A can of worms

By Jim Hightower

Other Words

Having decreed that corporations have a free speech “right” to spend unlimited sums from their massive corporate treasuries to elect or defeat candidates in our elections, the Supreme Court’s five-man corporatist majority has opened a colossal can of worms. One of those worrisome squigglies is this question: Does the court’s newly fabricated political right extend to foreign corporations?

In their ruling, the answer from the five judicial monkeywrenchers was ... silence. How sly. With no explicit ban to rule out foreign corporate money, the justices have implicitly ruled it in. After all, argue apologists for this constitutional perversion, a corporation is a corporation, and its official domicile is irrelevant in determining its political rights.

Corporate ‘persons’

So, not only have the Supremes magically endowed all inanimate corporate things with the human ability to speak in their Citizens United ruling, but they’ve also granted corporate “persons” more speech than actual people-people have. Start with the fact that the court’s ruling equates our freedom of speech with the freedom to spend money — a plutocratic contortion of democracy that gives the most speech to those with the most money.

But it appears that Toyota, Unilever, Deutsche Bank, Bin Laden Construction group, and thousands of other foreign entities can also add their trillions of dollars to drown out the democratic voices of real Americans.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. Distributed by Other Words.