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Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Supreme Court screws us again.

As anyone who has been following the news knows, last Thursday the supreme court ruled once again in favor of corruption also known as Citizens United. The ruling, on party lines basically said that unions had to ask their members if they wanted their dues to be used for political campaigns. That's not the part that really bothers me, (I'd be happy if the corporations had to do the same) No the part that is egregious is the fact that the court did NOT revisit citizens united. Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks, does a great job lambasting the supreme sellouts on the bench during his show.

 As for the unions, I was part of a union in my early 20's, best job I ever had, decent pay, good benefits and I didn't kill myself at work every day. This ruling by the Supreme koch, I mean court, will further weaken union power in politics, which is already at historic lows. I could post charts and graphs to corroborate these facts but my guess is that anyone who reads this blog most likely has already seen the myriad of charts showing how the decline of unions has led to the decline of the middle class and the decline of the middle class is due to the decline of actual progressives in office who stand for working people.

So here we have the problem. The highest court in the land is being dominated by ideologues. What do we do? Well there's the obvious choice, vote Obama for another term and most likely he'll appoint a more liberal justice. Sounds great, but how well can Obama do against the tide of right wing money that is going to hit him like a surfer against a tsunami? No one really knows. That's not to say Obama can't raise money, his biggest strength is fundraising, which is sad because if he was half as good at governing as he is fundraising maybe America would be doing better. I know there are people who are going to say "now wait a minute Mr. blogger man, but those tea partiers in the house and senate wont let Obama do anything!" True, but he had a stretch of time where he did have control of the house, sure the senate wasn't filibuster proof but if he had fought, used the bully pulpit more, explained his vision to the American people instead of  always reaching out to the republicans, maybe this whole tea party thing might not have happened and we might have had real reform. If Obama even wanted reform in the first place.

I voted for Obama in 2008, I will most likely vote for him again in November, simply because, Romney would be an absolute disaster for everyone who is not a millionaire, and because he will be able to appoint a justice on the supreme court. Presidents come and go and change at the most every 8 years, but it's the court that is really at stake. If liberals can take back the court, they could revisit citizens united. I may be too optimistic. The only other option to get rid of this horrible auction of our government is to support one of the many amendment proposals to get money out of politics. There's Wolf-Pac http://www.wolf-pac.com/, there is Bernie Sanders who proposed S.J. Res 33 http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-sj33/show . There is Dylan Ratigans get money out campaign. http://getmoneyout.com/ and hopefully many more to come. 


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