Corporate free speech. Can it corrupt democracy?

There has been many discussions here lately about TPTB both directly and indirectly circumventing the Constitution. While I was making my rounds of some of the news sites today, I came across this article in the Russian Times. I realize this is not breaking news, but some of the points the article presents are worth noting, in particularly the way that corporations have been given their entity rights over the past couple of hundred years.

Russian Times

One of the most troubling rulings that has occurred recently, was when SCOTUS ruled that

the government has no business regulating political speech

Source
thereby opening the halls of Congress to corporate interests with profits earned from consumer spending. They were there anyway, but it seems that SCOTUS has given them unfettered reign.

The cards are definitely stacked in the favor of Corporate interests. It makes me wonder what can we do to peacefully take our government back from big business.

The sad thing with that SCOTUS ruling is that they basically said that corporations have the same rights and liberties as American citizens. This basically means that some foreigner can create an American corporation and then be privy to our rights and liberties along with influencing our elections. Think about it, many American corporations are partly owned by foreigners and even foreign governments. That is the deeper end of the argument.

The immediate or more obvious argument is that corporate free speech will trump the free speech of American citizens. I believe that this was one of the single most dangerous SCOTUS rulings of our times or in the last 50 odd years. Now, more than ever, our politicians will be beholden to corporations because apparently, they are far more important that individual citizens.

Our Republic has been hijacked, as everyone knows but we are moving towards complete corporatism at an extremely alarming pace. There is no going back to freedom and liberty for Americans, we are just far too corrupted. There is noway to turn back the corruption that has already rotted our system.

--airspoon

[edit on 18-5-2010 by airspoon]