By Robert P. Bomboy
Seven years after the Supreme Court
opened the doors to the entrance of corporate billions in our elections, no one
is talking or writing about the decision that turned our democracy upside down,
even though the provocateurs who created Citizens United are now close to the
White House and at the elbow of the President.
David
Bossie, Citizens United's longtime chief, who drove the appeal that became the
Supreme Court case, Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission,
was Donald Trump's deputy campaign manager last fall and still regularly picks
up his phone to advise the President.
Steve
Bannon, who has been described as "one of the most hateful human beings in
America," ran Trump's campaign in its final months and is now his senior
political strategist in the White House.
Bannon and Bossie were executives
together at Citizens United which - far from having anything to do with us citizens
- has always been a spearhead for Big Business and the richest of the rich. The
two built their careers as ruthless pitbulls whose greatest achievement was
their 2010 Supreme Court victory.
Their
success with the Citizens United case has made money - especially
unregulated money from corporations and the super-rich - dominant now in our
state and federal elections. Prominent fundraisers in 2012 guessed it would
take $500 million to run a winning campaign in 2016. Trump raised almost twice
that; Hillary Clinton raised three times as much. Altogether, that amounted to $2,383,200,000
(that's billions!) plus $1,028,590,600 (more than another billion!)
for the unsuccessful also-rans in the 2016 primaries!
Recognizing that, President Trump
has already gone out on the campaign trail -
shamelessly, after only 100 days in office - to rant and rave at
a rally here in Harrisburg and begin stocking his treasure chest for 2020.
Citizens
United gave corporations much of the same right to political speech as
individuals have, thus removing virtually any restriction on corporate money in
politics. It unleashed a torrent of money from businesses and the
multimillionaires who run them.
As
I've said in a previous column, we're now witnessing the corporate takeover of
American politics.
With Steve Bannon at
his elbow and David Bossie on the phone, Trump could hardly wait to begin
appointing corporate millionaires and billionaires to his cabinet, and to begin
eliminating financial, environmental,
health and safety, workplace, and other
federal regulations that protect us, but are absolutely anathema to Big
Business.
So companies can now exploit their workers, Wall Street bankers
can rip off borrowers, dirty energy companies
can more easily pollute the air we breathe
and the water we drink, pharmaceutical companies can continue their price-gouging, auto companies can sell dangerous cars
without recalls. The big-money banks JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for
example, stand to gain millions from Trump’s anti-climate and anti-immigrant
agendas.
Many people want to overturn Citizens United, but with a
conservative Supreme Court and both houses of Congress securely in Republican
hands, that's unlikely to happen. Nor is any move to amend the U.S. Constitution.
For Big Business, the
billions it spent on the elections was money well spent.
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