WASHINGTON - January 21 - Today, five Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court struck down critically important laws regulating corporations' influence on election and public policy. The Center for Media and Democracy strongly opposes this radical decision by these five guys to rewrite the First Amendment and give corporations even greater influence in elections and public policy. With this decision, huge corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG will be able to use their enormous wealth to run campaigns against the president or any person who might oppose their agenda. I think we have to stand up and say "No" to this decision.

In our view, this decision is terrible for our democracy. The corruption of policy development we have already seen by the big insurance companies in the health care debate, by the big banks opposing regulations to protect our economy, and by big oil companies slowing efforts to address global warming, even under the current rules that the Court just struck down, show that this decision will make things worse in our democracy. We cannot sit on the sidelines and let this radical decision stand.

You can help us stand up to the Court by casting your vote against this judicial activist decision and sending a strong rebuke. Please click to sign our petition and help put Americans before corporations.

Please share this link with friends who are concerned about the state of our democracy and excess corporate influence: http://tinyurl.com/AmericansBeforeCorporations. We also have a new portal we are launching in SourceWatch to help educate the general public about these issues and provide a gateway for getting more involved.

We are also lending our voice to nationwide coalition efforts to fight this decision. In particular, CMD has joined the steering committee of the Move to Amend to support a broad-based effort to amend the Constitution to restore individual rights. We are also supportive of another coalition focusing on changing federal election law. But it's clear to me that we need to pursue the broadest effort to restore individual rights, so I hope you will join us in reasserting the primacy of the individual in our democracy.

When I worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewing President George W. Bush's judicial nominees and their agendas, I feared this day would come. That's why I tried to help keep John Roberts off the appellate court, and then was so saddened the day he was appointed and when I saw President Bush promote him to become Chief Justice after I had left the government. In reading the biographies, writings, and speeches of right-wing nominees, it became clear to me that a revolution in the law was being fomented to undermine the power of ordinary people to regulate corporations in their communities. Today's decision is a huge gift to corporations from a Supreme Court that has been radicalized by right-wing ideology, whose political agenda was made obvious in the Bush v. Gore case and whose very political decision today only makes things worse. I think we have to rebuke the Court's arrogant decision and make sure the law puts Americans before corporations.

We cannot just wring our hands, in my view, and let this stand. There is a great deal of work to be done. The Center for Media and Democracy, which has been documenting corporate spin, lies, and disinformation for over a decade through PR Watch, is ready to help. We've been spearheading a specialized encyclopedia of the people, corporations and money behind the headlines and policy, in SourceWatch, and we recently invested in a major upgrade of that Website to make it more useful for the millions of people who visit it each year. Our democracy needs a long-term effort to reverse the Supreme Court's radical decision, but we've got to start somewhere and we should start today.

If you care about fighting spin and you are concerned about the health of American democracy, I hope you will join me in saying the Supreme Court really got it wrong today, and this must be fixed.

Sincerely,

Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, and BanskterUSA.org