Is U.S. Growth Slowing?

 Financial FAQs

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 (October, November, and December), according to the advance estimate released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 4.4 percent.” BEA.gov

 

BEAgdp

The economic chaos that President Trump has sown by using the tariffs as a tool to coerce trading partners is a major cause of the sudden drop in fourth quarter (Q4) GDP growth from Q2 and Q3 growth (see graph).

So it’s great news the Supreme Court ruling that most of President Trump’s tariffs by executive order are illegal. It will create more certainty over the instability that has bedeviled consumers and businesses alike, which encourages future economic growth.

It’s also a huge victory for the rule of law over a president who routinely disobeys the law since only congress has the power to tax.

Businesses had rushed to counter the chaos created by the tariffs by stockpiling imports before Trump announced more tariffs. And import costs are subtracted from export prices to calculate GDP (Because imported goods aren’t produced domestically.), So higher imports, when all else is equal, tends to slow GDP growth, which measures what is produced domestically.

The furlough of hundreds of thousands of workers without pay during the 43-day government shutdown also slowed consumer spending that had already been affected by the tariff uncertainty.

So we are now beginning to see the damage Trump’s imagined cure for our trade deficits has done. He said other countries should have to eat the higher import costs from the tariffs but they passed on most of the higher costs.

Rump’s tariffs didn’t correct the trade imbalance between imports and exports either because importers then found ways to time their purchases between price swings and/or transfer their business to other countries that had lower tariffs.

In fact, the trade deficit—created by the amount imports exceeded exports— barely changed after all Trump’s planned chaos. It was $901 billion in 2025 vs. $903 billion in 2024.

“Had Congress intended to convey the distinct and extraordinary power to impose tariffs, it would have done so expressly, as it consistently has in other tariff statutes,” said the Supreme Court opinion, which was supported by a 6-3 majority of the court. Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas dissented.

In other words, President Trump can no longer govern by creating the chaos and uncertainty that has enabled him to accumulate so much power and wealth. So maybe “The times they are a changin?”

And sowing economic chaos by being unpredictable doesn’t work as a negotiating tactic either. Companies usually waited until Trump’s TACO bluster caused him to back down before agreeing to a rate. And SCOTUS ruled he now must do the research required by other laws to justify the tariffs.

Trump’s tariffs did not decrease the flow of imports or boost domestic manufacturing, as intended. Domestic manufacturing lost another 80,000 jobs last year, in large part because of the higher steel and aluminum prices that go into so much manufacturing output.

And the mostly illegal tariffs worsened inflation as well. A New York Fed bank study found U.S. businesses and consumers have paid most of the costs of the price increases on imported goods.

“Over the course of 2025, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports increased from 2.6 to 13 percent. In this blog post, we ask how much of the tariffs were paid by the U.S., using import data through November 2025. We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers” per the NY Federal Reserve.

The harm done by Trump’s tariffs by fiat makes a long list. China had stopped buying agricultural products as in Trump’s first term and higher tariffs have cost Ford and GM $billions in lost profits.

The Supreme Court ruling exposed the harm ignoring laws and our constitution has done to economic growth. Trump’s Republicans are no longer the party that stands for lower taxes, except among their wealthiest supporters. So much for increasing affordability!

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Antonin Scalia’s White, Male Legacy

 Answering Kennedy's Call

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's passing is a shock to die-hard conservatives for good reason. He was the bastion and spokesperson of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which meant any law had to divine the original intentions of the founding white male fathers of our nation.

AK-47

The two students and two teachers at Appalachee High School were killed by a 14-year old student with an AR-15 assault rifle has brought back the debate on the causes of such gun violence than kills more than 30,000 Americans every year.

Wednesday’s mass shooting marked the 45th school shooting of 2024 and the deadliest US school shooting since the March 2023 massacre at The Covenant School in Nashville,” said CNN.

