What I would like to see is someone who is good with petitions to start one calling on these justices to resign. They won’t resign, but let’s say a few million were to sign such a petition. That would have impact.

After they initial outlay for 2010, 2012, 2014 and of course the 2012 presidential race, they won’t have to spend as much. Once they flex their weight, their costs will go way down.

If we’re going to completely subvert our democracy and our finest institutions, we may as well do it as economically as possible.

The Founding Fathers were an educated bunch, successful, wealthy businessmen who knew well how to use their mother tongue. Clearly if they had wanted to extend essential liberties to businesses, they could easily have said so.

I went through my copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights last night. I found the following mentions:

People: 17
Human: 1
Person 18
Persons 10
Corporation: 0

Zero mention of corporations. Just which constitution are our justices reading, anyway?

Thank you for the links, Mudflats!

I think ties speak a lot about the man who wears them.

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Just thank you. I’m trying to get the word out to everyone I know and sometimes being a real ass about it too (a stretch, I’m sure). It’s astounding to me that more people are not outraged. The apathy is amazing (except of course, when it comes to the every day guy with the truck, yes I’m from MA and depressed about it these days).

And thank you again for this blog.

Doris “Granny D” Haddock

Doris “Granny D” Haddock, 100 as of Jan. 24, lives in the woods of southern New Hampshire.

Doris raised two children during the Great Depression and worked at a shoe company for twenty years.

With her husband, Jim, Doris helped stop the planned testing of hydrogen bombs in……….. Alaska in 1960, saving an Inuit fishing village at Point Hope.

After the defeat of Senator McCain and Senator Feingold’s first attempt to remove unregulated “soft” money from campaigns in 1995, Doris became interested in campaign reform and led a petition movement.

On January 1, 1999–at the age of 89–she began a 3,200–mile walk across the country to gather support for the issue.

She trekked over 1,000 miles of desert, climbed the Appalachian Range in blizzard conditions and skied 100 in to Washington, D.C. after a historic snowfall made roadside walking impossible.

In Washington, she was met by 2,200 supporters and several dozen members of Congress.

It took two more years to gain passage of the McCain/Feingold bill, during which time Doris engaged in walking fasts around the Capitol, organized rallies in many states, and held demonstrations that twice landed her in DC jails.

In 2003, Doris had her eyes on the upcoming election, and so she drove around the country on a 22,000 mile voter registration effort targeting working women and minorities.

This trek was cut short in June 2004, when Doris heard that the presumed Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in NH had dropped out of the race days before the filing deadline.

Doris became the Democratic challenger, in a successful effort to pin down Judd Gregg in New Hampshire and help move New Hampshire to Kerry, which happened by a slim margin attributed by some to her campaign

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doris-

Campaign finance reform advocate

What We Can and Should Do About the Campaign Finance Ruling
What’s Your Reaction

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doris-/what-we-can-and-should-do_b_433204.html

Ten years ago, I walked from California to Washington, D.C. to help gather support for campaign finance reform. I used the novelty of my age (I was 90), to garner attention to the fact that our democracy, for which so many people have given their lives, is being subverted to the needs of wealthy interests, and that we must do something about it. I talked to thousands of people and gave hundreds of speeches and interviews, and, in every section of the nation, I was deeply moved by how heartsick Americans are by the current state of our politics.

If your brother-in-law has a road paving company, it is clear that you, as an elected official, must not vote to give him a contract, as you have a conflict of interest. Do you have any less of an ethical conflict if you are voting for that contract not because he is a brother-in-law, but because he is a major donor to your campaign? Should you ethically vote on health issues if health companies fund a large chunk of your campaign? The success of your campaign, after all, determines your future career and financial condition. You have a conflict.

Let us say, through the enactment of new laws, that a politician can no longer take any action, or arrange any action by another official, if the action, in the opinion of that legislative body’s civil service ethics officer, would cause special gain to a major donor of that official’s campaign. The details of such a program will be daunting, but we need to figure them out and get them into law.

Remarkably, many better corporations have an ethical review process to prevent their executives from making political contributions to officials who decide issues critical to that corporation. Should corporations have a higher standard than the United States Congress? And many state governments have tighter standards, too. Should not Congress be the flagship of our ethical standards? Where is the leadership to make this happen this year?

This kind of reform should also be pushed in the 14 states where citizens have full power to place proposed statutes on the ballot and enact them into law. About 70% of voters would go for a ballot measure to “toughen our conflict of interest law,” I estimate. In the scramble that would follow, either free campaign advertising would be required as a condition of every community’s contract with cable providers (long overdue), or else there would be a mad dash for public campaign financing programs on the model of Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut. Maybe both things would happen, which would be good.

I urge the large reform organizations to consider this strategy. They have never listened to me in the past, but they also have not gotten the job done and need to come alive or now get out of the way.

And to the Supreme Court, you force us to defend our democracy–a democracy of people and not corporations–by going in breathtaking new directions.

And so we shall.