American Corporatocratic Inevitability & The So-Called Wisdom Of The People

We are approaching the two-week anniversary of the worst Supreme Court ruling since the Dred Scott decision in 1857. I speak, of course, of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in which the court's nihilist justices gave carte blanche to corporations to buy politicians out in the open, as opposed to the various forms of big business bribery that already grease the skids of many a campaign and legislative initiative.

Being a thoughtful sort (most of the time anyway), I eventually channeled my deep anger over the decision away from what it meant for American democracy (that's pretty obvious since the justices ludicrously equate buckets of money with free speech) to whether I had missed some larger point.

I indeed had and this is it: I and my liberal kin doth protest too much because Citizens United was an inevitable outgrowth not just of a high court that has lurched to the right but a society in which corporations and government move ever closer to a big fat corporatocracy.

We have no one but ourselves to blame for this devolvement from what the Founding Fathers intended to what the motherforkers in Washington have wrought. This is because, truth be known, Wall Street and Washington have been hammering away at the intrinsic virtues of democracy for decades and that has been okey dokey with Main Street, which every two years dutifully elects -- and more often re-elects -- legislators whose hands are in every pocket but their own.

The Founding Fathers made it clear that people had rights but that when it came to corporations rights could only be conferred. Those five conservative justices, of course, see things radically differently and in the kind of pretzel logical that made Dred Scott such an abominable ruling declared that corporations should be unfettered because of their contributions to the dissemination of the ideas that the First Amendment seeks to foster. Given this kind of "thinking," the obeisance to corporate power by five men who have masqueraded as advocates of judicial restraint came as no surprise.

The Founding Fathers put an awful lot of stock in the Wisdom of the People and we have miserably failed both them and ourselves.