Corporations are going to run for Congress. Corporations have the right to free speech and are now considered persons according to recent Supreme Court ruling
economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/corporation-says-it-will-run-for-congress/
Susan Grant Wrote:Corporations are going to run for Congress. Corporations have the right to free speech and are now considered persons according to recent Supreme Court ruling
economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/corporation-says-it-will-run-for-congress/
Better titled neo-fascism's next step. Mussolini, who coined the word, described it as the marriage of corporations and the state...what we all but have now, and will have completely in another few years. Say goodbye to American Constitutional and Republic Democracy, IMO [not that there is now much left to loose at this point.....but it will be
all gone soon.] :bandit:
What is saddest is that few notice the very polity they thought they had stolen piece by piece right under their noses. When it is complete, there will be no rights with which to get it back.....so act NOW...or loose all. IMO
What is do furiously ridiculous about this is that a Corporation will have a very limited Constituency, namely the executives - worse the Boardroom executives - of the Corporation itself. It will not be and cannot hope to be - and intends not to be, democratically representative. Ergo it is undemocratic.
Fortunately, I hope, it will not receive even a decent percentage of the vote. Assuming the vote is not rigged, of course, and judged by recent events, votes are rigged.
Welcome to the new American version of the NSDP.
and the new slogan to go with it:
Profit Uber Alles
That's what I was looking for!
When "human rights" are withdrawn from humans but granted to corporate entities.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/08/6935
Quote:ublished on Friday, February 8, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Corporations Given 'Human Rights,' Humans Are Denied Them
by Jeffrey Kaplan
In evaluating allegations that U.S. military forces deprived four British men of human rights during two years they were held captive in Guantanamo Bay prison, a U.S. appeals court found an innovative way to let the Bush administration off the hook. Two of three judges ruled the men -- because they are not U.S. citizens and, technically, were not imprisoned in the U.S. -- were not legally "persons" and, therefore, had no rights to violate.
While those judges were defying common sense and decency by denying legal personhood to living human beings, an appeals court in Boston has been reviewing an April 2007 decision by Federal Judge Paul Barbadoro that engaged in a different form of judicial activism -- granting human rights to corporations.
Barbadoro struck down a New Hampshire law that prevented pharmaceutical corporations from learning exactly what drugs doctors prescribe and how much they prescribe. The law aims to protect doctors and, indirectly, their patients, from drug companies pressuring doctors to choose their products.
The judge's grounds? He claims corporations, as legal persons, have "free speech rights" that would be infringed by such a measure.
The real issue in these cases (Maine recently passed a similar law) isn't free speech at all; it's manipulation and control. The drug salespeople only will decide what to say after poking into the doctors' prescription records. Under the guise of protecting speech, Judge Barbadoro denied both legitimate privacy rights of doctors and key protections to ensure patients are prescribed drugs based on their medical situation, not pressure applied to their physician.
Taken together, these two rulings are a perplexing and dangerous development. The founding principle of our country is right in the Declaration of Independence: all people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." It is not for judges to decide who is and who is not a human being.
Nor should the courts play Creator by endowing legal constructs like corporations with human rights. Our constitutional rights exist to prevent large, powerful institutions -- whether governments, corporations, or other entities -- from oppressing us humans.
For too long a strange dichotomy has persisted between principled people on the political left and right wings. The left wing often warns against the growing power of business corporations. The right wing complains the left ignores the overweening power of the government and is "anti-business."
Both sides have been seeing only part of the same elephant. What's happening is a merger of corporations and state.
Already there are corporate "black holes" for human rights that rival government affronts like Guantanamo. Under the Bush administration's legal framework for Iraq during its occupation, the Iraqi government wields no authority over Blackwater corporation's security guards.
And it's not clear the U.S. government does either. As a result, we may never see anyone punished for Blackwater's wanton killing of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last September.
Then there's the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, an American employee of Halliburton/KBR in Iraq who claimed she was gang raped by co-workers in 2005. U.S. officials reportedly handed the evidence to KBR, whereupon the evidence apparently disappeared. Nobody in Congress, Democrat or Republican, has been able to persuade the Bush administration to reveal what it has done about the case since then.
Halliburton/KBR, like Blackwater, apparently enjoys the rights of a person, but not the responsibilities.
The danger of "corporate personhood" is a bit like global warming; people have warned us of the threat for decades only to go unheeded because the dire consequences seemed far-fetched.
