Democracy Burning?

If we are not for ourselves who will be for us?

If not now, when; and if not you and I, who?

Our votes, yours and mine, used to have the same worth as any other person’s vote. My vote was equal to your vote and together our votes determined the fate of our lives and of our nation.

However, this appears to be fading into memory and history. It seems like our ballots are suffering from a case of severe voter dilution and vote inflation.  Your and my ballot just isn’t worth what it used to be. Our votes are beginning to resemble commodities to be traded, bought, spent, invested, channeled, and influenced.

No one argues that our nation country was founded upon the bedrock principle of one person one vote. However the 2010 CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION Commission decision by the U.S. Supreme Court thoroughly deconstructed the “one person, one vote” foundation of our nation.

First, the decision granted full person-hood to corporations, incorporeal legal entities. They are now people who are free to employ corporation money and financial resources to influence and distort our political process and the lives of living entities like you and me.

Our legally reborn incorporeal corporate citizens get to press their thumbs upon the election scales of living corporeal people. You know, living people, the ones who once defended Bunker Hill, fought at The Battles of Bull Run, and then fought their way up to plant our flag on Iwo Jima?

To add insult to injury, there are a number of billionaire citizens like the Koch brothers and others who dilute our one person one votes by funneling tens of millions of dollars into the political process that impacts the lives of living citizens like you and me.

In commodity terms, their two ballots are now worth far and away far more than yours and mine. The Koch brothers, with a wave of their corporate checkbooks, enjoy a freedom, nearly unconstrained by the federal electoral system, that allows them to press their thumbs upon any scale of justice and political process that appeals to them.

And we have had no appeal for that.

The Declaration of Independence declares that American have an “inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The U.S. Supreme Court has declared incorporeal corporate legal entities as possessing the same rights as living and breathing U.S. citizens. I can imagine, (and I can only imagine) that corporations now breathe a sigh of incorporate relief, hop in their virtual corporate fleet of luxury vehicles and jets,  to go home to corporate wives and cyber children, and relax happily in front of their corporate, tax deductible HDTV screens..

Given the foregoing, it can be of no real significance who heads up our ship of state in the coming elections, the corporations are voting with their cash, the Koch brother billionaires with their bucks, and the value of our citizen’s ballots is further compromised and shrinking fast.

We are “voting” while our democracy is sinking, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, our democracy house is burning, going up in smoke, while incorporeal and corporate billionaires saw away contentedly on their violins.

What will it take, whose will it take to turn this around? Yours, mine, ours?

If we are not for ourselves who will be for us?

If not now, when, if not you, who?