First-past-the-post voting got us to Citizens United.
Citizens united, not the first step but the last step in the downfall of democracy in the United States. It’s what empowered Elon Musk to dump money into swaying the election, as his wealth according to the supreme court is “free speech”. Pathetic.
We should unite some citizens and enforce some changes.
I think that’s the only way to fix things now. Massive general strikes are needed at a minimum. Likely far worse action needed before the ultra-wealthy can be reigned in.
100% CU and corporations are people.
CU’s argument that money is speech & therefore 1st amendment is stupid. It makes no sense that individuals have spending limits while a loophole doesn’t. Why not scale the max a corporation can spend based on the number of people?
The end result is the commodification of speech, speech that can be sold. If someone has more money, they have more speech. It’s like separate but equal: they could be similar, but they aren’t, and there’s been massive harm.
We’ve never seen a corporation go to jail for murder. I get the legal arguments for why corporations are treated as people, but the end result is systemic violence just has a price tag. If a person looted like corporations, poisoned land like corporations, killed like a corporation, they’d go to jail. Instead, the corporation is a smoke screen defusing blame across some amorphous identity when we know it’s some shady boardroom person saying, “I’m okay with harming millions for money.” Look at big pharma gouging insulin.
1 Timothy 6:10, the love of money is the root of all evil. If you made $400k/per working day between now and when Jesus was born, you’d still have less money than Bezos. That’s absurd. No one needs or deserves that while people are struggling.
Back when corporations were first really being invented a judge complained they had “no body to kick and no soul to damn”. That was 18th c. England when 12 guys would form a corporation to build a bridge, or whatever, and that was basically it.
