AFL-CIO Now

09/21/2012; Alliance for Justice

We all know how big business has eroded the American dream by getting Congress and the executive branch to change the rules to favor corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. But it hasn’t stopped with two branches of government. Corporate special interests have spent decades working to put their thumb on the scales of justice. The campaign finance decision in Citizens United is only the most prominent example. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In a special issue of The Nation, produced in cooperation with the Alliance for Justice, AFJ President Nan Aron writes about what big business has done to the cherished American value of equal justice under law and, most important, what we can do about it:

Liberals who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s perceived the Supreme Court largely as a constructive force, devoted to protecting civil, environmental and consumer rights and liberties, and interpreting the Constitution as a living document relevant to a rapidly changing 20th-century world. It was a Court worthy of respect, if not reverence.That was then. The 1 % Court is now in session.

Nan’s full article is available here.

More from this special issue of The Nation is available here.