The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America

If something isn't done about the climate/carbon crisis, people... today might be living in the last generation to experience a stable atmosphere, and thus a stable form of governance, for any foreseeable future. ...[B]ecause our Constitution doesn't mention the rights of nature (or even the environment), the Earth's biosphere is getting short shrift of our legal system...

Both doctrines, corporate personhood and money as speech, were simply invented by corporate-friendly Supreme Court rulings (in... 1819-86... for... personhood, and in 1976-2013... for money as speech). Their combined effect has been to hijack America's democratic experiment, concentrating power in the boardrooms of faceless corporations and the summer homes of reclusive billionaires.

America has ended up—mostly since around 1980—with one of the most corrupted political systems in the developed world, with billionaires and big corporations literally writing legislation to benefit themselves, from the federal to state to local levels.

[T]he Supreme Court determines how wealth can be earned, accumulated, and disposed of; it decides how far the rich can go in exploiting the poor and working people, and whether working people can fight back.

[T]he court has historically almost always sided with the wealthy, the powerful, and the corporate against the poor, the weak, and the individual.

In many cases these decisions have struck down laws passed by Congress and signed by the president... [through] .

No federal or state legislature, no president, and no state governor has ever... suggested that billionaires and corporations have a First Amendment "right" to unlimited political bribery. Congress has instead criminalized such behavior repeatedly.

No legislature, governor, or president has ever suggested that corporations should be considered "persons" for the purpose of Constitutional protections, particularly under the 14th Amendment's equal-protection rights.

[I]n 1803, the Supreme Court set itself above Congress and the president with the power to review, strike down, or rewrite laws based on its own lone interpretation of the Constitution.

Locke is the man whom Thomas Jefferson plagiarized, or was inspired by, when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the purpose of... government was to provide for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"... [H]e replaced Locke's repeated and varied mentions of different types of property with "happiness." It was the first time that word ever appeared in the founding documents of any nation.