Tim McCown
March 4, 2012
http://www.examiner.com/progressive-in-philadelphia/h-r-347-could-be-making-the-first-amendment-illegal
On Ron Paul's website it was duly noted that H.R. 347 could make the First Amendment illegal. No one is really covering this bill and the major media call it non-controversial. The innocent sounding bill titled The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 was passed Tuesday with only three dissenting votes including Ron Paul, and passed unanimously in the Senate. This bill dubbed the Anti-Occupy law was passed without one single Democrat speaking up for the first Amenndment.
Once this Bill is signed into law some including Ron Paul believe it will make it a felony to excercise your first Amendment rights of Free Speech. Several of those commenting opined that the nearly unanimous vote proves that despite all the posturing both parties stand shoulder to shoulder in their defense of the greed and entitlement of the 1% from the rest of us. When you couple this with the indefinite detention of Americans in the National Defense Authorization Act it is clear that Obama is part of a ruling corporate oligarchy and is surely no Progessive.
Among the controversial provisions of H.R. 347 is a section that is vague and open to interpretation that would make it a felony to enter or remain in an area designated as restricted. Because of the Secret Service protection at the national political party conventions this summer they could easily be declared restricted areas for the purpose of stifling dissent.
In addition, even a peaceful sit-in could be termed a felony if interpreted to mean blocking ingress or egress from a designated building. This section of the law could clearly be used to criminalize a broad range of formerly legal activities.
Defenders and apologists for mainly Democrats and Obama supporters claim this act is completely innocent and all of us who believe differently have drunk Ron Paul's Kool-Aid again. But a post on George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley's blog page notes that the imprecise languange, just as in the NDAA, creates risks and can most definately be seen as a threat to our First Amendment right to Free Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom to Petition our government. None of that is very comforting in light of the the Patriot Act and surveillance of and wire tapping of Americans.
Tonight you no longer need to be a conspiracy theorist to have real questions about whether we are becoming a police state.
Showing posts with label First Amendment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label First Amendment. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Senate will vote next month on Protect IP copyright bill
Declan McCullagh
December 19, 2011
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57345187-281/senate-will-vote-next-month-on-protect-ip-copyright-bill
The U.S. Senate will debate a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill as soon as senators return in January.
A vote on the Protect IP Act, a close cousin of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, will be held January 24, thanks to a last-minute push by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over the weekend.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who calls Protect IP "a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important."
"This is a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important," Reid said Saturday. "I repeat, it is bipartisan. I hope we can have a productive couple of days, pass this bill, and move on to other matters."
Both Protect IP and SOPA have earned the enmity of Silicon Valley companies, Internet engineers, venture capitalists, civil libertarians, and a growing number of Internet users because of the methods they use to make suspected piratical Web sites virtually disappear from the Internet. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, author of the treatise American Constitutional Law, says this approach violates the First Amendment.
On Saturday, as the Senate was preparing to adjourn until 2012, Reid proposed that the initial debate on Protect IP would take place at 2:15 p.m. ET on January 24, one day after senators return from the holidays.
"I am pleased the majority leader has filed a motion to proceed to the Protect IP Act," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Protect IP's author, said afterward. "The costs of online infringement are American jobs, harm to America's economy, and very real threats to consumers' safety. The answer cannot simply be to do nothing."
In the House of Representatives, allies of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Association of America also are moving with dispatch. Even though the House is likely not to be in session then, SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) has scheduled a vote on the legislation and related amendments for Wednesday, just in case.
"From our perspective we don't understand the rush, especially when these are dramatic policy changes with regard to the Internet," Markham Erickson, head of NetCoalition, whose members include Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, told CNET today. "We think they ought to be handled in a very thoughtful and careful way."
One explanation for the rush to vote is that a groundswell of opposition among Internet users has become better organized and higher-profile in the last month--meaning that if SOPA and Protect IP supporters move quickly, they may be able to send one version of the legislation or another to President Obama for his signature.
Nearly 90,000 Tumblr users telephoned Congress to register their disagreement, and another 10,000 did using Engine Advocacy's Web site. More than 1 million people have signed a petition posted by the Avaaz.org advocacy group; over 700,000 people chose to "like" the AmericanCensorship.org anti-SOPA site.
Sen. Ron Wyden, a foe of Protect IP, has threatened to filibuster it on the Senate floor. "I will be working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle over the next month to explain the basis for this widespread concern, and I intend to follow through on a commitment that I made more than a year ago, to filibuster this bill when the Senate returns in January," he said over the weekend.
Reid's motion to end debate, which would require a three-fifths supermajority of 60 senators to invoke a procedure called "cloture," is a preemptive strike against Wyden's promised filibuster.
Invoking cloture would impose a 30-hour limit on the motion to end debate. There would then be a second 30-hour period on the bill itself, and a third 30-hour period if supporters want to amend Protect IP from the version approved by a committee in May.
Obtaining 60 votes to end Wyden's filibuster curb debate, however, may not be that difficult for Hollywood's allies in the Senate: Protect IP already has 41 sponsors. (During last week's House Judiciary hearing, copyright enthusiasts outnumbered critics of the bill by margins of three-to-one or four-to-one.)
A representative for Wyden, who has offered an alternative proposal, told CNET today that her boss is undaunted:
The senator is prepared to require the Senate to take multiple cloture votes and use all time allowed under Senate rules to prevent passage of this misguided bill, even if that means taking a full week of floor time or longer. And he intends to use every minute of that floor time to let colleagues know that there is a lot more to voting for Protect IP than doing a favor for industry lobbyists.
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
December 19, 2011
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57345187-281/senate-will-vote-next-month-on-protect-ip-copyright-bill
The U.S. Senate will debate a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill as soon as senators return in January.
A vote on the Protect IP Act, a close cousin of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, will be held January 24, thanks to a last-minute push by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over the weekend.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who calls Protect IP "a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important."
