By Jerry D. Rose
On January 20, 2010 (a day that will live in infamy), our Supreme Court fathers brought forth upon this nation a new interpretation of restrictions on campaign financing, conceived in a scurrilous campaign book about Hillary Clinton, and dedicated to the proposition that corporations and other collective bodies are “persons” with the free speech right to spend as much money as they might wish on political campaigns.
Now American citizens are being asked to meet in observance of the loss of democracy experienced in a great battlefield of that war, the corporate effort to achieve “personhood” with the rights pertaining thereto—testing whether this assault on popular sovereignty can long endure. Specifically, the campaign asks whether it would be able to roll back the new political power enhancement of corporations by amending the constitution to remove the status of these collective entities as persons.
Now it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot arrest plutocratic control of our public lives by legislation the passage and implementation of which depends on the cooperation of the very corporations whose power we are protesting. The brave men and women who have taken up arms against the money domination of our politics, (and here) working off their lower anatomical parts to support populist candidates, can reverse this tidal wave of cash purchase of our government by rejecting over-funded candidates—far beyond our poor power to add new layers of regulation to campaign financing. It is rather for us, the surviving proponents of democracy, to take increasing devotion to that cause for which those brave supporters of under-funded campaigns have given the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolved that these heroic pioneers of democracy shall not have struggled in vain, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
Recent Comments