Corporate America is now all of America

Granted, I don’t watch enough news television as it stands, so I’m not sure just how much coverage the recent Supreme Court ruling has received. However, the fact that it’s not absolutely everywhere makes me believe that people are not taking it as seriously as they should. For those of you reading this who may not know what happened, the Supreme Court over turned the previous ruling that corporations could not back or fund candidates for the presidency. Now the most powerful candidate is going to be the one who can campaign to the most powerful companies in the nation – as opposed to campaigning to the people they are supposed to represent. It’s going to become, Wal-Mart presents the President of the United States of America!

I think what’s far scarier is the influence that foreign corporations have in our marketplace and how their agendas can be furthered through backing a specific candidate. Does this mean that companies can come together and front their own candidate? Is that really out of the realm of possibility? We saw in the Obama election that fundraising really help put him over the top against McCain. It allowed Obama to do things that McCain could not. With this in mind, you would think that if one company (say, Microsoft – not inflammatory, just example) wanted to put a candidate on the ticket – doesn’t said corporation’s deep pockets give their candidate an unfair advantage over traditional candidates?

I’m going to keep this short because I think that this can be extrapolated all the way to the apocalypse if we wanted to (and I’m sure several news outlets probably are). But, I’m going to stop off with two links. One is to a well written article on AlterNet.org and the second is a song that speaks very well to the situation.

When it comes to homework for the readers, I challenge someone to come up with a positive spin on this ruling. I’m grasping at straws trying to find them – and am completely open to any other opinions.