“The potential for foreign infiltration of what remains of our democracy is an adjunct of the fact that the source and control money from corporate treasuries (unlike registered PACs), is necessarily hidden. Who the heck are the real stockholders? Or as Butch asked Sundance, “Who are these guys?”
We’ll never know.

Hidden money funding, whether foreign or domestic, is the new venom that the Court has injected into the system by its expansive decision in Citizens United.

http://www.gregpalast.com/supreme-court-to-ok-al-qaeda-donation-for-sarah-palin/

If Greg Palast is correct on this one — YIKES sounds frightening!!!

The SCOTUS decision confirms the long-standing corporate [that is, ruling-class, that being presently finance and technomanagerial rather than, say, knights in armour holding land grants from the King] domination of “our democracy” and possibly marks an era in which it becomes open rather than semicovert.

Here are two propositions, only one of which can be true:

1. Campaign finance regulations were paper-thin, flimsy, ineffective barriers that did nearly nothing to keep corporate money out of elections, a fact amply demonstrated by the last two weeks of the Massachusetts senatorial campaign of Scott Brown.

2. The Citizens United decision opened the door to an unprecedented corporate takeover of our democracy.

Let me say this again: only one of these propositions can be true at a time. You have to choose one.

FULL

I know this is drifting far afield of a court decision, and this thought is more stream of consciousness than thought through yet.

I’m troubled by my own use of “barbarism” for lack of a better word. “barbaric” is what the Civilised call the unCivilised, but as we know by now, the cruelties of civilisation far outstrip those of “primitive” people in both ingenuity and sheer volume… however, for the moment it may serve. I’m thinking of Curtis White’s essay The Barbaric Heart in which he touches — though gingerly, with gloves on as you might say — on the connection between Manliness and barbarism.

So how would we define barbarism? as the failure of empathy and compassion? the ability to dehumanise the Other? the inability to respond to the Thou in the Other, seeing only the Them? the singleminded pursuit of Mine/More/Now? or something more dangerous yet: the valorisation and celebration of these failures of humanity, their redefinition as Heroic? all the above, of course, are required for the effective training of warriors.

Kathy, your point is taken on the “whore” talk, which gets even more entangled given the left’s (and the pomo’s) insistence on reducing prostitution to “sex-work,” a fairly transparent ploy to pull questions of sex back into the exclusive ambit of the workerist left, on the one hand, or into the (free-choice) consumer-feminism of liberals on the other. Either way, sex-as-power analysis gets shouldered out of the room. It must be dangerous, or there wouldn’t be such sustained effort to conceal it.

I don’t think that this is just a case of metaphor or symbolic meaning– I don’t know what to call it though- it just think its more weighty than “symbolic” since it’s so related to the normalization of “trafficking” (in many senses of the term) in women. It’s not arbitrary ranking, and does not seem silly to most people-except when raised by feminists in objection!! It’s taken for granted, and goes unremarked, and I think this level of misogyny has grown more not less rancorous within the Left, the male Left, as attached to the trivialization-thus-deeper embedding of sexual exploitation within popular culture. (For TV watchers you might notice how sexual harassment is a stock joke of sitcoms and serials alike. I think that in many ways TV embodies the neo-liberal patriarchal imagination which liberal feminism of course can not contest given its complicitous relationship with this same imagination)…