It’s a wedge issue. Jesus is a political tool, too. They are hollow men and women. TS Elliot pointed that out long before social media rose to be the driving force in our culture.
1 Like
The current system of representation at such a convention would almost certainly result in establishing an aristocracy again. So I believe a Constitutional Convention must be avoided at all costs. While our uniquely American form of political justice doesn’t always worked well, but it is an on-going experiment in democracy which needs to run its course before throwing in the towel.
Our republic most certainly has hit a bump. But I think we can get over it with a little patience and a lot of good ole Yankee ingenuity, so don’t stop believing. The fundamentals are still in place even if the integrity may not be. We must keep the faith and forge on. When you give up trying to fix mistakes, you’re admitting defeat. That’s what the Top 1% wants…total submission to the will of the few.
6 Likes
If corporations really want to be people then we should have arrested, tried, and hanged a bunch of them by now. Enron anyone??
3 Likes
Corporations and other types of entities that historically were created only for commercial purposes play a useful and necessary role in commerce. Therefore, rather than getting rid of them altogether, I think it would be more feasible for states to change their laws regarding what powers and authorities such entities can exercise. As creatures of state law, they would not be entitled to challenge limits on their powers and authorities based on the Constitution because there is no provision in the Constitution regarding such juridical entities.
5 Likes
Completely agree. I’d like to see what would happen if some State amended its corporate statutes to state, explicitly, that the entity being created is not a “person,” that its activities are restricted to those clearly enumerated in its corporate charter, and that it is not entitled to any of the rights and privileges of a live, sentient, human citizen unless the statute says otherwise, in unambiguous terms.
5 Likes
“Is money speech?” he said. “Absolutely. It’s totally obvious that money is speech. In fact, I just had a conversation with money the other day. If it can talk or write articles, then it is speech, and money can do both of these things. Besides, there’s this twitter thing where all you need to do is gain lots of followers - gaining millions of followers is even easier than making millions of dollars - and then you’ll have twitter speech to equal the money speech that big corporations and rich people have. What’s that? No, no, never mind that twitter speech can’t be donated to political campaigns like money speech can. It’s still speech, and speech is speech is speech - it’s all one big speech family. And this is all so obvious that even the supreme court could see it, which is why they said money is speech.”
4 Likes
An excellent false equivalence, right? ; - )
I mean, just the other day, I heard Kathy Griffin was stripped of her followers (speech) by the concerted effort of well-financed interests. And wasn’t one Robert DeNiro almost killed?
What’s the equivalent for monied interests? Take their money?
First, they get laws passed that allows them to hide their identity. Second, even if they lose their money, they still have voice.
3 Likes
As soon as you start asking yourself, how would the Koch brothers game that system, these solutions don’t look so great.
So we could easily end up with Candidate A for City Council, sponsored by Tate Brother’s Tires, or Candidate B for Senator, sponsored by Microsoft. The smart option would be for Big Gas & Oil Companies to sponsor different Oklahoma legislators depending on which is operating where, then have them pass laws that pretty much eliminate any corporate taxes those corporations don’t want, never mind that the populace is in-the-streets upset about the slashes to education funding. Oh, wait, done that. Doing that I mean.
Or lets say Big Donor Koch or Big Donor Adelson doesn’t want to have his name all over those FEC filings for GOP Presidential candidates. He simply funnels the money through a maze of trusts and shell corps, so that short of the FEC doing a compete audit on the internal finances of a bunch of private corporations set up specifically to protect the privacy of their investors, that immediate and transparent reporting to the FEC tells the people nothing about who is actually buying the race. In other words, status quo.
Here you get into tricky, actual free-speech territory. You have “issue” ads that equate health care reform with the personal bankruptcy of every person over 40, not to mention the federal government itself, or the “Look at all the stuff we’re doing to protect the rainforests next to our drilling sites!” ads from the '70s, or all those sweet pro-family ads run by the Mormon church in the '80s - I remember people insisting that “Julie Through the Looking Glass” was not about being present in your children’s lives, that it was nothing more than an insidious anti-abortion commercial. Or maybe it was just trying to normalize Mormons in American culture, part of a roadmap to Romney. What about that controversial Superbowl ad from coke where the young migrant brings her daughter through the dangerous journey to the US?
There’s a continuum between issue ads and political ads. For better or worse the legal line was drawn at actually naming the candidate. Erasing that line altogether, though, really just erases the protections that corporations, and non-profits, and civil rights advocacy groups, and so on have to protect the names of their stockholders and donors and members.
Then there’s the issue of foreign money. There are all sorts of convoluted excuses for how a corporation can be “American” and not use the money it gets from foreign investors, but the actual biggest issue is that corporations are by law beholden to the interests of their shareholders, and that does not distinguish Prince So-and-so of Saudi Arabia from Joe in Peoria with his 401k. There’s no “acting on principle”, unless the principle is to improve public relations. There’s no promoting Democracy, unless promoting that system of government somehow means less risk and better odds of tilting the regulatory apparatus in their favor. There’s no uncalculated patriotism.
This I can totally get on board with. In this day and age, the only reason not to do this is to hide that information from the public in the hope of manipulating political outcomes.
1 Like
Thank you Jimmy Carter, who started campaigning in Iowa a year before the rest of the crowd. He had essentially no name recognition until he captured that early state, and he did it the “old fashioned way”, by direct campaigning. At least that’s my childhood memory. No smoke-filled back room would ever have given him a chance.
Every candidate since then, not to mention the media and the colluding political parties, have made that method, the perpetual small-white-rural-state the bedrock of our democracy, and those voters the only ones that really count.
This turn of phrase just made something click.
One of the GOP’s standing orders is to eliminate all regulation of the wealthy or corporations. Their current rhetorical move is to take something they want to deregulate, and find a way to describe it such that it looks like a thing that the Constitution forbids the regulation of.
What is government forbidden to regulate?
- speech
- religion
- guns
So, we can expect to see the GOP paint their corporate masters as being essentially in the business of speech, religion, or guns – and thus absolutely beyond the reach of government.
1 Like
This referendum PASSED with ~74% of the vote! 