Despite having criticized the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the rise of Super PACs, President Obama’s re-election campaign has decided to fully endorse the use of their own allied Super PAC. Passing legislation about campaign finance reform was simply not a priority for the Obama administration.

Citizen’s United is not merely a mistake easily corrected, nor is the case simply about campaign finance or money in politics. Citizen’s United is a corporate power case masquerading as a free speech case. In many ways, the decision was less a break from the recent past than a proclamation about the sad reality of corporate power in America.

Mitt Romney won Florida partly because he was able to bury his opponents with negative ads. In Florida Romney and his allied SuperPAC outspent Newt Gingrich and his SuperPAC by a margin of four to one. Looking at the FEC filing report data, Romney has the money, if needed, to continue a strategy of crushing opponents with overwhelming spending on negative ads.

Hey, you know what conservatives really really hate? Conservatives just can’t stand it when rich people and corporations use their vast wealth to game the system! Just don’t ask them to support any kind of public campaign financing or limits on corporate political spending…

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein is calling for a total popular boycott on political donations. He believes that the problem with Washington is that we have an inherent stalemate that will not be solved by an election and only a boycott by campaign donors will magically make all members of Congress agree to the “grand bargain” Pearlstein wants.

Thanks to Citizens United and a subsequent court decision, Super PACs can raise unlimited sums, and spend it all advocating directly for or against a candidate, as long as there’s no coordination between the Super PAC and the candidate’s campaign. But this prohibition against coordination doesn’t really have much significance in the real world.

While the media remains focused on Herman Cain’s sexual harassment allegations, the more damaging story may be a budding campaign finance scandal. It seems a network of private corporations, possibly linked to the Koch bros, directly paid for many of the campaign’s early events, in violation of federal laws.

Much pundit ink has been spilled pondering why the OccupyWallStreet protest has grown so rapidly and resonated so widely. But the answer is really not difficult to apprehend. Our political system is fundamentally broken by corruption and oligarchical control. Many people know this. They have rationally concluded that voting fixes none of these systemic problems precisely because the problems are systemic. And going out into the street to protest and demand an end to this corruption is the only perceived means of redress.

Sarah Palin just hates it that corporations control our government. Honest!

Did you know that Stephen Colbert has started his own Super Pac? He may be kidding, but I am not. He’s been raising money, evidently enough money (or Comedy Central is footing the bill?) to do an ad buy in Iowa. You can watch the commercial here. I love the name of the ad “Episode IV: A new hope.”