I had the privilege of speaking to about 200 people outside the 9th Circuit Court building in San Francisco yesterday as part of Occupy the Courts (this is despite the rain).  Up the street in the financial district thousands were marching about and closing down banks on a day of action called Occupy Wall Street West.  It was all connected.  Two years ago the Citizens United ruling – which allowed corporations to give large sums of money to politicians – came down and an already flawed democracy got even worse.  You could say that decision was like the fox in the henhouse deciding that gluttony is ok – a country where wealth is more consolidated than it has ever been had its highest court declare that big money is free to use it's money to subvert democracy as much as it wants.

Here is more or less what I said:

First, since I was speaking for the National Lawyers Guild, I mentioned the group and the part of our founding document that says human rights should be regarded as more sacred than property interests. The Citizens Unitedcase is a classic example of the clash between the two and ourfederal courts proved they are incapable of protecting human rightsover property interests.