Huge Corporations have more access to Democracy than we do!

[Amy6627]

Our government is not a government of the people, It's a government subordinate to mulit-national corporations. Is it any wonder we feel their voices aren't heard?

Our founding fathers knew of the coruption that would follow with corporation involvement with our government:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."
-- Andrew Jackson

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"I again recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party.… Let individuals contribute as they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly."
-- Theodore Roosevelt

The following is from Reclaim Democracy:

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/political_reform/democractic_elections_primer.html

We view as a fundamental requirement for democracy that each person's political influence result directly from the quality of one's ideas and the energy put into promoting them--independent of a person's wealth to the greatest degree possible. Yet we're clearly nowhere close to those conditions when it comes to state and federal elections.

The excessive power assigned to money, especially in federal elections, is glaring. Even in the 2002 Congressional races, where money was less dominant as the determinant of the victors than in 2000, 95% of all House seats and 75% of Senate seats were won by the higher-spending candidate. Incumbents won 97% of races in which they ran. (based on candidate financial reports filed through September 2002, when this article was written.)

And money is a conclusive determinant of who can compete. One-third of all those running for the House (157 candidates) -- effectively ran unopposed. Thirty-five had no opponent at all, while another 122 faced challengers who spent less than $5,000. No wonder only 75 of the 435 House races were even marginally competitive (margin of victory less than 20 points).

The depth of our problems in some specific realms such as campaign financing is explored in detail in other articles. Here, we aim briefly to explore an overview of some of our most vitally needed electoral reforms.

1. Abolish the "Money Equals Speech" Doctrine

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/political_reform/democractic_elections_primer.html

[LiberalEsto]

1. They have much more access, but don't call it democracy

because it's not. Is it oligarchy?


Good post.

[gizmo1979]

2. The only voice we have

is if we speak together as one.They only acknowledge regular people when enough of us speak up for it to affect electibility.otherwise we are invisible!

[OneBlueSky]

3. A Brief History of the Corporation

Excerpted from Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America
(Kalle Lasn,William Morrow/Eaglebrook, 1999)

snip

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech.

This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution -- that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates -- had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it "could not be supported by history, logic or reason." One of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of democratic government.

Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place. By 1919, corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and produced most of America's wealth. Corporate trusts had become too powerful to legally challenge. The courts consistently favored their interests. Employees found themselves without recourse if, for example, they were injured on the job (if you worked for a corporation, you voluntarily assumed the risk, was the courts' position). Railroad and mining companies were enabled to annex vast tracts of land at minimal expense.

Gradually, many of the original ideals of the American Revolution were simply quashed. Both during and after the Civil War, America was increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government and business interests. The shift amounted to a kind of coup d'tat - not a sudden military takeover but a gradual subversion and takeover of the institutions of state power. Except for a temporary setback during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (the 1930s), the US has since been governed as a corporate state.

- more . . .

http://www.socialistfuture.org.uk/globaleconomy/The%20Issues/historyofCorporation.htm

[kodi]

4. consider this, very good stuff

"Basic political principle says that one powerful interest group should not control the major decisions of a country.

"The normal and proper aim of the corporate community is to make money for its managers and for the owners of business all the better if its members also contribute to the general prosperity. However, business acts on the prevailing business philosophy, which claims that corporate self-interest eventually produces the general interest. This comfortable belief rests on misinterpretation of the theory of market rationality proposed by Adam Smith.

"He would have found the market primitivism of the current day unrecognizable. He saw the necessity for public intervention to create or sustain the public interest, and took for granted the existence of a government responsible to the community as a whole, providing the structure within which the economy functions.

"Classical political thought says that the purpose of government is to do justice for its citizens. Part of this obligation is to foster conditions in which wealth is produced. The obligation is not met by substituting the wealth-producer for the government.

"Business looks after the interests of businessmen and corporation stockholders. Stark and selfish self-interest obviously is not what motivates most American businessmen and -women, but it is the doctrine of the contemporary corporation and of the modern American business school."

"It does not automatically serve the general interest, as any 18th century rationalist would acknowledge - or any 21st century realist."

William Pfaff

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0126-01.htm