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
23-02-2010, 05:25 PM (This post was last modified: 23-02-2010, 05:28 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
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
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
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
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
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
23-02-2010, 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: 23-02-2010, 09:19 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
David Guyatt Wrote: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
More likely flags...
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
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.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
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.
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.”
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Quote:Last Week’s Supreme Court Ruling: A Step Towards Corporate Communism?
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Comments (4)
By Laura Kiesel
This past Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5 to 4 decision to do away with any limitations to corporate funding of political campaigns. The decision comes on the heels of the surprise election of conservative candidate Scott Brown in Massachusetts to take over the late Ted Kennedy's seat. As such, the verdict seems to have been passed in preparation of the upcoming 2010 election, by paving the way for corporate sponsorship of candidates. This decision should deeply scare us all as it establishes new legal interpretations of the 1st amendment. First, it interprets corporations as legal individuals entitled to the more rights in deciding elections than you and me. Second, it deems that money is the same as "speech," and that therefore funneling money into the campaigns is the same as voicing support for a candidate. Besides flying in the face of legal precedent, the implications of these unfortunate interpretations are potentially quite dire. It makes us consumers first, and citizens second. It defines us solely as consumers and our worth to and in this country estimated by how we oil the great corporate machine. Groups such as the right-leaning Tea Party have based much of their rhetoric on the fear of government takeover of our lives. And yet, the Supreme Court decision single-handedly puts us on the fast track of a complete corporate takeover, where corporations dominate and even dictate who our elected officials will be and how they will vote. By default, our political choices will be made for us. Unlike a government representative, corporations are not vulnerable to votes or petition signs. A corporation is not limited by election terms. A Corporation is not a human! It is granted immunity from culpability in many court cases because of this reason, and as such, should not be granted rights on equal or greater par than us.
A corporation is comprised of countless individuals, many of whom are probably not residents of the states in which they will be subsidizing campaigns. In fact, since most large corporations are multi-nationals, corporations may be calling the shots in who runs for office in your district even though they may not even be from the United States. The most disturbing aspect of this ruling is its affront against freedom of speech. The founding fathers, in creating the first amendment, sought to offer the constituency rights to which we all equally share. All of us have a voice and a means to communicate. We are, for the most part, on fairly equal ground in this respect. We do not all have easily disposable incomes. Most of us don't: a recent poll revealed that more than half of American individuals make $35,000 a year or less. For a single parent, this toes the poverty line. By claiming that money is tantamount to speech, the Supreme Court has inevitably set up a system in which corporations have the power to hand-pick candidates. We lay citizens cannot compete, as even our individual campaign donations cannot legally exceed $3,600 per candidate. Most of us can't afford airtime or to buy up bill boards as an alternative to our single votes. Our speech has thus been rendered less prominent, and so less important or influential, than that of the corporations.
Whereas we are restricted to one vote per elected official and in our home towns and states, a corporation is now given a free pass to vote with its dollars anywhere and everywhere it chooses. Corporations have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal and can drown out all of our voices to elect officials amenable to their interests. And since a corporation is not human, it has no conscience or consciousness, and cannot be tried for crimes against humanity. It conjures up apocalyptic images of the dystopian novels we are assigned to read in high school and college. We are told to read them to better comprehend the capabilities of runaway power. We are taught that this is a real risk. It is-we should heed these works of literature and find the lesson in this.
A corporation, by virtue of its implicit purpose and function, is run with one reigning goal in mind: to maximize profits in the shortest time possible. All other things are secondary, or more likely, peripheral. Such goals run counter to public health and welfare, social equality, and environmental sustainability. I fear the worse from this and will use an example. In the Appalachian region, a majority of coal (which makes up most of our electricity source) is extracted using a nefarious method called Mountain Top Removal (MTR). The name is literal: the tops of mountains are blown off with reams of high powered dynamite. What is left blacks out the sky and slides down the tops and fills the valley with rock and soot. It chokes and coats the nearby towns with dust, kills all the fish and birds, and leaves an ugly mess in its wake. Kids in towns where MTR is conducted have high levels of asthma, bronchitis, and GI upsets. One small child asleep in his bed was killed by a stray boulder during an MTR 'extraction.' His parents received a judgement of only a few tens of thousands of dollars for the murder of their son from the multi-million dollar coal company responsible (which did not have the proper permit at the time of the incident). One of the largest silos that stores the coal sludge of MTR debris is kept behind an elementary school, where it threatens rupture and drown the school. Townspeople in MTR towns have much higher cases of diseases like cancer and Crohn's. I was shocked to learn something like this was being practiced in our country. But the reason it still goes on is clear: coal companies have a lot of money, do a lot of lobbying, and even take judges ruling on the cases against them on yacht trips. How can poor people compete? They can't. And yet, an effort has been made recently in both state and federal governments to seriously clamp down on this destructive practice. But what chance would small communities stand if all of the electorate was put in place by corporate interests? The slim chance they might have had quickly becomes none. Their dollars are less, so their speech has much less worth to the point of worthlessness.
