Mission Statement

This blog is dedicated to tracking current events and developments that exemplify, support or discredit the
themes of City, Save Thyself! Nuclear Terror and the Urban Ballot.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

      The Supreme Court’s decision to permit corporations to fund political campaigns is certain to narrow the possibility for fair elections based on issues and on candidate qualifications. It also furnishes a telling example of why the nations of the world, left to themselves, never will take the steps to end the nuclear arms race and prevent war.


      Weapons makers for years have allocated parts procurement, weapon by weapon, throughout the fifty states. Complex systems, like airplanes, are assembled from bits and pieces made in hundreds of separate Congressional districts. What such inefficiency adds to the cost can only be imagined, but the purpose is clear, to ensure that every Member of Congress will be vulnerable to pressure from constituents with either a job or a profit stake in each and every weapon.

     The Supreme Court now has made it harder yet to influence arms policies through election campaigns. No matter how cautious and multilateral a Congressional candidate’s proposal might be to enter into mutual, proportionate, verified arms control agreements, there never will be enough campaign money to match the infinite resources of the arms makers.

     As awful as 20th Century wars were, the nation structure, democracy, and most of civilization’s achievements pulled through. 21st Century wars, sooner or later, will be nuclear wars. Civilization, democracy, and the nations, including the United States, will not survive as we know them. If non-deterrable terrorists succeed in going nuclear, it could happen soon.

     The last political resource that threatened populations might yet command, and the last means by which populations might make common cause across national boundaries, is the cities and towns where the populations live. With effort, political influence remains available at that level. As the intended targets of wars and of terrorists, no voice in opposition to war could be more justified than the municipal voice. If Americans, through their cities, and Russians through their cities, and Chinese through their cities, all insisted at once that their nations cooperate to substitute enforced law for war, progress might follow that citizens could not make trying separately to influence their national policies.

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