World Without End

It's over.

Arguments can be made that the American Republic, moribund for decades, actually passed away on 9/11/01. Or maybe it was 12/13/00, the day the US Supreme Court ratifed George W. Bush's theft of the 2000 Presidential election. Perhaps it was much longer ago than that: 11/4/80 perhaps, the night Reaganism triumphed. Or, 11/22/63.

No. The American Republic died today, in the form of yet another Supreme Court decision.

Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

(How nice the decision also applies to labor unions -- here's hoping John L. Lewis's war chest is flush.)

Endgame. The decision is the moment totalitarian Corporatists have been moving toward since November 1980: a world with an absolute connection between wealth and political influence; a world with no connection between public needs and public policy. How tragic the American Democratic Experiment will soon result, less than 250 years since it started, in the most total of totalitarian states, one where the air we breathe, the water we drink, the hopes and dreams we have for our children will all be commodified.

So it's over. American politics, during the best of times mostly a war among (usually hidden) elites, yet previously with enough cracks in the system to allow true citizen influence -- now has all the cracks paved over.

Welcome to 1936 Germany, the Pepsi-Cola version.