Military-style assault rifles had been banned for 10 years during the Clinton administration, but the Republican-led Bush administration didn’t renew the ban. Why? One man, SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia, was almost solely responsible for the Supreme Court ruling that legalized assault rifles for use by common citizens.

I wrote about it in Huffington Post at the time of Scalia’s death in 2016.

“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's passing is a shock to die-hard conservatives for good reason. He was the bastion and spokesperson of the originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which meant any law had to divine the original intentions of the slave-owning, landowning, founding white male fathers of our nation, which excluded women and non-landowning males (and slaves, of course) from representation.”

So that meant turning the clock back at least one century to a time when the white male patriarchy still ruled, which was a much less democratic time. Scalia's most noted opinion was to expand Second Amendment gun owners' rights, which 'protected' every citizen's right to own a gun almost without restriction, because he convinced the majority of SCOTUS that the Second Amendment right to bear arms also protected an individual's right of self-defense.

The result has been record gun sales and gun deaths (30,000+ per year), as well as mass shootings, and no limit to the purchase of military-style assault rifles with unlimited magazines. Another little-noted result was the higher incidence of gun violence in households with guns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In fact, "Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that living in a home where guns are kept increased an individual's risk of death by homicide by between 40 and 170 percent," said the Law Center. "Another study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology similarly found that "persons with guns in the home were at greater risk of dying from a homicide in the home than those without guns in the home." This study determined that the presence of guns in the home increased an individual's risk of death by homicide by 90 percent.

Whereas other developed countries without that Second Amendment 'right', such as Australia, do not allow the purchase of a gun for self-defense to be a sufficient reason for owning such a weapon. And Australia has not had a single incidence of mass shootings since 1996 and the passing of its gun control legislation.

Does it make sense for anyone to own a military-style assault rifle for self-defense when it was manufactured for wartime? The definition of the word, assault, means just that. It was made to assault an enemy during wartime. What purpose could it have in a home, even as a semi-automatic—where children live?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

A Greater Lawlessness Causes Greater Gun Violence

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

I wrote this Huffington Post piece in 2017 after the October 1 killing of 58 people with bump stock-equipped assault rifles at a Las Vegas music festival. It was one in a series on the greater lawlessness tearing apart Americans.

Nothing has changed with the Supreme Court now deciding the executive government, in the form of its ATF agency, did not have the power to outlaw bump stocks because when equipped with same, an assault rifle didn’t fit the exact definition of a machine gun, which is banned for civilian use.

The SCOTUS majority has caused a greater lawlessness because there is now no law or regulation to prevent the use of bump stocks in more mass killings.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has been the credo of NRA, gun lobby and most Republicans since the 1980s when gun manufacturers came up with automatic pistols, so that guns could fire more rapidly.

But Las Vegas shooter Stephan Paddock had no discernible mental illness, criminal record — or anger problems, according to his brothers. The NRA will try in vain to find a reason this inhuman act was committed when there is no reason, other than the fact that military-style weapons are legal in most of America and easily obtainable.

Paddock’s assault rifles reportedly fired 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes, which is more than one round per second (1.5 rounds, actually). How is that not a machine gun?

Only guns can kill that many people — always the most vulnerable unable to defend themselves. His brothers didn’t even know he was a gun nut who owned more than 30 weapons and was able to smuggle in 10 suitcases containing 23 of those weapons without any Mandalay Bay Hotel staff even noticing such an oddity. Who needs that many suitcases in a hotel room?

President Trump’s administration did ban bump stocks at the time. But not for long with the Supreme Court majority now stepping in to make them legal again.

No existing laws now protect children in elementary and high schools from military-style assault rifles because in Justice Alito’s words, congress must decide, which said congress hasn’t been able to do.

For shame on the conservative SCOTUS majority.

Australia, the country most like US in population, had a similar gun problem until 36 people were killed in Port Arthur, and Prime Minister John Howard was able to pass strict gun control laws in 1996, the same year of the Port Arthur massacre. There hasn’t been a mass killing since then in Australia.

