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Show 2 this case sent a harrowing message to publics, counter-publics, and decision makers that democracy as we knew it had died. Some took matters to the streets. For instance, on the second anniversary of the Court's decision, 100 protestors congregated in front of the U.S. Supreme Court shouting, "Whose steps? Our steps?" while clutching signs of protest with slogans such as "Corporations are not People" and "We are the 99 percent." One group of protestors dressed as Supreme Court justices and sung: "I'm a person, he's a person, she's a person, it's a person…be a corporate person, be a corporate person…Shame shame shame! (Berger, 2012; Larotanda, 2012). Worried that the Citizens United decision would lead to a proliferation of unabated super Political Action Campaigns (PACS), where private organizations raise money for campaigns without restriction, this group, known as "Move to Amend," attempted to "Occupy the Courts" by staging various image events (DeLuca, 1999a) that sidesplittingly ridiculed the Court for putting corporations before people. To them and others, Citizens United sanctioned a "Wild West campaign spending world" (quoted in Weissman, 2015, para. 16) that transmuted deliberative democratic behavior into a political scenario dominated by corporate interests. Even President Obama supports reversing Citizens United, stating, "I would love to see some constitutional process that would allow us to actually regulate campaign spending the way we used to, and maybe even improve it" (Schouten, 2015, para. 2). "The system was pretty bad before," he said, "Citizens United just made it worse. It changed from an arms race to a nuclear-arms race" (para. 5). Move to Amend has been at the helm of this controversy in its advocacy for a constitutional amendment that bans corporations as protected persons. The petition reads, |