"This is a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important," Reid said Saturday. "I repeat, it is bipartisan. I hope we can have a productive couple of days, pass this bill, and move on to other matters."
Both Protect IP and SOPA have earned the enmity of Silicon Valley companies, Internet engineers, venture capitalists, civil libertarians, and a growing number of Internet users because of the methods they use to make suspected piratical Web sites virtually disappear from the Internet. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, author of the treatise American Constitutional Law, says this approach violates the First Amendment.
On Saturday, as the Senate was preparing to adjourn until 2012, Reid proposed that the initial debate on Protect IP would take place at 2:15 p.m. ET on January 24, one day after senators return from the holidays.
"I am pleased the majority leader has filed a motion to proceed to the Protect IP Act," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Protect IP's author, said afterward. "The costs of online infringement are American jobs, harm to America's economy, and very real threats to consumers' safety. The answer cannot simply be to do nothing."
In the House of Representatives, allies of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Association of America also are moving with dispatch. Even though the House is likely not to be in session then, SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) has scheduled a vote on the legislation and related amendments for Wednesday, just in case.
"From our perspective we don't understand the rush, especially when these are dramatic policy changes with regard to the Internet," Markham Erickson, head of NetCoalition, whose members include Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, told CNET today. "We think they ought to be handled in a very thoughtful and careful way."
One explanation for the rush to vote is that a groundswell of opposition among Internet users has become better organized and higher-profile in the last month--meaning that if SOPA and Protect IP supporters move quickly, they may be able to send one version of the legislation or another to President Obama for his signature.
Nearly 90,000 Tumblr users telephoned Congress to register their disagreement, and another 10,000 did using Engine Advocacy's Web site. More than 1 million people have signed a petition posted by the Avaaz.org advocacy group; over 700,000 people chose to "like" the AmericanCensorship.org anti-SOPA site.
Sen. Ron Wyden, a foe of Protect IP, has threatened to filibuster it on the Senate floor. "I will be working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle over the next month to explain the basis for this widespread concern, and I intend to follow through on a commitment that I made more than a year ago, to filibuster this bill when the Senate returns in January," he said over the weekend.
Reid's motion to end debate, which would require a three-fifths supermajority of 60 senators to invoke a procedure called "cloture," is a preemptive strike against Wyden's promised filibuster.
Invoking cloture would impose a 30-hour limit on the motion to end debate. There would then be a second 30-hour period on the bill itself, and a third 30-hour period if supporters want to amend Protect IP from the version approved by a committee in May.
Obtaining 60 votes to end Wyden's filibuster curb debate, however, may not be that difficult for Hollywood's allies in the Senate: Protect IP already has 41 sponsors. (During last week's House Judiciary hearing, copyright enthusiasts outnumbered critics of the bill by margins of three-to-one or four-to-one.)
A representative for Wyden, who has offered an alternative proposal, told CNET today that her boss is undaunted:
The senator is prepared to require the Senate to take multiple cloture votes and use all time allowed under Senate rules to prevent passage of this misguided bill, even if that means taking a full week of floor time or longer. And he intends to use every minute of that floor time to let colleagues know that there is a lot more to voting for Protect IP than doing a favor for industry lobbyists.
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Icons that would shock today's right
From Dr. Seuss to the Statue of Liberty, these American mainstays would have been decried by modern conservatives David Sirota
Wednesday, Sep 28, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/david_sirota/2011/09/28/american_icons_conservatives/index.html
Boogeymen are everywhere these days, if you believe the conservatives' Perpetual Paranoia Machine. A few years ago, WorldNetDaily and the American Family Association warned that Barney the Dinosaur was trying to "surreptitiously indoctrinate young children into [homosexuals'] lifestyle." Then, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly warned that "secular progressives" were waging a "War on Christmas" and pressing the "legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will [and] gay marriage." Now, schools are busy banning books for their "filthy" messages, while Fox and Friends warns that SpongeBob is leading a sinister plot to convert kids to Al Gore's eco-crusade.
Welcome to America at the edge of insanity, where even the most innocuous items are now considered diabolical threats to the culture.
Exceptions like "Slaughterhouse Five" aside, the products that generate the most manufactured outrage and hysteria today tend to be new -- puppets, celebrities' vanity tomes, cartoons and other detritus in our cultural waste dump. However, it stands to reason that if the same Perpetual Paranoia Machine applied its standards of manufactured outrage across the board, it would end up targeting many of the most long-standing "American" symbols for elimination.
Pondering which of those symbols is an important thought experiment -- it locates our relative position on the psychological map, telling us just how extreme our sociopathy is at this moment of chaos. So without further ado, here are the top 10 most universally "American" symbols that would be labeled as seditious, unpatriotic anti-American agitprop if they had been first introduced today.
10. The Collected Works of Dr. Seuss
For most of the last half-century, being a kid meant reading and loving the collected works of Theodor Seuss Geisel -- aka Dr. Seuss. Think back to your earliest years, and you are likely to recall Geisel's legendary catalog. His works are as integral to American childhood as fireworks on July 4 -- and thankfully, Geisel published his books before the advent of Fox News. For if this New Deal liberal had published them today, they would likely be burned in televised Tea Party rallies.
For example, 1957's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" -- which criticizes the commercialization of the holiday season -- would be held up by Bill O'Reilly as an example of the vicious War on Christmas. Likewise, 1971's "The Lorax," which is a parable about the downsides of hyper-industrialization and environmental degradation, would be at least as viciously denigrated as Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth." And had 1984's "The Butter Battle Book" been introduced during the "War on Terror," it would have gotten Dr. Seuss put on a no-fly list and labeled a seditious, al-Qaida-loving traitor.
9. The Golden Rule
Treat others as you would want them to treat you. This idea, which undergirds the concept of human rights, is as old as organized religion, and is a proud basis for America's dominant Judeo-Christian traditions. In the Old Testament, scripture says to "love thy neighbor as thyself," while New Testament says "Do to others as you would have them do to you" -- and we teach this to kids at the earliest age.
