A = A

[Hate to let a month go by without bitching about Citizens United. It pisses me off I had to quit volunteering for the ACLU because I couldn’t make a sincere argument for its support of Citizens when I tabled at events.]

The first day in Philosophy 101 at the U of A (which I actually attended for a semester; thanks Senator Pell!) they covered A=A.

Many philosophical tenets seem to exist simply to be debated, but some are so fundamental that they form the basis from which all subsequent arguments are formulated. A=A is one of those cornerstones.

A rock is a rock, it is not a tree or a church steeple. Duh! Seems straightforward, eh? Guess that’s why they covered it on day one.

In the case of Citizens United, however, applying that most basic of philosophical constructs would suggest that corporations are (huh-whazzuh?) actually corporations, not people; and money is actually money, not speech.

Then there is the counter-argument put forward by Citizens United and summed up quite brilliantly by accidental comedian and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, buttressed by the hilariously vacuous follow-up, “Everything that corporations earn ultimately go to people,” below:



If Mitt Romney’s retort that day had been, “The Courts have decided to treat money as speech, my friend,” that would have been a true statement. Infuriating, but demonstrably true.

“Corporations are people, my friend,” however, is demonstrably untrue. That Romney could quip it like it was a brilliant rejoinder, without a trace of irony, I think says something about the man.

Last week, the Roberts Court—in a strictly party line 5-4 vote, as usual—upheld Citizens in a Montana case where they overruled a state 1912 political corruption law.

Those are the kind of pre-existing laws that are falling to Citizens, not free speech statutes. So the argument I have heard mouthpieces for The Right—and the damned ACLU—make that Citizens is a free speech issue, not a political corruption issue, is an argument that SCOTUS itself continues to reveal to be fraudulent.

Citizens is as bunk as a philosophical construct as its results are corrosive in practice. FangCorp shouldn’t have a right to have to the disproportionately loud voice in the political debate that its campaign dollars buys access to. Fang Bastardson ought to have a megaphone as loud as FangCorp, and Citizens codifies the opposite.



To which The Right responds: Hey, big-money Dem donors and unions have an equal right to throw as many dollars as they want to at their candidates. Except that SCOTUS has also been busy limiting the power of unions to spend members’ dues on elections, at the same time as Citizens is freeing up the big money donors on the right—the captains of industry and genetic lottery winners like Romney, generally speaking—to let their cash and influence flow freely.

And the big-money individual Dem donors are mostly the occasional bleeding heart-type like aging billionaire Warren Buffet (suffering an attack of conscience?) and show-biz liberals, none of whom have business issues currently being weighed by the very government whose representatives upon whom they are bestowing their largesse.



Unlike the titans of industry currently funding the GOP campaign machine.

Goddamn it, the whole idea of our democracy in the first place was that wealth and family position shouldn’t buy power!  That’s why George Washington allegedly declined the Kingship he was offered after the Revolutionary War and instead settled in favor of a relatively modest presidency instead.

Citizens United will fall. It may help cost Obama his job—or Romney his dream—but it is the Dred Scott of our day and I’m betting this election shines an inescapable spotlight on its deleterious effect on our democracy. When rich people can buy the Presidency, it’s not a democracy anymore, it’s an oligarchy.



You can put it in a pretty dress on the nicest street corner in town, but a whore is still a whore is still a whore.



A = A.