Saying Goodbye to Citizens United
What a great time to be alive. Just when the world’s people needed a reminder that their viewpoints still matter, it appears that we’re about to see this play itself out. In particular, the people of the United States (often accused of more closely resembling sheep than human beings) have finally had enough of the overt political corruption that was fostered by the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision “Citizens United.” This law grants corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money influencing our elections, and when Americans of all political stripes correctly observed this as a moral obscenity, they exerted so much pressure on our government that now, it has no other choice than to overturn it.
From an email I just received:
This morning, Hillary Clinton came out supporting publicly funded elections.
For over 30 years of her political life, she rarely talked about public financing of elections. And during the first months of her Presidential campaign, she never supported public financing. But today, she flipped from decades of being non-committal and came out supporting fundamental reform.
She’s talked about overturning Citizens United — which we all support — but you’ll forgive me for being a little cynical and thinking that any candidate who talks about Citizens United and not public financing is not serious about breaking the cycle of corruption.
But why did she flip? Because millions of angry Americans who wouldn’t take anything less, because of (Bernie) Sanders, (Lawrence) Lessig (pictured), and (Martin) O’Malley repeating the public financing drumbeat, and because she saw the writing on the wall if she didn’t demand REAL structural change.
Don’t for a second think this means we can all go home, or stop protesting, calling, asking, pushing, questioning, and demanding politicians take a stand in support of public financing.
The issue pundits like to put in the “no one cares” box is out in the open as the issue that everyone cares about, and that you can’t get away without talking about.
We launched our campaign to urge leaders in Congress to support public financing of elections. Our hope then was to force presidential candidates to take up the issue, realizing that inaction or silence would hurt their chances with an angry public who cares deeply about a new, clean approach to campaign funding.
Candidates across the country will see this and realize they have to support public financing because it’s a political issue with a huge, angry grassroots movement of power behind it.
Words are the first step – the next step is keeping those words alive on the campaign trail.
It’s “Time To Say Goodbye.”
