News Items You May Have Missed
Citizens United at 13
This year marks the thirteenth anniversary of Citizens United. This decision by the U.S. Supreme Court ended a century of restrictions on donations to political candidates. It allowed, corporations, other groups, and individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. The only limitation was they couldn’t coordinate directly with a candidate’s campaign. The result was an avalanche of $4.5 billion dollars in the decade following the 2010 decision to buy elections. Most of this money was donated by a few super wealthy individuals.
“Our politics should not be a tug of war between billionaires on the right and billionaires on the left…” writes Mathew Rothschild, the former director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “Citizens United makes a mockery of the ideal that we all have an equal voice in our democracy.”
Billionaire Warren Buffet agrees and has said, “Let only individuals contribute with sensible limits per election. Otherwise, we are well on our way to ensuring that a government of the moneyed, by the moneyed, and for the moneyed shall not perish from the earth.”
Polls indicate 75% of Americans – 66% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats – support overturning Citizens United. But as political science researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page inform us, “…the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
For 13 years citizens across the country have been trying to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn this ridiculous and destructive court ruling. Why is good change so hard to achieve?
Who manages the economy better?
“By nearly every objective measure, Democrats manage the economy better than Republicans.” Christina Lorey writing in Up North News, November 22, 2022.
Recessions have happened 17 times in the last 100 years. Thirteen of them began under Republican presidents. Since Carter was president, federal budget deficits have increased under every Republican and shrunk under every Democrat president. At $3.1 trillion Trump is #1. His administration more than doubled G.W. Bush’s $1.41 trillion deficit. Biden is second with $2.8 trillion due to pandemic bailout spending and record Pentagon budgets. The figures on economic growth, job creation and household incomes show similar patterns of increasing under Democratic presidents.
What Republicans do better is media spin and deceiving American voters.
More lies from Ron Johnson
Wisconsin’s Senator is well known for supporting COVID quack cures and opposing vaccinations. In a recent Fox news interview he claimed that COVID was “pre-planned” by unnamed elites to take away human rights and “take total control over our lives.”
A quote from Claire King Sargent (an activist for electing women – now deceased) applies to Ron. She said, “I think it’s about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we’ve been voting for boobs long enough.”