Stephen Hoban describes how Stephen Colbert is using his platform to illustrate the ridiculousness of our political finance system:
This new reality that Stephen Colbert and his lawyer Trevor Potter keep bringing up in Stephen’s run-ins with Viacom is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision from 2009, because Citizens United allows corporations to make unlimited political donations. Where once we feared that corporate money could be misused to buy elections, now we honor corporate money as free speech. (It’s not hard to predict that the effects of Citizens United could be as destructive as the deregulation of the banking industry in 1999. Many economists believe that deregulation led directly to the “Too Big to Fail” banks, the global financial crisis, and the bailout. Imagine something like that happening in politics.)