To the editor:

If you’re enjoying the degraded attack rhetoric known as the presidential primaries, then please read no further.

In the bits I’ve been unable to avoid, it seems the candidates are trying to outdo each other in malice and are well on their way toward destroying one another, imploding the whole process.

Why is this the case?

One reason is that the Supreme Court has elevated corporations, allowing them all sorts of special economic rights and now, as well, granting them the same political rights as the people.

This is not only painful to watch on TV, it is a very dangerous period for our country whose real people, unlike corporations, are suffering not only from rapidly increasing costs of food and fuel but, for many, lack of housing, employment and basic health care.

In view of the untold millions being spent to buy candidates’ allegiance and your vote, should Citizens United which is largely responsible, continue as the law of the land?

I decided to turn to the bard whose famous appeal in the “Merchant of Venice” will stand long after the first corporation has drawn breath. Taking a bit of liberty with Shylock’s speech: “I am a corporation. Hath not a corporation hands … senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food … subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means … as a human being? If you prick us, do we bleed? If you tickle us, do we laugh?”

I heartedly doubt it.

Would it not be better to live in a country whose elected representatives weren’t bought and paid for by big corporations, many of which are based in foreign lands?

The “Citizens United vs. FEC” Supreme Court decision overturned a long-standing precedence, allowing floods of corporate millions to be dumped anonymously into our political system.

Real human beings must unite against “Citizens United,” which should more truthfully be called “Corporations Consolidated.”

Urge your state representatives and the Supreme Court to reverse this decision. Tell your senators to overturn the deceptively labeled “Citizens United” and end the poisonous lie of corporate personhood.

Anni Cooper,
Freeport

letters@timesrecord.com

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