Australians apparently don’t believe owning an assault rifle is the ticket to manhood. Their gun control laws are maintained by weapon buyback programs and the requirement that gun owners must belong to a certified gun club.

How did our gun laws become so lax that military-style weapons are this easy to obtain? It was a little-known Supreme Court decision authored by its most extreme ideologue, Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1980s which said that said gun owners no longer must heed the constitutional Second Amendment stricture that owners of such guns be members of a well-regulated militia.

Our founding fathers must have put the works, “a well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment for a reason. Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was not a member of a well-regulated militia.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What Civil War?

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

 

Texas, 17 other red state Attorneys General, and 126 Republican House members tried to keep President Trump in power after January 20 by breaking election laws and ignoring the United States Constitution. But the Supreme Court, arbiter of the Constitution, said they had no basis to sue four Democratic states after the election had been decided.

This has led Texas’ GOP Party Chair Alan West to suggest that these states should secede from the United States (which was quickly disavowed by other state GOP leaders).

West and Texas Republicans were in fact still fighting their own version of the 1860s civil war that abolished slavery in suing to overturn the will of a majority of Americans. President-Elect Biden was certified by the Electoral College as our new POTUS and Kamala Harris as our new Vice-President Elect on December 7.

Turning the Supreme Court’s decision on its head, West said, "This decision establishes a precedent that says states can violate the US constitution and not be held accountable," in a statement following SCOTUS’s Friday-night ruling. "Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.”

Ben Schatz, the Democratic senator for Hawaii, said Mr West’s statement revealed that the Texas Republican Party had lost its mind, in a post to Twitter.

“The Texas Republican Party is officially in favor of leaving the Union. They have lost their minds,” wrote Mr Schatz. “Biden will be President, but these people are deadly serious about secession and sedition.”

If those red states had ever thought about what they were doing, or even why they were doing it—which they obviously hadn’t—they would have realized many would be bankrupted if they ever wanted a separate union.

They would be in danger of losing much of $437.596 billion in transfer payments made to them from the federal government that is above what they contributed to the US Treasury in FY 2018, according to the Rockefeller Foundation.

There were six states like New York and New Jersey that have large tax revenue surpluses totaling $51.4 billion which are distributed to poorer, mostly red states by the federal government, such as Kentucky that has a $45 billion deficit in their balance of tax payments with the federal government.

The tax surpluses from the richer states are paid out as part of transfer payments (e.g., social security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, welfare) to members of the poorer, mostly red states.

This in fact is why America is a prosperous country—wealthy states help to support the federal programs of citizens in the poorer states. No one state can pull down other states because of its financial problems, and its citizens know they will be covered by our central government, whether in blue or red states.

Then why have Republicans under Trump continued their attempts to overturn the election results? NY Times’ Op-ed columnist Charles Blow said it best. Trump realized that trying to steal the presidency is more lucrative than being president with his calls for donations to his re-election Super Pac that now total more than $200M. In conning his base into believing he won the election, “We are witnessing one of the greatest grifts in history,” said Blow.

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen 

Who Says There's No Leadership?

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

www.nippon.com

Critics of the Trump administration and its Republican Party enablers have it exactly backward when they say the federal government isn’t leading the effort to control the novel coronavirus pandemic. They have in fact been actively opposing any measures that would control the pandemic and protect the health and welfare of most Americans.

President Trump and his enablers are suing in the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare that has insured 30 million Americans, for starters.  Another 5 million have no coverage because of their lost jobs.

They are also actively opposing a national response by attacking and undermining the administration’s own scientific experts in order to sow confusion and doubt among the public. And just as alarming, they are now demanding the opening of public schools without mandating national guidelines to protect its students.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo confirmed as much at yesterday’s press briefing, when he said, “The federal government is committing gross negligence.”

That is why we now have the highest COVID-19 infection and death rates in the world. And those most affected are immigrants and minority populations in the ‘essential’ occupations who are most exposed to infection, rather than Republicans’ white nationalist supporters.