But had someone published these words for the first time today, that person would seem like a radical left-wing ideologue. After all, America is a country whose definition of "class warfare" is making the rich pay the same tax rates as everyone else. It is a nation that gets angry at leaders who suggest redistributing some of the wealth.
In the context of that me-first-screw-everyone-else culture, and in the context of drone warfare, rendition, torture, warrantless wiretapping, Wall Street predation and budget cuts to social services, the Golden Rule would be vilified as a Marxist idiom -- and its proponents would, at best, be depicted as coffeehouse communists who refuse to live in the real world. More likely, they'd be attacked as unpatriotically justifying blowback against the United States for our military actions across the world.
8. The South Carolina State Flag
Though you wouldn't know it from the every-presidential-campaign-year brouhaha over the flying of the Confederate stars and bars, South Carolina's state flag happens to be a crescent moon flying over a palm tree. This design is rooted in pure, chest-thumpingly proud Americana, having something to do with the Revolutionary War, the Stamp Act and a military official named William Moultrie. But had it been a new design proposed today, South Carolina would likely be accused by conservatives of trying to create a terrorist cell in the heart of Dixie.
Take a look at South Carolina's flag next to, say, Saudi Arabian iconography and you see that it's a flag that could easily double up as the national symbol of an Islamic country in a Middle Eastern desert. The crescent moon, of course, is an Islamic symbol already featured on many Muslim nations' flags, and the palm tree has long been a symbol of an oasis in a Sahara-like desert.
No doubt, South Carolinians would vehemently deny the charge that its flag suggests any kind of tolerance for Muslims. This is a state that seems totally psyched about its long heritage of bigotry -- a state that continues to fly symbols of slavery on its public grounds. But there's little doubt that outfits like WorldNetDaily would make the same Islamophobic claims about the South Carolina flag that it's made about other public symbols.
7. The Statue of Liberty
As any elementary school trip to New York City teaches, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of warmly welcoming the world's refugees to America. Indeed, Lady Liberty is so synonymous with a pro-immigration stand, she is the home of a famous plaque memorializing the 1883 poem, "The New Colossus," which says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Yet, had this statue been first erected today with the same message, it would generate an orgiastic anti-immigrant protest that would make last year's Park51 pandemonium look tame. With talk of building walls at the border and with mass deportations of undocumented workers on the rise, this age of xenophobia would have zero tolerance for any kind of state-sanctioned sculpture enthusiastically welcoming the world's "wretched refuse" and "the homeless, tempest-tost."
6. Labor Day
Try to imagine an America without Labor Day. Then, try to imagine a modern-day president of the United States signing a bill creating a national holiday to honor unions -- and try to imagine that bill being seen as a necessary election-year compromise.
Most likely, you can't imagine this, even though this is exactly what happened in 1894 when President Grover Cleveland signed such a measure as a peace offering after he deployed federal troops to violently crush the Pullman strikes. You can't imagine this, because a president today wouldn't merely be lambasted for considering such a national holiday -- he'd probably be impeached for treason in a nation that now euphorically celebrates ever more vicious attacks on organized labor and makes political folk heroes out of union-busting governors.
Labor Day today, of course, involves national festivities that (outside of the day's union events) all but avoid mentioning organized labor. If the holiday is celebrated at all, it is celebrated as the last gasp of summer fun -- and nothing more. But the history of the holiday, though buried and willfully ignored, reminds us of just how impossible it would be to legislate such a quintessentially American day in the 21st century.
5. "This Land Is My Land"
Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" is one of those iconic summer camp jingles regularly bellowed out by kids roasting marshmallows around the fire. It teaches children those universal lessons about sharing and inclusion. Which is why it would be excoriated as a subliminal plot against capitalism had it first come out today.
Think about it: Had Guthrie first released his ditty in 2011, rather than in 1945, it would surely become the top target of the arch-conservative private-property-rights movement in America. Guthrie would be promptly accused of being a land "redistributionist" looking to wage a Marxist holy war on the very concept of ownership. The protest signs at his record label's offices -- which would inevitably become bumper stickers -- would be red-white-and-blue-themed placards, reading: "This Land is My Land, NOT Your Land."
4. Bert and Ernie
America has never been a particularly gay-friendly nation, so it's a miracle that Bert and Ernie were ever allowed on television in the first place. But they've been there consistently since 1969.
And yet, had the Children's Television Workshop waited a few years more to introduce the pair to America's kids, they probably would have faced a much more hostile reception. Modern-day America is a nation whose leading right-wing Christian groups now insist that anti-bullying laws promote homosexuality among children. Can you imagine what that same right-wing Christian movement would do to a child-focused puppet show about two adult men cohabiting in the same bedroom? Of course, Bert and Ernie are clearly depicted as sleeping in separate beds (and, let's face it, they're puppets who, as the show's creators themselves have pointed out, are about as asexual as you can get), but that would hardly tamp down the anti-gay hysteria.
3. The Weekend
The epic struggle for a 40-hour work week in America culminated in the late 1930s with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Effectively, this legislatively cemented the contemporary concept known as the American Weekend.
Today, though, such a law probably could never be passed. With corporations dominating our politics so completely, and with the United States now in a race-to-the-bottom competition with slave-labor countries, the notion of a weekend -- had it not already existed -- would likely be cited by lobbyists and by Rupert Murdoch's attack machine as yet another ultraliberal scheme to help lazy layabout workers live a life of undue luxury. Just as the indigent have been criticized as "welfare queens," so too would proponents of two-days-a-week of off-time be hammered as "weekend queens."
2. The First Amendment
The constitutional right to freely express one's opinion and to freely worship one's own religion -- our First Amendment distinguishes our founding Constitution from so many other nations'. But had we not been lucky enough to get it on the books back in the 18th century, it's hard to imagine it being legislated into law today.
