The Supreme Coup

Original Link: http://www.jimhightower.com/node/7042

By Jim Hightower

Remember their names: Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.

From within the dark isolation of the Supreme Court, these five men have pulled off a black-robed coup against the American people's democratic authority. In an unprecedented perversion of judicial power, the Alito-Kennedy-Roberts-Scalia-Thomas cabal has decreed that corporations have a free-speech "right" to dip into their corporate coffers and spend unlimited sums of money to elect or defeat candidates of their choosing.

Corporate interests already had too much money power over our political system. Using their PACs, executive bundling, 527s, front groups, and other financing gimmicks, their chosen candidates have long had a big advantage over lesser-funded aspirants. No other group in America comes anywhere near the spending clout that this relatively small clutch of wealthy special interests wields over our elections and government. So it's ludicrous for anyone – much less Supreme Court judges – to argue that the corporate voice is a victim of political "censorship," the word chosen by Justice Kennedy to rationalize his vote for corporate plutocracy.

Nonetheless, on their own whim, the five Supremes have now made corporations supreme in our "Land of the Free," abruptly and autocratically reversing nearly 250 years of broad public agreement that corporate interests must be subjugated to the people's interest. This is not merely judicial activism, it is judicial radicalism.

In the early years of our democratic republic, Thomas Jefferson warned about the dangerous rise of corporate power, declaring that Americans must "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations." Today I'm sure that founding patriots like Jefferson are not simply spinning in their graves at the Supreme Court's surrender to this aristocracy – they're trying to claw their way out of their graves to throttle all five of the traitors.

"Justices Block Key Part of Campaign Law," www.nytimes.com, January 21, 2010.

"Supreme Court Considers Vast increase in the political power of corporations," The Hightower Lowdown, September 2009.