A Quote by Nina Easton
The Citizens United ruling did not invent special-interest spending; it enables corporations and unions to advocate directly on behalf of a candidate rather than running more subtle 'issue ads.'
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Here is what the practical impact of Citizens United means. What Citizens United means is that corporations call hundreds of millions of dollars into television ads, radio ads, and other forms of advertising to defeat those candidates who stand up and take them on.
There could be a 'community of communities' rather than a state. They would be united in some way but without any governing body. It would be made up of unions, credit unions instead of banks. There would be no more lending at interest. There would be no more money lenders.
A lot of people are driven by an interest by one particular issue or a small number of specific issues rather than a candidate or a party or something broader.
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
We are spending more money on bond holders than we are on our own citizens. It took 204 years to have this happen. The other party will not even allow a recorded vote on this issue so that we can see how people stand on that issue.
If the need for comprehensive campaign finance reform was not already clear, the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United permitting unlimited corporate and union spending in campaigns certainly made it so in 2010.
The SuperPACs and the Citizens United ruling that gives corporations a voice in the political process are all bad news. They made it so you can now lie, and the politician being promoted on that lie will not be held responsible for it.
Every major federal campaign-finance-reform effort since 1943 has attempted to treat corporations and unions equally. If a limit applied to corporations, it applied to unions; if unions could form PACs, corporations could too; and so on. DISCLOSE is the first major campaign-finance bill that has not taken this approach.
What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires and the corporations they control: 'You own and control the economy, you own Wall Street, you own the coal companies, you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we're going to give you the opportunity to own the United States Government.' This is the essence of what Citizens United is all about - and that's why it must be overturned.
At Rome there were nothing even vaguely resembling modern political parties - although given the stifling impact of these, this may well have made it more rather than less democratic than many countries today - and each candidate for office competed as an individual. Only rarely did they advocate specific policies, although commenting on issues of current importance was more common. In the main voters looked more for a capable individual who once elected could do whatever the State required.
Unlike the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property-so long as the state res...erves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.
One glance proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these unions (railroad craft unions) are exceedingly useful to the corporations; and to the extent that they serve the economic and political purposes of the corporations, they are the foes – and not the friends – of the working class.
During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.
Either you're for ending Citizens United, or you're not. So, if you're for ending Citizens United, then act like you are against corporations influencing our democratic process.
In the Washington soft money game, big business and big labor are accomplices working together to protect the mushy middle of big government, with plenty of special interest plums: Big unions get big spending and big business gets corporate welfare and special tax breaks - all at the expense of average Americans.
A tax cut would most certainly be my first choice rather than an increase in federal spending. Those who advocate that fail to see that spending not only continues in subsequent years, but it grows and grows.
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