During the so-called War on Terror, we've seen citizens arrested and jailed for daring to stage public protests, media-backed mobs try to prevent Islamic cultural centers from being erected, presidential candidates insist that communities can outlaw places of worship, and a president target an American citizen for assassination (without charge) for the "crime" of speech. Likewise, as corporate media conglomerates have risen to prominence, we've seen political messages censored off the publicly owned airwaves.
In this cauldron, had a group of legislators proposed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion where one did not yet exist, those same forces would undoubtedly align those lawmakers, accusing them of making common cause with terrorists.
1. The Holy Bible
Often touted as the catechism for right-wing religious politics, the Holy Bible is the ultimate American bestseller, appearing everywhere in our country. It's in our churches, our bookstores, our libraries and our motel desk drawers. But had the Good Book first been published today, it's hard to imagine it not being the target of a censorship campaign by Fox News, which would bill it as a new and dangerous Communist Manifesto.
You see, when you actually read the Bible (rather than making selective political reference to it as so many often do), you find that it is filled with passages echoing progressive liberation theology, from "the meek shall inherit the earth" to its diatribes against usury. Additionally, one of its central characters seems to have anti-capitalist tendencies. As reported by the Washington Post's Gregory Paul:
Jesus is no free marketeer. Improving one's earthly financial circumstances is not nearly as critical as preparing for the end times that will arrive at any minute. He does offer substantial encouragement for the poor, and warns the wealthy that they are in grave danger of blowing their prospects of reaching paradise, as per the metaphor of a rich person entering heaven being as difficult as a camel passing through the eye of the needle...
To understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all "the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need ... No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had ... There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need."
Now folks, that's outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx -- who likely got the general idea from the gospels.
Paul is exactly right -- and only because the Bible is a few thousand years removed from its first publication run is it allowed to remain immune from the wrath of the Right Wing Hate Machine.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at http://www.davidsirota.com/.
Wednesday, Sep 28, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/david_sirota/2011/09/28/american_icons_conservatives/index.html
Boogeymen are everywhere these days, if you believe the conservatives' Perpetual Paranoia Machine. A few years ago, WorldNetDaily and the American Family Association warned that Barney the Dinosaur was trying to "surreptitiously indoctrinate young children into [homosexuals'] lifestyle." Then, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly warned that "secular progressives" were waging a "War on Christmas" and pressing the "legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will [and] gay marriage." Now, schools are busy banning books for their "filthy" messages, while Fox and Friends warns that SpongeBob is leading a sinister plot to convert kids to Al Gore's eco-crusade.
Welcome to America at the edge of insanity, where even the most innocuous items are now considered diabolical threats to the culture.
Exceptions like "Slaughterhouse Five" aside, the products that generate the most manufactured outrage and hysteria today tend to be new -- puppets, celebrities' vanity tomes, cartoons and other detritus in our cultural waste dump. However, it stands to reason that if the same Perpetual Paranoia Machine applied its standards of manufactured outrage across the board, it would end up targeting many of the most long-standing "American" symbols for elimination.
Pondering which of those symbols is an important thought experiment -- it locates our relative position on the psychological map, telling us just how extreme our sociopathy is at this moment of chaos. So without further ado, here are the top 10 most universally "American" symbols that would be labeled as seditious, unpatriotic anti-American agitprop if they had been first introduced today.
10. The Collected Works of Dr. Seuss
For most of the last half-century, being a kid meant reading and loving the collected works of Theodor Seuss Geisel -- aka Dr. Seuss. Think back to your earliest years, and you are likely to recall Geisel's legendary catalog. His works are as integral to American childhood as fireworks on July 4 -- and thankfully, Geisel published his books before the advent of Fox News. For if this New Deal liberal had published them today, they would likely be burned in televised Tea Party rallies.
For example, 1957's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" -- which criticizes the commercialization of the holiday season -- would be held up by Bill O'Reilly as an example of the vicious War on Christmas. Likewise, 1971's "The Lorax," which is a parable about the downsides of hyper-industrialization and environmental degradation, would be at least as viciously denigrated as Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth." And had 1984's "The Butter Battle Book" been introduced during the "War on Terror," it would have gotten Dr. Seuss put on a no-fly list and labeled a seditious, al-Qaida-loving traitor.
9. The Golden Rule
Treat others as you would want them to treat you. This idea, which undergirds the concept of human rights, is as old as organized religion, and is a proud basis for America's dominant Judeo-Christian traditions. In the Old Testament, scripture says to "love thy neighbor as thyself," while New Testament says "Do to others as you would have them do to you" -- and we teach this to kids at the earliest age.
But had someone published these words for the first time today, that person would seem like a radical left-wing ideologue. After all, America is a country whose definition of "class warfare" is making the rich pay the same tax rates as everyone else. It is a nation that gets angry at leaders who suggest redistributing some of the wealth.
In the context of that me-first-screw-everyone-else culture, and in the context of drone warfare, rendition, torture, warrantless wiretapping, Wall Street predation and budget cuts to social services, the Golden Rule would be vilified as a Marxist idiom -- and its proponents would, at best, be depicted as coffeehouse communists who refuse to live in the real world. More likely, they'd be attacked as unpatriotically justifying blowback against the United States for our military actions across the world.
8. The South Carolina State Flag
Though you wouldn't know it from the every-presidential-campaign-year brouhaha over the flying of the Confederate stars and bars, South Carolina's state flag happens to be a crescent moon flying over a palm tree. This design is rooted in pure, chest-thumpingly proud Americana, having something to do with the Revolutionary War, the Stamp Act and a military official named William Moultrie. But had it been a new design proposed today, South Carolina would likely be accused by conservatives of trying to create a terrorist cell in the heart of Dixie.
Take a look at South Carolina's flag next to, say, Saudi Arabian iconography and you see that it's a flag that could easily double up as the national symbol of an Islamic country in a Middle Eastern desert. The crescent moon, of course, is an Islamic symbol already featured on many Muslim nations' flags, and the palm tree has long been a symbol of an oasis in a Sahara-like desert.
