"Free Speech Rights Are For People, Not Corporations" A coalition of public interest organizations strongly condemned today's ruling by the US Supreme Court allowing unlimited corporate money in US elections and announced that it is launching a campaign to amend the United States Constitution to overturn the ruling. The groups, Voter Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance, say the Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC poses a serious and direct threat to democracy. They aim, through their constitutional amendment campaign, to correct the judiciary's creation of corporate rights under the First Amendment over the past three decades. Immediately following the Court's ruling, the groups unveiled a new website here devoted to this campaign.

"Free speech rights are for people, not corporations," says John Bonifaz, Voter Action's legal director. "In wrongly assigning First Amendment protections to corporations, the Supreme Court has now unleashed a torrent of corporate money in our political process

The Columbus Free Press spoke with Kim Ellis of Climate Ground Zero as police arrested supporters on the ground who were there to assist the tree sitters high above them. This is the most recent of a series of acts of non-violent civil disobedience aimed at stopping Massey Energy from blasting parts of Coal River Mountain. It comes on the day environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr. and Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship debate each other at the University of Charleston in West Virginia. The event will stream live starting at 6:30 pm, on Jan. 21.

Ellis said she hopes non-violent civil disobedience of this sort will speed up the process of finally getting a ban on mountain top removal mining.

“You have to pursue every avenue. We are talking with the DEP ( West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection). We are trying to deal with legislators to get this stopped. But in the meantime, they (Massey Energy) are blowing up mountains. We can’t just let that happen. So we are putting our bodies in the way of that.”

Massachusetts again reminds us why the Democrats are such losers.

They are terminal schizophrenics, driven mad by the corporate dominance of American politics. They cannot govern and make significant change at the same time because the system is geared to make this impossible.

Somehow, this core problem must be fixed, or we are lost as a nation, and probably as a species.

The currently prescribed role of the Dems is to be the "Party of the People." But they can’t attain or retain office without cash flow from the very corporations that are the people’s worst enemy.

They are thus politically bi-polar. They can never offer meaningful cures for any of America’s real problems because they must always return to the trough of the corporations that cause the bulk of them.

Because the modern global corporation has human rights (as defined by the 14th Amendment) but no human responsibilities, it is history's most powerful institution. It is above the law, shielded from debt, not accountable for damage to the public, to the people who work for them, or to the planet.

President Obama should know that his silence in regards to the military industrial complex is a betrayal of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 exactly one year after, to the day, he profoundly indicted U.S. militarism. Obama unleashed the same militarism in his so-called Afghanistan surge. King's Silence is Betrayal speech, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, denounced a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift. send comments

In the middle of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the lack of a Green New Deal and jobs programs that make the U.S. less energy dependent are leading to imperial folly in Central Asia. Obama's popularity erodes as he embraces the same militaristic policies that destroyed President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. As the architect of the War on Poverty, Michael Harrington, used to say, The War on Poverty was not lost in America, it was lost in the jungles of Vietnam.