From The Last American President by Thom Hartmann - The groundwork for the GOP’s plutocratic takeover of American politics was laid on January 21, 2010, when the Supreme Court issued a ruling that fundamentally transformed American politics. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court’s 5–4 Republican majority struck down key provisions of campaign finance laws dating all the way back to the late nineteenth century, ruling that corporations and outside groups could spend functionally unlimited sums on elections through the Super PACs the decision invented.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, made the extraordinary claim that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This statement would soon be revealed as one of the most naïve or cynical pronouncements in Supreme Court history.
This wasn’t merely a legal technicality: it was the culmination of a century-long corporate campaign to claim the Constitutional rights of persons while avoiding the responsibilities of citizenship....
Citizens United represented their ultimate victory, handing them the power to flood our democratic processes with unlimited cash while remaining legally obligated solely to maximize shareholder returns. American democracy was being transformed into what Franklin Roosevelt once called “economic royalism,” aka rule by the economic elite rather than we the people.
Unlike the First Gilded Age, when robber barons like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller primarily purchased individual politicians, this Second Gilded Age enabled the wholesale capture of our political system itself. The American experiment in self-governance—unique in its founding premise that all political power originates from the people themselves—was being fundamentally rewired to ensure that political power originated from those holding or controlling great wealth. And Trump, himself a product of inherited wealth with an instinctive deference to monied interests despite his populist rhetoric, was the perfect vehicle for this transformation.
The practical effects were immediate and profound. Political spending by outside groups exploded, jumping from $750 million in the 2008 presidential election to over $4.5 billion in 2016.4 But more significant than the amount was the source: just 150 billionaire families put up more than 60 percent of all Super PAC money raised in the years following Citizens United....
Into this system stepped the new American oligarchs, whose names would become synonymous with the corruption of American democracy...
These men and their billionaire colleagues didn’t, in my opinion, want democracy; they wanted control. Control over a government that might otherwise regulate their industries, tax their enormous wealth, or hold them accountable for environmental and social damage their businesses caused.
Citizens United gave them the tools to seize that control. And in Donald Trump, they found the perfect front man for their operation.
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