No doubt, South Carolinians would vehemently deny the charge that its flag suggests any kind of tolerance for Muslims. This is a state that seems totally psyched about its long heritage of bigotry -- a state that continues to fly symbols of slavery on its public grounds. But there's little doubt that outfits like WorldNetDaily would make the same Islamophobic claims about the South Carolina flag that it's made about other public symbols.
7. The Statue of Liberty
As any elementary school trip to New York City teaches, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of warmly welcoming the world's refugees to America. Indeed, Lady Liberty is so synonymous with a pro-immigration stand, she is the home of a famous plaque memorializing the 1883 poem, "The New Colossus," which says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Yet, had this statue been first erected today with the same message, it would generate an orgiastic anti-immigrant protest that would make last year's Park51 pandemonium look tame. With talk of building walls at the border and with mass deportations of undocumented workers on the rise, this age of xenophobia would have zero tolerance for any kind of state-sanctioned sculpture enthusiastically welcoming the world's "wretched refuse" and "the homeless, tempest-tost."
6. Labor Day
Try to imagine an America without Labor Day. Then, try to imagine a modern-day president of the United States signing a bill creating a national holiday to honor unions -- and try to imagine that bill being seen as a necessary election-year compromise.
Most likely, you can't imagine this, even though this is exactly what happened in 1894 when President Grover Cleveland signed such a measure as a peace offering after he deployed federal troops to violently crush the Pullman strikes. You can't imagine this, because a president today wouldn't merely be lambasted for considering such a national holiday -- he'd probably be impeached for treason in a nation that now euphorically celebrates ever more vicious attacks on organized labor and makes political folk heroes out of union-busting governors.
Labor Day today, of course, involves national festivities that (outside of the day's union events) all but avoid mentioning organized labor. If the holiday is celebrated at all, it is celebrated as the last gasp of summer fun -- and nothing more. But the history of the holiday, though buried and willfully ignored, reminds us of just how impossible it would be to legislate such a quintessentially American day in the 21st century.
5. "This Land Is My Land"
Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" is one of those iconic summer camp jingles regularly bellowed out by kids roasting marshmallows around the fire. It teaches children those universal lessons about sharing and inclusion. Which is why it would be excoriated as a subliminal plot against capitalism had it first come out today.
Think about it: Had Guthrie first released his ditty in 2011, rather than in 1945, it would surely become the top target of the arch-conservative private-property-rights movement in America. Guthrie would be promptly accused of being a land "redistributionist" looking to wage a Marxist holy war on the very concept of ownership. The protest signs at his record label's offices -- which would inevitably become bumper stickers -- would be red-white-and-blue-themed placards, reading: "This Land is My Land, NOT Your Land."
4. Bert and Ernie
America has never been a particularly gay-friendly nation, so it's a miracle that Bert and Ernie were ever allowed on television in the first place. But they've been there consistently since 1969.
And yet, had the Children's Television Workshop waited a few years more to introduce the pair to America's kids, they probably would have faced a much more hostile reception. Modern-day America is a nation whose leading right-wing Christian groups now insist that anti-bullying laws promote homosexuality among children. Can you imagine what that same right-wing Christian movement would do to a child-focused puppet show about two adult men cohabiting in the same bedroom? Of course, Bert and Ernie are clearly depicted as sleeping in separate beds (and, let's face it, they're puppets who, as the show's creators themselves have pointed out, are about as asexual as you can get), but that would hardly tamp down the anti-gay hysteria.
3. The Weekend
The epic struggle for a 40-hour work week in America culminated in the late 1930s with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Effectively, this legislatively cemented the contemporary concept known as the American Weekend.
Today, though, such a law probably could never be passed. With corporations dominating our politics so completely, and with the United States now in a race-to-the-bottom competition with slave-labor countries, the notion of a weekend -- had it not already existed -- would likely be cited by lobbyists and by Rupert Murdoch's attack machine as yet another ultraliberal scheme to help lazy layabout workers live a life of undue luxury. Just as the indigent have been criticized as "welfare queens," so too would proponents of two-days-a-week of off-time be hammered as "weekend queens."
2. The First Amendment
The constitutional right to freely express one's opinion and to freely worship one's own religion -- our First Amendment distinguishes our founding Constitution from so many other nations'. But had we not been lucky enough to get it on the books back in the 18th century, it's hard to imagine it being legislated into law today.
During the so-called War on Terror, we've seen citizens arrested and jailed for daring to stage public protests, media-backed mobs try to prevent Islamic cultural centers from being erected, presidential candidates insist that communities can outlaw places of worship, and a president target an American citizen for assassination (without charge) for the "crime" of speech. Likewise, as corporate media conglomerates have risen to prominence, we've seen political messages censored off the publicly owned airwaves.
In this cauldron, had a group of legislators proposed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion where one did not yet exist, those same forces would undoubtedly align those lawmakers, accusing them of making common cause with terrorists.
1. The Holy Bible
Often touted as the catechism for right-wing religious politics, the Holy Bible is the ultimate American bestseller, appearing everywhere in our country. It's in our churches, our bookstores, our libraries and our motel desk drawers. But had the Good Book first been published today, it's hard to imagine it not being the target of a censorship campaign by Fox News, which would bill it as a new and dangerous Communist Manifesto.
You see, when you actually read the Bible (rather than making selective political reference to it as so many often do), you find that it is filled with passages echoing progressive liberation theology, from "the meek shall inherit the earth" to its diatribes against usury. Additionally, one of its central characters seems to have anti-capitalist tendencies. As reported by the Washington Post's Gregory Paul:
Jesus is no free marketeer. Improving one's earthly financial circumstances is not nearly as critical as preparing for the end times that will arrive at any minute. He does offer substantial encouragement for the poor, and warns the wealthy that they are in grave danger of blowing their prospects of reaching paradise, as per the metaphor of a rich person entering heaven being as difficult as a camel passing through the eye of the needle...
To understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all "the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need ... No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had ... There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need."
Now folks, that's outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx -- who likely got the general idea from the gospels.
Paul is exactly right -- and only because the Bible is a few thousand years removed from its first publication run is it allowed to remain immune from the wrath of the Right Wing Hate Machine.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at http://www.davidsirota.com/.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Unequal Protection: Jefferson Versus the Corporate Aristocracy
Tuesday 19 April 2011
Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-jefferson-versus-corporate-aristocracy/1303196400
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.
The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1
In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2
The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.
In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3
Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.
Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.
In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:
With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5
The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”
As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”
This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6
Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.
The Three Threats
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:
•Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)
•Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)
•Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)
Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.
Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right
Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.
On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.
On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9
By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10
The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11
All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.
The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy
Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12
Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.
“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:
Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.
Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.
But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.
As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.
Notes:
The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.
James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.
James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout=html&Itemid=27.
A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.
This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=306.
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=998.
Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl223.htm.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
Want a copy of the book? Receive "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' - And How You Can Fight Back" as a thank-you gift with a donation of $35 or more to Truthout.
Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-jefferson-versus-corporate-aristocracy/1303196400
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.
The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1
In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2
The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.
In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3
Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.
Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.
In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:
With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5
The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”
As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”
This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6
Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.
The Three Threats
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:
•Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)
•Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)
•Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)
Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.
Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right
Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.
On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.
On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9
By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10
The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11
All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.
The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy
Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12
Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.
“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:
Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.
Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.
But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.
As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.
Notes:
The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.
James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.
James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout=html&Itemid=27.
A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.
This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=306.
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=998.
Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl223.htm.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
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Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Al Franken: ‘They're coming after the Internet’
MIKE ZAPLER | 3/14/11
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51266.html
AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.
"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”
Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."
Receiving a hero's welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.
He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.
"The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely," Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix's streaming video business could pose to Comcast's cable franchise. "In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service."
Comcast is now embroiled in a dispute with Level 3, a networking company that carries online video feeds for Netflix, over fees Comcast wants to charge to carry the high-bandwidth content.
In response to Franken’s comments, a Comcast spokeswoman said Monday that the dispute with Level 3 isn’t about net neutrality but is “a peering issue.” “Under the FCC order for the Comcast NBCU transaction, Comcast is required to comply with the FCC’s recent open Internet rules even if they are overturned in court. Our customers can access all Netflix content,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications.
Franken, who was an aggressive opponent of the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal, implored SXSW attendees to fight the political influence of the big telecom firms.
"Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don't is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes," he said. "Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. ... The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants."
Franken said talk of a "government takeover" of the Internet by net neutrality critics has as much credibility as claims of "death panels" in the health care legislation and claims that "Obama's a Muslim," calling them a "pantheon of lies."
Franken finished up his half-hour speech by imploring the crowd to preserve net neutrality to avoid a future in which they're "stuck listening to the Black Eyed Peas and reminiscing about the days before you had to sell out to make it.”
“Let's not let the government sell us out,” he said. “Let's fight for net neutrality. Let's keep Austin weird. Let's keep the Internet weird. Let's keep the Internet free."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51266.html
AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.
"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”
Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."
Receiving a hero's welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.
He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.
"The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely," Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix's streaming video business could pose to Comcast's cable franchise. "In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service."
Comcast is now embroiled in a dispute with Level 3, a networking company that carries online video feeds for Netflix, over fees Comcast wants to charge to carry the high-bandwidth content.
In response to Franken’s comments, a Comcast spokeswoman said Monday that the dispute with Level 3 isn’t about net neutrality but is “a peering issue.” “Under the FCC order for the Comcast NBCU transaction, Comcast is required to comply with the FCC’s recent open Internet rules even if they are overturned in court. Our customers can access all Netflix content,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications.
Franken, who was an aggressive opponent of the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal, implored SXSW attendees to fight the political influence of the big telecom firms.
"Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don't is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes," he said. "Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. ... The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants."
Franken said talk of a "government takeover" of the Internet by net neutrality critics has as much credibility as claims of "death panels" in the health care legislation and claims that "Obama's a Muslim," calling them a "pantheon of lies."
Franken finished up his half-hour speech by imploring the crowd to preserve net neutrality to avoid a future in which they're "stuck listening to the Black Eyed Peas and reminiscing about the days before you had to sell out to make it.”
“Let's not let the government sell us out,” he said. “Let's fight for net neutrality. Let's keep Austin weird. Let's keep the Internet weird. Let's keep the Internet free."
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
1st Amendment protects military funeral protesters
From the AP:
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount anti-gay protests outside military funerals, despite the pain they cause grieving families.
The court voted 8-1 in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. The decision upheld an appeals court ruling that threw out a $5 million judgment to the father of a dead Marine who sued church members after they picketed his son's funeral.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the court. Justice Samuel Alito dissented.
Roberts said free speech rights in the First Amendment shield the funeral protesters, noting that they obeyed police directions and were 1,000 feet from the church.
"Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker," Roberts said. "As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."
1st Amendment protects military funeral protesters
MARK SHERMAN
3-2-11
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110302/ap_on_re_us/us_supreme_court_funeral_protests
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount anti-gay protests outside military funerals, despite the pain they cause grieving families.
The court voted 8-1 in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. The decision upheld an appeals court ruling that threw out a $5 million judgment to the father of a dead Marine who sued church members after they picketed his son's funeral.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the court. Justice Samuel Alito dissented.
Roberts said free speech rights in the First Amendment shield the funeral protesters, noting that they obeyed police directions and were 1,000 feet from the church.
"Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker," Roberts said. "As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."
1st Amendment protects military funeral protesters
MARK SHERMAN
3-2-11
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110302/ap_on_re_us/us_supreme_court_funeral_protests
Thursday, October 21, 2010
First Amendment flap: Was Christine O'Donnell touting 'tea party' view?
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2010/1019/First-Amendment-flap-Was-Christine-O-Donnell-touting-tea-party-view
First Amendment flap: Was Christine O'Donnell touting 'tea party' view?
