"We have never seen anything like this in terms of the amount of money being raised and spent. The scale of it is the surprise. They are spending more than the candidates are."
Trevor Potter
The above comments by Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, provide a trenchant judgment on the United States Supreme Court's decision in the lawsuit Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
David Keating, president of Speechnow.org, doesn't see anything wrong with corporations using their shareholder's money for political advocacy. Keating's view is that the Constitution of the United States "...doesn't say that everyone is going to have the same-size megaphone."
Implied in Keating's assessment of the Constitution's free speech amendment is that money is speech and corporations are people - not!
I do not believe the First Amendment's free speech protection ever meant that corporate money should determine the size of one's megaphone or that corporations are people. The Supreme Court's ruling in the Citizens United case puts the jackboot of a corporate-owned Supreme Court on the neck of the American democracy and it tilts the political scale in favor of a plutocracy or worse, a corporatocracy.
Gold, Matea and Melanie Mason. "'Super PACs' dominate the political landscape." Los Angeles Times 18 January, 2012: online edition.
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