“It’s politically inconvenient in an election year, so he denies it,” said Cuomo. “Except you are jeopardizing public health and losing lives by your denial and political agenda.”

And now thirty-eight U.S. states have seen a rise in cases in the last 14 days, I quoted MarketWatch’s Jeffrey Bartash saying yesterday: “Harvard Global Health Institute researchers have developed a national tracker to trace the severity of the outbreak on a state-by-state basis, and it’s flashing red for red states like Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia.”

Arne Duncan, Obama’s former Education Secretary, probably said it best regarding the opening of schools:

“What we obviously need to do to make our schools safe is to make our communities safer,” he says. “It's actually [Trump’s] tremendous lack of leadership, just horrific leadership over the past several months, that's the only reason why whether or not we can go back to school safely in the fall is in question now.”

I maintain it’s worse than that. Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School said in a recent Salon interview about Trump’s need to speak in front of his followers without regard to their safety:

“Trump is able to appear more in touch with reality when he is being worshiped. Indeed, when his primitive needs are not being challenged, he can look like a normal person — it’s what has made him a successful con man.  When he is challenged, however, his cruelty, sadism, paranoia, lack of conscience, incitement to violence and active pursuit of policies that kill people become obvious. These traits are properly described as “evil.” In professional terms, they mean he is a psychopath.”

There should be no question where the national leadership of America is leading the majority of Americans. It is leading to the destruction of our health and well-being. Enough is enough.

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Red Tide in Education

ANSWERING THE KENNEDYS CALL

The Guardian

Red tide algal blooms have been threatening coastal beaches for decades, killing sea life and sickening bathers; a sign of rising ocean temperatures due to global warming as well as human pollution.

But another red tide is benefiting Americans by threatening the wealth of oligarchs like the Koch Brothers and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who have diverted funds so desperately needed by America’s public schools where most of our children are educated, to not only preserve their wealth, but increase it.

It is the red state Teacher’s movement for better salaries and benefits in public schools in the conservative states that have either cut education spending in public schools, or diverted funds to Charter Schools and private school vouchers benefiting the wealth-holders of this country and their supporters who own and operate for-profit schools that can receive up to 90 percent of their revenues from federal taxpayers, typically in the form of student loans and Pell Grants.

The Teacher’s movement is another example of powerful ‘grass-roots’ movements generated in local communities to solve grievances that have worsened their citizens’ quality of life.

A 2016 report by the NYU Brennan Center for Justice entitled Secret Spending in the States stated in its introduction: “Six years after Citizens United enabled unfettered spending in our elections, the use of so-called dark money has become disturbingly common. Contrary to the Supreme Court’s assumption that this unlimited spending would be transparent to voters, at the federal level powerful groups have since 2010 poured hundreds of millions of dollars into influencing elections while obscuring the sources of their funding.”

In the six states the Brennan Center report detailed—Alaska, California, Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts and Maine—1) At these levels, dark money sources often harbor a narrow, direct economic interest in the contest’s outcome;  money sources often harbor a narrow, direct economic interest in the contest’s outcome; (2) relatedly, contentious ballot measures that carry major economic consequences frequently attract dark money; and (3) in the relatively low-cost elections at these levels, it is easy for dark money to dominate with unaccountable messages that voters cannot meaningfully evaluate.

Who were the recipients of this largesse in PAC money that ballooned after Citizens United? It has to be no secret that the supporters of vouchers and/or Charter schools that favored higher-income constituencies won out in the funding struggle.

This is what started the “Red for Ed” teachers’ movement fighting for better school funding who had suffered for years, in underpaid salaries and underfunded public schools. “Red shirts and blouses had emerged as the official uniform of teacher uprisings against low pay that were spreading from West Virginia to Oklahoma and Kentucky under the rallying cry “Red for Ed,” said an excellent NYTimes Magazine article, about the Arizona teachers’ uprising.

