Saturday, January 23, 2010

where's the schadenfreude?

Maybe I've missed it, or maybe it's just too early, but I dont seem to be hearing the great upswell of gloating from The Right that their carefully stacked SCOTUS gave full free speech rights to corporations. What's the matter guys? Where you not paying attention, or did you think that the anti-abortion Authoritarians you were insisting that the Court be stacked with were just going to stop there? Did you forget that Authority and Money go hand in hand, and that there is no one in this country with more money than corporations?
Do you suppose that conservatives have realized that they may have made a mistake? That those Justices upon which they placed such high hopes have sold us all down the river in an moment of judicial activism an order of magnitude above anything they may have accused "liberal" judges of performing?
So how are we going to fix this? Certainly, something has got to be done soon, because we've only got a few months before the first of the corporate financed legislators get elected (it may already be too late, since incumbent House members are going to want a piece of the pie right away).
Here's my suggestion: If corporations have the same "rights" as human beings, then they should also have the same obligations and punishments. Let them pay the regular rate of income taxes, let them be jailed (or a similar form of incapacitation and loss of income, maybe all profits given to charity for a period of years, including stock options?) for crimes committed, including the death penalty for murder (hear that, Xi?). If they want to play human, then let's play human, all the way.

2 comments:

Pryme said...

Olbermann commented that if a similar decision had been made regarding salary caps for sports (baseball, football, basketball) the sports media would have been in an uproar. Sadly, I agree.

Anonymous said...

Have you read the decision itself? Granted, it comes in at 183 pages, but it's an interesting read...