Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of a day I’d prefer to forget. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I don’t do a show on Fridays. But I’ll suck it up and deal with it today.
On the afternoon of January 21, 2010 the Supreme Court handed down their ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, a ruling that undid over 100 years of settled law regarding the financing of campaigns and opened the floodgates for corporate control of elections.
Later that afternoon came word that Air America radio had filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and ceased operations.
No, it was not a good day at all…
This morning on the show, we talked about what happened that day. I shared some clips from my show that night when I moved it online, and my conversation – recorded moments after getting the news about AAR – with Congressman Alan Grayson.
A year after the Supreme Court decided to, as President Obama put it in last years’ State of the Union address, “reverse a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limits in our elections.”
The ruling reinforced the egregious idea of “corporate personhood.” To that end, a lot of events are planned this weekend to mark the inauspicious anniversary through the group Move to Amend. Here in South Florida, Echo Steiner is searching for a corporation to marry, and spoke with me about it this morning too:
I also spoke with Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny and the Blue America PAC about progressive politics and finding progressive candidates to run for office. We must get this movement