...are coming home to roost.The Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC last year ruled that corporations could spend as much as they please trying to elect people who'll do their bidding or defeat people who didn't do their bidding. That decision was based on the legal reasoning that a corporation is the same as a living, breathing, eating, excreting human being and deserves the same rights under the 14th Amendment. (The 14th Amendment, O my brethren, was enacted to protect the weak. So, see how warped the legal minds of the John Roberts Court have become.)
Anyhoo ... if you've followed the nastiness in Stanly County, NC, over the polluting of the Yadkin River by the Alcoa Corporation, which I confess I haven't, you might be interested to know that Alcoa is now unleashing its corporate "personhood" to defeat through advertising $$ the sitting county commissioners who dared to sue them for the pollution.
Carter Wrenn (of all people!), the man who unleashed Jesse Helms on the universe, is now outraged about corporate power and gives the only summary we've so far seen of the "coming storm" of corporate muscle crushing ordinary American citizens and how that's currently playing out in Stanly County. The most conservative Republican we can personally think of can clearly see the poison the Roberts Supreme Court has spilled on the landscape.
Yet there are Republican voices in the state, and even in Stanly County, who still scream that the sacred Free Enterprise System demands that a company like Alcoa cannot, must not, be called to account.