Last week the U.S. Supreme Court threw out six decades of established law by granting corporations the right to use their incredible wealth and power to influence elections — thereby diminishing the power of your vote.
Imagine ExxonMobil, AIG or Entergy-Louisiana for that matter, throwing huge sums of money directly into Congressional or Legislative attack ads. And this on top of the already unbelievable the amount of influence corporations have on elections.
The tortured legal argument is this: We the People are infringing on corporations’ “rights” by preventing them from using all of the special advantages they have over real human beings (like unlimited life, limited liability, and lots of other ways of amassing great wealth) to influence political elections.
A corporation is not a person. Corporations cannot vote. They do not live, breathe or die – at least not in the way people do. Giving corporations the rights of people is a cynical political move that fundamentally changes our democracy.
Unless we stand up, the problem of corporate money in politics could go from bad to unimaginably worse.
Already, moneyed institutions have too much power over government. I shudder to think of a situation in which Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and Big Pharma have even more control. In fact, if this had been the law of the land in 2008, ExxonMobil alone could have outspent President Obama’s campaign almost sixty times over.1
Thankfully, some legislators are working to strengthen our campaign finance laws to prevent this. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (MD), Sen. Charles Schumer (NY), and the White House are working to pass a Legislative fix to the Supreme Court opinion.
We need Congress to prevent a flash flood of corporate money into elections and we need to move fast. The alternative is an undemocratic system in which large corporations have even more power to drown out the voices of regular voters.
[1]. Exxon Mobil Sets Record With $45.2 Billion Profit, ABC News, Jan. 30, 2009; Banking on Becoming President, Center for Responsive Politics, Oct. 27, 2008.
