No federal or state legislature, no president, and no state governor has ever... suggested that billionaires… — Thom Hartmann
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.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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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.