First Amendment and church-state separation were debated Tuesday between Delaware Senate hopefuls Christine O'Donnell and Chris Coons. Her stance is akin to that of some tea party activists.
Peter Grier, Staff writer / October 19, 2010
Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell on Tuesday during a debate with opponent Chris Coons seemed to question whether the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state. So what’s her view of the First Amendment?
The First Amendment is the section of the nation’s founding document that deals with church-state issues, after all. The First Amendment reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."
To Ms. O’Donnell, it may be the second clause there – “prohibiting the free exercise” – that’s most important. That means the government can’t interfere with religion, she emphasized in remarks to National Review Online after Tuesday’s debate at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Del.
To O’Donnell, that means, for instance, that public schools should have the right to teach intelligent design as a theory of how life on earth came to be, along with the theory of evolution.
The First Amendment “gives them the freedom to teach that if that’s what they want,” O’Donnell told National Review Online’s “Battle ‘10” blog.
Mr. Coons, along with many constitutional law scholars, likely would see that example the other way around. They’d say that intelligent design, which holds that the universe is best explained as the creation of some form of larger being, is a religious belief, not a scientific theory. Allowing it to be taught in public schools would be to favor one particular religion over another – something prohibited by the “respecting an establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment.
Confused? Let’s start from the top.
During Tuesday’s debate, O’Donnell and Coons were arguing over the teaching-of-Creationism thing when Coons said that one of the “indispensable principles” of the Founding Fathers was “separation of church of state.”
“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” said O’Donnell in reply, drawing gasps from a crowd composed largely of law students and professors.
A few minutes later, Coons returned to the subject, saying the First Amendment establishes the separation between church and state.
“The First Amendment does?” said O’Donnell. “You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”
After the debate, O’Donnell did not respond to reporters asking her to clarify her remarks. Her campaign manager, Matt Moran, later issued a statement saying that she was not questioning the concept of separation of church and state. “She simply made the point that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution,” Mr. Moran said.
O’Donnell is not the only conservative Republican Senate candidate with "tea party" support who has raised the issue of what the First Amendment means. In Nevada, Sharron Angle has taken a point of view similar to that of her Delaware compatriot.
In an interview earlier this year, Ms. Angle said that Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father credited with originating the phrase “separation of church and state,” has been misunderstood on this matter.
“Thomas Jefferson was actually addressing a church and telling them through his address that there had been a wall of separation put up between the church and the state precisely to protect the church from being taken over by a state religion,” said Angle to Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston. “That’s what they meant by that. They didn’t mean we couldn’t bring our values to the political forum.”
First Amendment flap: Was Christine O'Donnell touting 'tea party' view?
First Amendment and church-state separation were debated Tuesday between Delaware Senate hopefuls Christine O'Donnell and Chris Coons. Her stance is akin to that of some tea party activists.
Peter Grier, Staff writer / October 19, 2010
Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell on Tuesday during a debate with opponent Chris Coons seemed to question whether the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state. So what’s her view of the First Amendment?
The First Amendment is the section of the nation’s founding document that deals with church-state issues, after all. The First Amendment reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."
To Ms. O’Donnell, it may be the second clause there – “prohibiting the free exercise” – that’s most important. That means the government can’t interfere with religion, she emphasized in remarks to National Review Online after Tuesday’s debate at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Del.
To O’Donnell, that means, for instance, that public schools should have the right to teach intelligent design as a theory of how life on earth came to be, along with the theory of evolution.
The First Amendment “gives them the freedom to teach that if that’s what they want,” O’Donnell told National Review Online’s “Battle ‘10” blog.
Mr. Coons, along with many constitutional law scholars, likely would see that example the other way around. They’d say that intelligent design, which holds that the universe is best explained as the creation of some form of larger being, is a religious belief, not a scientific theory. Allowing it to be taught in public schools would be to favor one particular religion over another – something prohibited by the “respecting an establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment.
Confused? Let’s start from the top.
During Tuesday’s debate, O’Donnell and Coons were arguing over the teaching-of-Creationism thing when Coons said that one of the “indispensable principles” of the Founding Fathers was “separation of church of state.”
“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” said O’Donnell in reply, drawing gasps from a crowd composed largely of law students and professors.
A few minutes later, Coons returned to the subject, saying the First Amendment establishes the separation between church and state.
“The First Amendment does?” said O’Donnell. “You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”
After the debate, O’Donnell did not respond to reporters asking her to clarify her remarks. Her campaign manager, Matt Moran, later issued a statement saying that she was not questioning the concept of separation of church and state. “She simply made the point that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution,” Mr. Moran said.
O’Donnell is not the only conservative Republican Senate candidate with "tea party" support who has raised the issue of what the First Amendment means. In Nevada, Sharron Angle has taken a point of view similar to that of her Delaware compatriot.
In an interview earlier this year, Ms. Angle said that Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father credited with originating the phrase “separation of church and state,” has been misunderstood on this matter.
“Thomas Jefferson was actually addressing a church and telling them through his address that there had been a wall of separation put up between the church and the state precisely to protect the church from being taken over by a state religion,” said Angle to Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston. “That’s what they meant by that. They didn’t mean we couldn’t bring our values to the political forum.”
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Supreme Court struggles with free speech question
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2010-10-06-supreme-court-snyder-phelps_N.htm
Supreme Court struggles with free speech question
10-6-10
Joan Biskupic
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices expressed empathy Wednesday for a father whose Marine Corps son was killed in Iraq and whose funeral was protested by fundamentalist pastor Fred Phelps and his anti-gay followers.
"This is a case about exploiting a private family's grief," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.
Yet the scope of the justices' questions during the hour-long session revealed the difficulty of the case and the reality that the court's previous rulings on free speech make it hard for individuals to claim they have been harmed by even horrific statements regarding public issues.
