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The Bloomington Alternative

Top Ten Sellouts of 2010

No, you’re not going to find LeBron James on this list. The man did what any self-respecting capitalist would do: Take the money and run.

Curious, isn’t it? Throughout the year, James was catching all sorts of shit for his decision to leave Cleveland for more lucrative, and winning ways, in Miami. Meanwhile, people in positions of real power and authority sold out this country at every turn. Where is the outrage?

Call James a sellout all you like, but this sideshow ain’t nothing like the real thing.
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Earlier this week, President Obama announced that Solicitor General Elana Kagan was his nominee for the Supreme Court.

Kagan’s nomination dominated this week’s news cycle,effectively putting the BP oil disaster and Afghan President Hamid Karza’s “Happy Together” tour in Washington, DC on the US press corps’ back burner.

As with most inside-the-beltway debates, the Kagan nomination seems tailored to serve elite interests. Only more so.

Unremarkably, the Democratic leadership is failing all over itself repeating the Obama administration’s line on Kagan: a pragmatic progressive — whatever the hell that means.

For their part, Republicans have responded in a far more subdued tone that you might expect, given their track record with such things for, say, the last decade or so.

Corporate media, and not a few public broadcasters, nevertheless had plenty to say about the ensuing “debate” over Obama’s pick to the High Court.

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to call our attention to the fact that the GOP’s muted response to the Kagan nomination is definitely out of character.

In this clip, Colbert notes that the Conservative attack machine is MIA. And along with his guest, Salon senior editor, Dahlia Lithwick, Colbert suggests that the Kagan nomination isn’t all that threatening to either executive power or corporate interests.

That’s what you call a “win-win” for the power elite.

As always, Colbert’s mix of pop culture references and incisive political satire is a brief, but rewarding, respite from the awful truth: despite our enormous wealth and power, America’s democracy has never been more fragile and precarious.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

The High Court lifted the ban on corporate and union campaign spending. The 5-4 decision is based on earlier Court rulings that grant corporations the same free speech rights that individuals enjoy.

But as John Bonifaz, Legal Director of Voter Action noted: “Free speech rights are for people, not corporations. In wrongly assigning First Amendment protections to corporations, the Supreme Court has now unleashed a torrent of corporate money in our political process unmatched by any campaign expenditure totals in U.S. history.”

The court’s flawed reasoning on corporate “personhood” has compromised our system of government for generations. This ruling is just the latest in a series of decisions that fundamentally undermine American democracy.

As Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen said in a statement issued on Thursday, “Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy-making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Today, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy.”

In an era of corporate welfare and “too big to fail” public policy, this decision hastens the corporate colonization of our economic, social and political lives.