Corporatist, The New Honorific for Massa

If you've been around this blog long enough you'll remember that I've warned my friends in campaign finance reform that banning money and placing limits on who and where was a dangerous strategy and the SCOTUS unhappily proved me right yesterday. Cripes no, I do not confuse statuatory fictional personhood with people and I never have. My objection was that the concept of personhood was not tightly defined and limited. The absolute hell of it is that we're liable to find that the pieces that are left of McCain-Feingold are probably the ones with the worst unintended consequences.

In the realm of some things a bit more immediate than a Constitutional Amendment there may be some ways to mitigate the effects of the Supreme corporate whores' decision. Forget trying to ban or stop the money. Try to not have it pay off.

If the attribution of political ads had to occupy,say, 1/3 of the display space it certainly wouldn't bother campaigns themselves since name recognition is most of what it is about. It might be a little less appealing to Haliburton and probably at least annoying to the veiwer. It would take clever lawyers working with ad men to make it work.

Since corporations already operate under a tax regimen that is different it shouldn't be too difficult to find a way to tax the snot out of the removal of the funds from the revenue stream. This idea is akin to the machine gun tax, it doesn't prohibit or restrict speech itself, simple makes it expensive to engage in such a pilfering of assets. That is again the bailiwick of lawyers and this time really good accountants.

I know it is tempting to run around with hair afire, but an issue like this will have some very good minds working on it. It would be very difficult to plan ahead without knowledge of the language of the decision. I think this would also be a very good time for some smart lawyer to sue on behalf of a nice liberal corporation for a vote. I don't know that there'd be much point in having a prosecutor bring charges for corporate acts that would be crimes if a human did them to another human, like murder for buying out another corporation or bigamy for mergers, but it sure would be fun to watch.

I won't go into my emotional response to this court, it would be illegal and unwise to do. But that does get me to this point, those assholes were picked by...Republicans and had some Democratic votes for approval behind a flood of GOPers. Despite current appearances it does matter who the President is and (I hate to use really rude words like this) Congress is run by. OK, mismanaged by. Just for god's sake do better than Ho LIEberman.