“Public education is a $650 billion national enterprise,” said the NYTimes, “comparable to the U.S. defense budget, except that the federal government pays only 8.5 percent of the cost. States and local school districts split the rest in varying proportions, but each state finances it differently. Texas and Louisiana tap plentiful oil and gas revenues; Northeastern states like Massachusetts and New Jersey rely on high income and property taxes.”

Arizona is an example that hasn’t raised income taxes in more than 25 years, and counts more on sales taxes and other revenues generated by a growing economy. However they pay for it, K-12 schooling is the biggest single expenditure for all states, accounting for 36 percent of general-fund budgets on average.

“A half-dozen Arizona teachers — and more than 25 others, current and retired, with education backgrounds — declared their candidacy for the State House and Senate with a promise to increase funding for public schools, said the NYTimes. “They’re part of a sudden wave of educators on ballots as first-time candidates in every walkout state.”

The ultimate solution has to be political action, especially political action by women who make up 80 percent of the teaching profession. In fact, the red wave is turning into a blue wave, as this has energized even the less liberal voter base. Data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University shows that more women have filed to run for Congress than at any point since at least 1992 — and by a wide margin. That year, 298 women ran for the House of Representatives. This year, 476 have — most of them Democrats.

Education has always been the responsibility of governments, not private institutions, if we want to educate all Americans, not just those most favored by circumstances.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Divided States of America

Financial FAQs

It is now becoming obvious that we are not a United States of America. There are many states that restrict voting rights, abortion rights, immigration, even the collective bargaining rights of workers that are no longer able to negotiate for their own living wages.

This is when the media is lamenting the possible breakup of the European Union with Great Britain’s Brexit vote to depart from the EU. But the US is breaking up in far more serious ways, even without the influx of millions of Muslim refugees that Europe has to deal with and is causing its drift to xenophobia and the fear of foreigners.

The US in many ways is still fighting the Civil War of 150 years ago, with the defacto apartheid of poor vs. wealthy neighborhoods, and the police killing of blacks at traffic stops. A recent study by the New York based Center For Policing Equity showed that African Americans are more than 3 times as likely to be beaten, bitten by police dogs, pepper sprayed, Tasered, or shot, according to the New York Times.

There are now 26 right-to-work states that either don’t allow workers to join unions, or pay dues, or bargain collectively for their wages, even when their workplace may be under a union contract. This has resulted in those states having the greatest income inequality and lowest wage-earners.

Graph: Wikipedia

There are a very similar number that restrict abortions—even in the case of rape for women—and restrict voting rights when the Voting Rights Act was gutted by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in 2015.

And it is many of those same states that don’t allow convicted felons that have served their time from voting—as many as 30 percent of voter-age African Americans in southern states, thanks to the War on Drugs, according to Michael Moore’s movie, Where To Invade Next. GW Bush probably only won Florida because some 80,000 ex-felons were stricken from the voting roles—mostly in Democratic-leaning counties.

This is why African-Americans now comprise 50 percent of our 2.3 million prison population when they are 12 percent of our population. It provides the cheap labor that prison factories have used to generate products for most large corporations plus the military—another form of slave labor.

Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, "Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men.” If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, "Florida would no longer be a swing state."

But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole. All told, felony disenfranchisement prevents more than from voting. And of the four states that permanently bar voting by former felons—Kentucky, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia—the latter three are battleground states.

Then there are the gun laws. Only 6 states restrict or outright ban the sale of military-style assault weapons, when more than 30,000 gun deaths are recorded every year, and Orlando-style massacres occur because of unlimited magazine sizes of those same assault weapons.

What is behind the defacto civil war still raging? Many economists says it’s the globalization and export of good jobs to developing countries with cheaper wages that have hurt those blue collar workers in the poorer states.  But too many blame immigrants, or nonwhites, or anyone not belonging to their tribe. But we also have to look at the monopoly power of corporations that have pushed such free trade treaties, suppressing their employees’ wages while paying their executives record incomes.

