The other shoe drops. A federal judge in Virginia has leapfrogged the US Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and ruled that a century-old law barring corporate contributions to political candidates is unconstitutional. Let the buying begin.
Citizens United held that US companies were entitled to pour money into election campaigns as part of political free speech. The Virginia ruling allows corporate cash to flow directly to candidates.
The caps on direct donations remain in place but are meaningless to corporations. They can simply create as many straw companies as they like to circumvent the limit problem.
Of course, America already has a "bought and paid for" Congress unabashedly beholden to corporate interests. This ruling just makes it easier to get those corporate payoffs directly into the hands of grateful candidates. Welcome to ancient Rome.
At least in ancient Rome the wealthy of a community were expected to help pay for upkeep of public services. In America, corporations like GE take advantage of accounting tricks to move profits offshore to tax havens while keeping expenses onshore, and end up paying an effective 0% federal tax rate.
ReplyDeleteOf course, corporations wouldn't be able to do this without bought and paid-for politicians changing the laws to let them get away with it.