Is the Supreme Court biased towards corporations?

I wrote last week about the plutocracy or corporatocracy which has emerged as the dominant force in American politics. Today, Bloomberg News has a teaser article up featuring an interview with Justice Stephen Breyer, who was appointed to the court by Bill Clinton in 1994. Before I get into the substance of the post, permit me to point out that Bloomberg News is a subsidiary of Bloomberg L.P., a company with revenues in the billions of dollars, and owned by Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City and America's 10th richest person. See how money, the media and politics all work together? And I'm sure this was entirely coincidental, but Bloomberg TV was severely reprimanded a few years ago in the United Kingdom for breaching British rules on broadcasts before elections. It seems that Bloomberg covered the Labour Party's "Business Manifesto", but failed to provide equal coverage to the Conservative or Liberal Democratic parties.

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Christine O’Donnell’s usefulness

At the NYT, Frank Rick points out that Christine O'Donnell is quite useful to the Republican Party because she gives the heart and soul of the party cover:

By latching on to O’Donnell’s growing presence, the Rove-Boehner-McConnell establishment can claim it represents struggling middle-class Tea Partiers rather than Wall Street potentates and corporate titans. O’Donnell’s value is the same as that other useful idiot, Michael Steele, who remains at the Republican National Committee only because he can wave the banner of “diversity” over a virtually all-white party that alternately demonizes African-Americans, Latinos, gays and Muslims.

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Separation of Church and State?

I was on my way to lunch today, when I saw an ad on a local 'mega-church' billboard. It was promoting a "Restoring America Conference". This is a church. It pays no taxes. It should have no say, as an entity, in our political process. Based on the speakers, this will not be about Restoring America in any social sense - something that a church should indeed participate and lead. This 'conference' will undoubtedly be a rabidly right-wing diatribe from start to finish. I have absolutely no problem with free speech, not do I have a problem with Partisan speech. I do have a problem when political speech is not only associated with religion, but sponsored and promoted by a religious organization.

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Welcome to the new Plutocracy!

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” -- Warren Buffett, currently the world's third richest person
Most Americans have the sense that something's wrong in our country, and most realize that it's intimately tied up with money and politics. Those who have not studied the issues deeply could be forgiven for thinking we have a foreclosure problem, or an unemployment problem, or a Democrat problem, or a Republican problem, or a problem with Congress as a whole, but the truth is more important than those symptomatic issues. The truth is that we are now living in a nakedly plutocratic state-- that is, a state which is run by, and for, the wealthy. Or perhaps a corporatocracy (a state run by, and for, corporations), but they are functionally the same thing.

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How broken is our system of electing members of Congress?

How broken is our system of electing members of Congress? It's abominable, according to Senator Ted Kaufman, who is not seeking election and who is willing to speak candidly on major issues. It's no coincidence that he is not running and that he is willing to speak candidly, according to Kaufman.

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