In fact, these states have in many ways already withdrawn from the United States of America in trumpeting state and local rights over inalienable rights. It is just a modern incarnation of our ongoing Civil War.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Corporate Fallacy

Popular Economics Weekly

The dust is settling on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to nullify Montana’s 99-year old law that banned political contributions by corporations. But the controversy is not settled, since the majority Justices’ interpretation in what has been called Citizen’s United II is that since corporations are ‘persons’ in law, they should be protected by First Amendment free speech, regardless of its affect on the functioning of our democracy.

Corporations are not persons by any standard definition of personhood. Corporations are not even mentioned in the Constitution. They in fact more closely fit the socialist model, with a ruling hierarchy comprised of its CEO, a compliant Board of Directors that is owned by the public at large. And that ‘hierarchy’ wields much more power for good or harm that an individual ‘person’.

Although dictionaries define a person as a “human being or organization with legal rights or duties”, a corporation is really a state-within-a-state, since it is really a socialist system in which “producers possess both political power, and the means of producing and distributing goods”. And now corporations have almost unlimited means to increase their political power.

It even more closely resembles an oligarchy, as current law and usage enshrines control not with shareholders, but its executives who make the day-to-day decisions and long term plans. This is exactly the model of such socialist states as Russia and China, with their single-party rule.

So under what definition should corporations be protected by First Amendment freedom of speech? Persons are not protected by the so-called Free Speech Amendment if they cause damage to other persons. The 99-year old Montana law just struck down by this Supreme Court protected free speech by curtailing what corporate power was doing to their state.

Specifically, it was holding all the political power, without any responsibilities towards either its employees or Montana’s citizenry at large. Montana’s 99-year old law upheld by its State Supreme Court was meant to limit corporate power, when it literally owned state politicians.

“Even if I were to accept Citizens United,” said Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion in Citizen’s United II, “this court’s legal conclusion should not bar the Montana Supreme Court’s finding, made on the record before it, that independent expenditures by corporations did in fact lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption in Montana. Given the history and political landscape in Montana, that court concluded that the state had a compelling interest in limiting independent expenditures by corporations.”

Chief Justice Mike McGrath of the Montana Supreme Court, writing for the majority in its 5-to-2 ruling, stressed that the state’s experience of having its political system corrupted by corporate interests early in the 20th century justified the ruling.

“At that time,” Chief Justice McGrath wrote in the New York Times article, “the state of Montana and its government were operating under a mere shell of legal authority, and the real social and political power was wielded by powerful corporate managers to further their own business interests. The voters had more than enough of the corrupt practices and heavy-handed influence asserted by the special interests controlling Montana’s political institutions.”

In other words, there is good reason that such corporate power has to be curtailed in a democracy. Quite simply the one-voice, one-vote principle that makes a democracy work is nullified. That is why Montana had continued to enforce its Corrupt Practices Act. It had robber barons of the first magnitude with unlimited financial resources that could buy almost any politician.

Before a referendum banned corporate contributions in 1913, Butte copper barons openly bought officer holders with massive bribes. One corporate bigwig, W.A. Clark, flagrantly handed out gobs of cash to state lawmakers, who then in turn, elected him to the United States Senate, said a history of the subject, according to the small-town Montana Havre Daily News.

“In a refreshing break from the stately language used in court decisions, Montana Chief Justice McGrath quoted humorist Mark Twain as saying Clark "has so excused and so sweetened corruption in Montana that it no longer has an offensive smell."

“Sick of this skulduggery, in 1913, voters approved a referendum banning corporations from making donations and barring politicians from accepting them. They then changed the law to demand that people, not the state legislature, would elect U.S. Senators. The rest of the country followed suit in seven years.”

So, the U.S. Supreme Court is in essence decreeing a return to the old system of political patronage, where corporations and their wealthy supporters elect our representatives, instead of ordinary citizens. But instead of looking out for the welfare of all Americans, it will be their richest, profit-seeking supporters who benefit.

Harlan Green © 2012