempted to walk back "in the strongest terms possible."
By all accounts, the man who received the warmest welcome in the Nevada desert was JEB BUSH, Their only option in 2016. Jeb Bush, who was invited to A private dinner with the mega-donor in his personal airplane hangar. The special treatment helped launch the nascent Bush campaign's early spring mini-boomlet.
And then there's poor Rand Paul. The junior senator from Kentucky has been frozen out of these early Adelson meetings, no doubt because of his long track record of support for drastic cuts in aid to Israel and strong opposition to war with Iran.
Who could possibly have predicted that Paul's foreign policy views would begin to evolve" in the days immediately following Adelson's March powwow? I'm sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with Adelson's threat to spend vast sums against Paul if he appears to be well positioned in the Republican primaries.” As long as Sheldon Adelson has a say in the matter, no Republican candidate for president will ever challenge the party's unconditional support for the bellicose policies and territorially expansionist priorities of Likud.
Adelson also owns several media properties within Israel itself and unabashedly uses them to defend the Netanyahu government against its foreign and domestic critics. Which isn't to say that Israel is all that Adelson cares about. On the contrary, the man who made his $35 billion fortune from casinos in Macau and Singapore also just so happens to vociferously oppose internet gambling, which he has threat to our society" and a "toxin."
Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky, then, that Sen. Lindsay Graham (S.C.) has sponsored a bill that would ban this scourge of 21st-century American life. Of course it's possible that Graham was persuaded to sponsor the bill by the Las Vegas fundraiser that Adelson and his wife threw for the South Carolina senator last year. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Graham allowed Adelson's lobbyist to write the first draft of the bill. But really, how can we know for certain?
And anyway, maybe rank cronyism is just the cost of doing business in a country that equates money with free speech. Perhaps we should simply acquiesce to the rule of this self-aggrandizing plutocrat who's out to buy himself a permanent position as the puppet master of the Republican Party. Follow the money and you find a crook… even with the Supremes.