Another case is our health care system. Health insurance companies maximize profits and eliminate costs by denying people coverage with pre-existing conditions or canceling when the person becomes too much of a "cost-risk" (e.g.: develops cancer). For some reason, many Americans decry implementing more regulation on these companies or a public option in this system because they think some socialization will lead us down some slippery slope to Cold War-era Russia. This is despite the fact that most other developed nations have universal healthcare and have maintained robust democracies (and have higher life expectancies, lower rates of cancer, etc.). It seems strange to me that people are so scared of government-run healthcare, and not corporate-run healthcare, even though the latter can and does take so much more liberties with our lives. To the corporate run healthcare system, we are and continue to be nothing more than consumers who cease to be of worth once they can no longer maximize profits by our continued patronage. I would think even those hard-lined conservatives who don't want a social option in medicine can still see the atrocity in denying or canceling care for these ends. Under the Supreme Court ruling, these problems will accelerate as health insurance companies will continue to pursue and attain their corporate agenda by these means unchecked. Additionally, other corporations will continue to pollute our air, soil and water, and use carcinogenic chemicals in our products without environmental regulations, thereby exacerbating the rate at which we become sick with a myriad of disorders and diseases for which we then cannot secure (afford) health care to treat.
Think this can't happen? It already has been in the works for a long time. Check the voting records of your Congress person and then check his/her campaign donors: you can easily see connection. The Supreme Court ruling will take this several steps further. We will have outright corporate sponsorship of representatives. Their positions in our Congress will be bought by the highest bidders and the agenda of that bidder will be what that representative is beholden to, not to his constituents! This ruling puts Congress in the pockets of corporations and keeps them there. It measures the significance of our free speech in dollars, and defines its worth by stocks. And we as regular people are vastly outweighed.
So what is the purpose of this post: is it just a dystopian vision, an apocalyptic rant to bring down your day? Not completely. It probes us first to reflect on the unconstrained power of the Supreme Court. Unlike the executive and judicial branches, these justices are rendered impervious to public opinion or social concern. They are not beholden to voters, or even to the other branches of our government. Once elected, they may and often do sit on the bench for several decades, legislating with ideologies that reflect the era and influences that affected their appointments, ideologies that may now be irrelevant and obsolete. We need to appeal to our government to consider effective checks to the Court, especially when decisions contradict strong legal precedent and undermine individual rights and the overwhelming will and interest of the people. A Constitutional amendment is perhaps in order to restrain corporate financing of elections, as well as the power of Supreme Court justices. A petition for such an amendment, that would clarify that for-profits are not entitled to 1st amendment rights through subsidization of candidates, is available at http://www.dontgetrolled.org. Another bright light in this dark tunnel is the introduction of the Fair Elections Now Act in Congress, which would waiver limitations on individual citizen donations and offer competitive public financing options as an alternative to corporate backing. Please make sure to contact your House Reps. and Senators and urge them to co-sponsor and vote for the bill when it hits the floor.
In the interim to attaining the passage of legislation or a proper amendment, we need to understand that this is not necessarily a hopeless situation. But it is a David and Goliath case. We can look beyond the dollar signs and ad campaigns the corporations will no doubt bombard us with. The one possible good thing to come out of this is more transparency in campaign financing. This gives us the opportunity to investigate candidates and understand the subliminal messaging of their rhetoric, what it is they are really supporting. We can still vote, and choose the less funded candidates with no or the least corporate representation. We still have the power to reject the beginning of a plutocracy. We can vote with our dollars. Corporations have power because we fund them. Extremely large corporations with huge government influence and shoddy reputations when it comes to human rights protection are good targets for a boycott, as are those that will emerge as the dominant forces in elections. Whereas it is unrealistic to expect we can completely abstain from supporting corporations, as they are now a ubiquitous facet of our society, we can consume much less and consume more conscientiously. By doing this, we refuse to be just consumers, pawns in the chess game of profit playing. This means patronizing our local co-ops and mom & pop shops over big chain retailers, buying second-hand goods over new, sourcing more food from CSA shares, community gardens and farmer's markets, seeking non-profit over for-profit services when it is a viable option, investing in small-scale renewables and conserving energy at home, driving less and shopping from companies that support democracies at home and abroad (The NGO Green America has a comprehensive online Business Directory of socially and environmentally responsible businesses at http://www.greenamericatoday.org/pubs/greenpages/).
Perhaps this sounds Pollyannaish of me, but we need an appeal. If corporations are in charge of our officials, for now the only control we have over corporations is our financial support of them and we need to scale that back considerably.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
[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.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
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.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
![[Image: 140px-Nazi_Swastika.svg.png]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Nazi_Swastika.svg/140px-Nazi_Swastika.svg.png)
and the new slogan to go with it: Profit Uber Alles
