The 2014 midterm election will change nothing in the United
States ~ 2014 is set to be the most expensive non-presidential election in US
history and unfortunately money buys elections. Not
only do politicians do the bidding of the wealthy, they themselves are
increasingly numbered among the rich and super-rich and they follow their
corporate masters. Social inequality rules in America and the 2014 midterm
election has been reduced to Kabuki theater as millionaire Republicans and
Democrats rearrange the chairs on the deck of the sinking Republic while the
main stream press tries to convince us that it all really matters: Allen L
Roland, Ph.D
How can these vast
changes in economic relationships not have had a profound and transformative
impact on political life?
Andre Damon, WSWS
explains ~ "The historian Edward Gibbon once summed up the
political form of the Roman Empire as “an absolute monarchy disguised by the
forms of a commonwealth.” Taking our cue from his definition, we can say
that the United States has become an oligarchy disguised by the outward,
increasingly threadbare trappings of a democracy…..Whatever the pretense of
“one person, one vote,” the fact is that the top 0.1 percent dictates policy
and essentially selects the personnel tasked with carrying it out."
See WSWS article ~ http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/18/pers-o18.html
The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission helped unleash unprecedented amounts of outside
spending in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. The case, along with other legal
developments, spawned the creation of super PACs, which can accept unlimited
contributions from corporate and union treasuries, as well as from individuals;
these groups spent more than $600 million in the 2012 election cycle. It
also triggered a boom in political activity by tax-exempt "dark
money" organizations that don't have to disclose their donors.
Citizens United, in essence, established corporate
personhood where corporations have the same weight as individual voters but
with obvious incredible financial clout and leverage.
Move to Amend is a
coalition of hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals
committed to social and economic justice, ending corporate rule, and building a
vibrant democracy that is genuinely accountable to the people, not corporate
interests. It calls for an amendment to the US
Constitution to unequivocally state that inalienable rights belong to human beings only, and that money is not a form
of protected free speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated in
political campaigns.
Allen
L Roland, Ph.D
"John Marshall, the nation’s greatest chief justice, saw a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible,” he wrote in 1819. “Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence.”
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