But look at what's happened to the First Amendment. Corporations use it to strike down laws clearly designed to protect citizens, even while courts deny prisoners the right to know what evidence the government is using against them. It's time for alarm.
We should take offense whenever we hear the dangerous notion of "corporate citizenship" promoted. Soon, the only citizens with real power in the United States may be the corporate kind.
If this "arrangement" - or should I say "judgement" is allowed to stand the future of citizens will continue to denigrate until slave status is reached - which I argue is the ambitious goal.
I'm not sure if this article has been posted already, but it seems to fit right into this thread.
Altogether, this suggest to me a future where any corporation may fund any other corporation running for office. They may each fund each other and themselves. Blocks of corporations seeking dominance of the marketplace would operate as a political consortium.
A chosen corporation executive could be elected president, as the "face" of the corporation - with the chosen presidential executive revolving as the corporation wishes. Congress could simply become a corporate Boardroom. Having control of the levers of power, corporations would appoint justices to the Supreme Court on the understanding that said justices would reflect the corporations wishes. Corporations could, under that scenario, frame the law to suit corporate profits. Corporations could be exempted all taxes, with a far higher burden of taxation being heaped on the shoulders of their workers and other citizens. The individual citizens vote in elections would become meaningless. Citizens would be wholly unrepresented.
The possible dimensions of these rulings are massive; the potential erosion of democratic freedoms limitless.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/pol...cotus.html
Quote:January 22, 2010
Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.
The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.
The decision will be felt most immediately in the coming midterm elections, given that it comes just two days after Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and as popular discontent over government bailouts and corporate bonuses continues to boil.
President Obama called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
The justices in the majority brushed aside warnings about what might follow from their ruling in favor of a formal but fervent embrace of a broad interpretation of free speech rights.
“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
The ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, overruled two precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that upheld the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted campaign spending by corporations and unions.
The 2002 law, usually called McCain-Feingold, banned the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections.
The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applied to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.”
The five opinions in Thursday’s decision ran to more than 180 pages, with Justice John Paul Stevens contributing a passionate 90-page dissent. In sometimes halting fashion, he summarized it for some 20 minutes from the bench on Thursday morning.
Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.
Eight of the justices did agree that Congress can require corporations to disclose their spending and to run disclaimers with their advertisements, at least in the absence of proof of threats or reprisals. “Disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” Justice Kennedy wrote. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on this point.
The majority opinion did not disturb bans on direct contributions to candidates, but the two sides disagreed about whether independent expenditures came close to amounting to the same thing.
“The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind,” Justice Stevens wrote. “And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.”
Justice Kennedy responded that “by definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”
The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.
Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.
The majority cited a score of decisions recognizing the First Amendment rights of corporations, and Justice Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.”
But Justice Stevens defended the restrictions struck down on Thursday as modest and sensible. Even before the decision, he said, corporations could act through their political action committees or outside the specified time windows.
The McCain-Feingold law contains an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials. But that is, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “simply a matter of legislative grace.”
Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion said that there was no principled way to distinguish between media corporations and other corporations and that the dissent’s theory would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, on television news programs, in books and on blogs.
Justice Stevens responded that people who invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.” He added in a footnote that lawmakers might now want to consider requiring corporations to disclose how they intended to spend shareholders’ money or to put such spending to a shareholder vote.
On its central point, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Justice Stevens’s dissent was joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.
Instead, it addressed the questions it proposed to the parties in June when it set down the case for an unusual second argument in September, those of whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. The answer, the court ruled Thursday, was yes.
“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”
[quote=David Guyatt]
http://www.etalkinghead.com/archives/las...01-23.html
[quote]Last Week’s Supreme Court Ruling: A Step Towards Corporate Communism?
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Comments (4)
[/QUOTE]
NO! It is a natural outcome of
capitalism in its current corporate manifestation. This
is capitalism.
This is what you get. Communism is quite different but some just can't bring themselves to admit that this could actually be a result of the wonderful capitalistic system. Because it is bad it must there fore be.....the dreaded COMMUNISM!!!!! It because of this limited thinking that some people are deluded to think that Obama is a socialist of all things. He is a capitalist and a tool.
I've been trying to watch Stephen Colbert's clip on "Corporate Personhood" (colbert explains corporate personhood). So far I've tried six different US websites and in every case the clip won't run and a message appears saying it isn't available in "your country".
Is there is a kind soul out there able to post a copy of the clip to youtube or otherwise make it internationally available? Thanks.