Dark Energy. Dark Money. Dark Democracy.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, organizations called Super Pacs may get unlimited amounts of money from anyone, even foreigners, no need to reveal anything, and use it for political ends. It is called “dark money,” after the scientific phenomenon of “dark energy,” because neither can be detected or measured. The only evidence that either exists are behaviors explained no other way.
Dark energy explains the expansion of the Universe. Dark money, used stealthily and with lies to misinform and mislead, explains the election of politicians who act against the interests of constituents and pass laws disenfranchising people, depriving women of rights, favoring the rich, and penalizing everyone else.
Dark money should lead to Dark Democracy, except there can’t be such a thing. Democracy needs light as urgently as a rain forest. If choosing leaders and enacting laws are secret, a government is not democratic. Dark democracy is an oxymoron, like what the Egyptian military calls democracy while reserving to itself basic rights, including the right to declare war. The Citizens United decision that allows unlimited money to pour into politics while staying hidden and out of sight desecrates and weakens democracy.
Posterity will place the Citizen United decision of 2010 with the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that defined human beings as property. Children will study it in school, learn the names of dissenting justices, Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. Those who perpetrated it will join Justice Roger B. Taney, who in 1857 wrote that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race” These pariah justices: Kennedy, Roberts, Aleto, Thomas, and Scalia, defiled the world’s greatest democracy. Their names will live in infamy.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, organizations called Super Pacs may get unlimited amounts of money from anyone, even foreigners, no need to reveal anything, and use it for political ends. It is called “dark money,” after the scientific phenomenon of “dark energy,” because neither can be detected or measured. The only evidence that either exists are behaviors explained no other way.
Dark energy explains the expansion of the Universe. Dark money, used stealthily and with lies to misinform and mislead, explains the election of politicians who act against the interests of constituents and pass laws disenfranchising people, depriving women of rights, favoring the rich, and penalizing everyone else.
Dark money should lead to Dark Democracy, except there can’t be such a thing. Democracy needs light as urgently as a rain forest. If choosing leaders and enacting laws are secret, a government is not democratic. Dark democracy is an oxymoron, like what the Egyptian military calls democracy while reserving to itself basic rights, including the right to declare war. The Citizens United decision that allows unlimited money to pour into politics while staying hidden and out of sight desecrates and weakens democracy.
Posterity will place the Citizen United decision of 2010 with the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that defined human beings as property. Children will study it in school, learn the names of dissenting justices, Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. Those who perpetrated it will join Justice Roger B. Taney, who in 1857 wrote that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race” These pariah justices: Kennedy, Roberts, Aleto, Thomas, and Scalia, defiled the world’s greatest democracy. Their names will live in infamy.
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