Democracy Sure Was Fun While It Lasted

This country is well and truly fucked.

[TPM] In a ruling that has major implications for how elections are funded, the Supreme Court has struck down a key campaign-finance restriction that bars corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads.

The long-awaited 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case, presents advocates of regulation with a major challenge in limiting the flow of corporate money into campaigns, and potentially opens the door for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.

From the decision:

By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.

As TPM points out, "At the heart of the ruling, now available here (pdf), is a judgment by the Court that the law cannot distinguish between corporations and individuals in prohibiting speech - so free speech rights that apply to the latter must also apply to the former."

(Supposed liberal) Justice Kennedy actually referred to corporations as a "disadvantaged class" and that they were being denied the rights of the individual?

Fuck that, sideways. If corporations are to be granted all the rights of the individual citizen, then in turn, corporations will now be taxed as individuals in the highest bracket now, right?

Right?

Plenty of excerpts from the majority opinion and the dissent, here.

Good News For From John McCain

As part of a move long overdue, John McCain emerges as a force for good—combining with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to introduce legislation that should have come along with the bailout:

The anger at the nation’s financial behemoths is taking shape in a variety of ways, most notably in a bill from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), who are targeting big financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

The bipartisan duo’s bill would reinstate the Depression-era law that built a wall between commercial banking and the riskier activities of investment banking. The separation — originally set up in the Glass-Steagall Act — was repealed in 1999.

[...] “The American people want us to do something about the fact that capital is [not] flowing down to them. It is flowing in a direction that is making Wall Street huge profits. Nothing wrong with making profit, but this consolidation has squeezed the American public out of needed capital. And I think that capital could be going to investment in technology, to new business start-ups, to things that are about the ingenuity of America, not the ingenuity of toxic assets,” Cantwell said on MSNBC.

Damn fucking straight. A key reason for the bailout was to help balance the books, but that was to free up capital for banks to lend money. Instead they simply kept it all and lent to each other. CRedit is still extremely tough to come by.

And Cantwell-McCain aren't the only ones getting in on the act:

Rep. Paul Kanjorksi (D-Pa.), who is generally seen as a rather pro-business moderate on the House Financial Services Committee, pushed language that would empower federal regulators to pre-emptively break up large financial institutions that posed a risk to the economy, even if they were currently healthy...

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act,” which would require the Treasury secretary to break apart any financial institution deemed too big to fail. The Vermont independent has become a populist hero on the left and the right of the political spectrum for his crusade against Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a mission also rooted in his belief that the American people want a change in the way Wall Street functions, and Bernanke and the Fed he runs represent the status quo, Sanders says.

Of course, much of this will die the death of a thousand amendments and compromises, but it's a clear move in the right direction.

Until it needs the approval of President Lieberman.