Judicial fabricators.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - The Supreme Court lifting of the ban on corporate political spending - Viewpoint essay

As you've probably heard, corporations are now "people"--humanoids that are equivalent to you and me. This miraculous metamorphosis happened on January 21. Accompanied by a blinding bolt of lightning, and a terrifying jolt of thunder, five Dr. Frankensteins on the Supreme Court threw a judicial switch that endowed these pulseless paper entities with the human right to speak politically.

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Never mind that inanimate corporate constructs have no tongue, brain, heart, or soul--the five judicial fabricators breathed unprecedented legal life into corporations, decreeing that the vast wealth held in their corporate treasuries is their voice. With a cry of "Shazam!" the Court ruled that, henceforth, every corporation--from Wal-Mart to Wall Street--is entitled to "speak" by spending unlimited sums from their treasuries to elect or defeat candidates for any and all public offices in our land, from city council to the Presidency.

By a bare 5-4 majority, the justices created an artificial, uber-wealthy, political monster that will overpower everyone else's voices. For example, just the 100 largest corporations have assets totaling more than $13 trillion. No combination of human people's political organizations can amass even a tiny fraction of that spending power.

With their ruling, five unelected guys in black robes have subverted our sovereignty with a semantic perversion that twists special-interest things into "people" and money into "speech." In so doing, the Supreme Five have substituted their personal political views for the clearly expressed wisdom of America's founders, every Congress since Teddy Roosevelt's time, twenty-two states, dozens of cities, the court's own precedents, and the people themselves.

Bizarrely, the five Court corporatists on the Court seemed to think that their sneak attack on America's democratic ideals was so cleverly done that it would be meekly accepted by the public and even widely applauded. Hardly. The ink of their signatures on this absurd opinion wasn't dry before the justices were pelted with ridicule.

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Others raised an intriguing constitutional conundrum that the Court obviously failed to contemplate. Since the Thirteenth Amendment bans slavery, which is the ownership of a person, the newly born corporate "persons" cannot legally be...