Thank You Supreme Court Justices; Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy

ThinkProgress » Big Oil Lobby Announces It Will Start Donating Directly To Candidates

Note: The Justices who voted in favor of Big Corporations against The American People in The Citizens United Ruling are:
Roberts
Alito
Scalia 
Thomas 
Kenned

Big Oil Lobby Announces It Will Start Donating Directly To Candidates

The American Petroleum Institute, the Big Oil industry’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertisements and Astroturf campaigns to support the the oil industry agenda. As CAP’s Dan Weiss wrote, API “wants to drill in fragile, sensitive places, keep government tax breaks, expand offshore drilling without reforms, and block global warming pollution reduction requirements.”

“This is adding one more tool to our toolkit,” Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, told Bloomberg News. “At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.” As Bloomberg pointed out, oil-supported political action committees like the Independent Petroleum Association of America overwhelmingly donate to Republican candidates.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, API spent $6.7 million on lobbying alone last year, after clearing $7 million in 2009. In 2010, API was the seventh most prolific spender in the oil and gas industry, following ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Koch Industries and BP.
API’s turn toward direct political donations is doubly problematic because, in addition to acting as the industry’s chief lobbyists, the institute runs technical committees that set standards for the oil industry. In its official report, the commission that investigated the BP oil spill found that API was too “compromised” to be setting industry standards. “Because they would make oil and gas industry operations potentially more costly, API regularly resists agency rulemakings that government regulators believe would make those operations safer, and API favors rulemaking that promotes industry autonomy from government oversight,” the commission found. And this was before API established a political action committee!
In its proposed 2012 budget, the Obama administration suggested, once again, removing the billions in subsidies that taxpayers give oil companies every year. API has been at the forefront of the lobbying fight to preserve Big Oil’s subsidies, demonizing the removal of them as new “energy taxes,” even while admitting that cutting the subsidies and plowing the money back into clean energy technology would create “a lot more jobs.”

The Corrupt Supreme Court

Justice Clarence Thomas 'Hearts' Big Corporations




Supreme Court Corruption Grows with Clarence & Ginny Thomas, Samuel Alito

The Story of Citizens United v. FEC: Why Democracy Only Works When People Are in Charge

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/03/01

The Story of Citizens United v. FEC is being released to support the growing movement for a constitutional amendment. The Story of Stuff Project will hold over 500 house parties around the country for participants to learn more about the Supreme Court’s decision and to organize in support of a constitutional amendment.

The Story of Citizens United v. FEC companion website (www.storyofcitizensunited.org) will serve as an interactive launch pad for information and activism. The site offers viewers additional educational resources, including an annotated script and FAQs, as well as ways to get involved in the constitutional amendment campaigns of Public Citizen, Free Speech for People and People for the American Way.



The Justices who voted in favor of Big Corporations against The American People:


Roberts
Alito
Scalia
Thomas
Kennedy


From an opinion concurring with the majority:
Chief Justice  John G. Roberts Jr.:
"The Government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern. . . . The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer."


For the dissenters:

Justice John Paul Stevens:
"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."