Blue Moon Aurora

One of the most oppressed minorities in our nation won a stunning victory yesterday with the Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which can be found here.  Though if I were you I would just skip to page 88 and Justice Stevens’ dissent as the losers are always more informative and interesting when it comes to reading decisions.  However, for those who don't want to read boring legalese I can sum it all up – corporations have full First Amendment rights and attempts to limit their freedom of speech are unconstitutional! 

This has been a long hard fight for the oppressed corporations who were only first recognized as persons in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886) and they have been fighting for more rights ever since.  Human beings are considered natural persons, which are like persons except they can’t be incorporated and have to actually work for their money.  This may surprise you but corporations still can’t get married or even vote, but Citizens United signals that change is in the winds and the current activist majority of the Supreme Court will extend corporations’ rights as soon as the right case gets to them.  This is only fair; as corporations are just like human beings, well, except for the fact they have lots more money, which as Justice Scalia and company would agree – makes them better!

In fact, considering that our activist majority basically equates money with speech there is a strong argument that corporations may already be entitled to the right to vote, which certainly isn’t a more important right than speech, you know the First Amendment.   Voting just takes a few minutes at best and most natural persons don’t even bother to do it, but creating and distributing a fallacious political attack add takes hours, maybe days, and certainly is of greater value than the right to vote.  It certainly costs a lot more and it’s all about the money.  So I imagine it’s only a matter of time before SCOTUS gives corporations the right to vote, but how much of a vote should they get?  Well, since SCOTUS thinks money is the same as speech then let’s use that as our standard.  The US median income for a family is about $50,000, and each family has at least one vote, so a company like Wal-Mart should get about 8 million votes and McDonald’s just 450,000 votes.  That’s only fair. 

IBM has been an oppressed person for decades but SCOTUS has given him the same right to say whatever dumb shit he wants just like any natural person.  So keep an eye out for IBM to be posting racist bullshit in blog comments, starting flame wars on forums, and using that hard won freedom of speech just like the rest of us. 

Life has been hard for corporations.  I had a friend who dated a corporation in high school and there was a lot of pressure on them to breakup.  You see corporations can merge with one another, but they can’t marry natural persons.  It’s unfair.  However, they broke up over kids; he wanted them but she didn’t want to settle down when there were still profits to be made.  He’s currently dating a union, but I don’t think he loves her as much as he did the union.  Let’s face it – corporations are just sexier.  Still considering that freedom of speech is perhaps the most sacred of rights in this nation, easily more enshrined than let’s say marriage, it’s easy to see that SCOTUS will obviously extend this right as well to corporations, who really are the same as natural persons, except they have a lot more money.  So I’m confident my friend and his union girlfriend will get married and have little PACs in no time. 

I am so proud of Justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas to say what we all know in our hearts: corporations are just as important as living breathing people, because corporations make piles of money.  Corporations give so much to this country; in Walter Reed there are dozens of corporations missing limbs from combat in Iraq and now they have equal First Amendment rights as the other soldiers.  It really warms the heart.  On September 11th the number of corporations that died I think helped bring the country together to agree that corporations should be treated as fully equal citizens.  The sacrifices of corporations, especially since a lot of them have lost a lot of money the last few years, I really think moved SCOTUS to raise corporations up with those other historically oppressed minorities like women and African-Americans.  If Obama can become President, then so can Microsoft - that’s the American dream and I’m glad SCOTUS is making it happen.