Despite their sympathy for the bereaved father, the justices, including Anthony Kennedy, often a key vote, clearly struggled with how to avoid a decision that encroaches on valid, although hateful, protest messages.
Justice Elena Kagan referred to the demonstrators as "taking advantage of a private funeral to express their views," yet noted they apparently adhered to ordinances about keeping their distance from the church. Ginsburg's questions suggested that state and local laws about where protesters may gather might sufficiently protect the sanctity of funerals.
As the justices heard arguments in the overflowing courtroom, the drama continued outside as Phelps' followers, who regularly travel the country to demonstrate at military funerals, protested in front of the marble-columned building.
Wednesday's case arose after Matthew Snyder, a Marine Corps lance corporal, was killed in Iraq in 2006. Fred Phelps and members of the Westboro Baptist Church — who comb media reports nationwide for news of military funerals — saw that Matthew would be memorialized in Westminster, Md. They protested near the Catholic church with signs that read, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "Fag Troops" and "Pope in Hell."
The Westboro congregation is made up mainly of Phelps' relatives. They preach that God hates gay people and protest what they say is a national tolerance for homosexuality, particularly under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. (Snyder was not gay.)
Westboro members separately posted on the Web a video "epic" about their protests titled The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. The video indicated Albert Snyder and his ex-wife had "taught Matthew to defy his creator" and "raised him for the devil."
Lower court decisions
Snyder sued for damages based on the emotional distress Phelps and his followers caused him and won $5 million in a jury verdict. The trial judge said Snyder was not a "public figure," which diminished the free speech protections for Phelps and his followers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the verdict, saying the question was not the private or public status of Snyder but rather the "type" of speech at issue.
"As utterly distasteful as these signs are," the 4th Circuit said, "they involve matters of public concern, including the issue of homosexuals in the military, the sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church and the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens."
In his appeal Wednesday, Snyder's lawyer, Sean Summers, said, "Mr. Snyder simply wanted to bury his son in a private, dignified manner."
Summers said demonstrators did not go on church grounds and did not violate any local statutes, yet argued that they cannot claim the usual First Amendment protections for free speech because of the "private, targeted nature" of their harsh words against Snyder.
Justice Stephen Breyer drew out from Summers that Snyder had not seen the offensive signs until after the funeral on a television report.
Summers urged the justices not to rely fully on a 1988 case, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, that said public figures and public officials may not recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress unless they prove the statement was deliberately false — a high standard to meet. The 1988 case involved Hustler magazine's parody of Jerry Falwell, a nationally known fundamentalist preacher, that suggested he lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. The court said the parody was not intended to assert the truth.
Summers said Snyder is not a public figure, as Falwell was.
Justice Kagan picked up on the Falwell precedent, noting the court had warned against jurors being allowed to impose liability based on their subjective views of "outrageousness." Summers responded that the context of a funeral should matter and separate it from Falwell.
Lawyer Margie Phelps represented her father and his Westboro followers. She said their protest met all the rules set by prior court decisions.
By turns passionate and pointed in her legal arguments, Phelps repeatedly referred to Westboro as "a little church" intent on preaching its message, which she characterized as, "Nation, hear this little church. If you want them to stop dying, stop sinning."
'Umbrella' of protection
Phelps insisted that any protesters who want to track down military families would be shielded by the First Amendment. She said that only if their activity rose to the level of "stalking, following, importuning" would an individual have a possible claim.
She told the justices that Albert Snyder's public comments about his son's death turned him into a public figure — a point that drew skepticism from many of the justices, including Samuel Alito.
Alito expressed doubts that bereaved family members could be turned into "public figures" by providing obituary information to a newspaper or expressing pride in a son's service.
Phelps stressed the wide "umbrella" of protection for "speech on public issues."
Justice Kennedy said he wanted help "in finding some line" between speech that merits protection and speech that does not.
Wednesday's case is one of the most closely watched of the term. The courtroom was filled, and spectators spilled into special seats set up in the alcoves. Outside, a handful of Fred Phelps' followers carried signs with messages such as "God Hates You."
Groups backing Snyder, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and 48 states, stressed the need to protect the privacy of grieving military families. Free speech groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say Phelps' horrific message is exactly the kind of unpopular, offensive speech the First Amendment was intended to protect.
A ruling in the case of Snyder v. Phelps is likely before next summer when the court recesses.
KEY CASES THAT DEALT WITH ISSUE
The case of Snyder v. Phelps tests First Amendment standards for liability in a dispute between two private parties. Here are some court touchstones involving the free speech of the news media and other private entities when challenged by individuals seeking damages for reputational, emotional or other injuries based on a defamatory report:
New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964: Finding the First Amendment protects the press from libel lawsuits by public officials unless the disputed report was published with "actual malice," which the court defined as a "deliberate falsehood" or one published in "reckless disregard of the truth."
Gertz v. Robert Welch, 1974: Ruling that private individuals do not have to prove such "actual malice" in their libel actions against a publication or other speaker. The court said private citizens lack public officials' ability to rebut allegations about their conduct and can meet a less demanding standard in state law to recover damages.
HustlerMagazine v. Falwell, 1988: Finding that public figures and public officials may not recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress without meeting the malice standard and proving that the statement was deliberately false or made with reckless disregard of its truth. The case involved Hustler magazine's parody of Jerry Falwell, a nationally known fundamentalist preacher, that suggested he lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse; the court said the parody was not intended to assert the truth.
Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 1990: Declaring that a publication's designation of a report as "opinion," rather than actual fact, does not exempt it from a libel action. The case involved a newspaper column that referred to a wrestling coach as a "liar" based on his testimony before a state athletics board.
Supreme Court struggles with free speech question
10-6-10
Joan Biskupic
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices expressed empathy Wednesday for a father whose Marine Corps son was killed in Iraq and whose funeral was protested by fundamentalist pastor Fred Phelps and his anti-gay followers.
"This is a case about exploiting a private family's grief," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.
Yet the scope of the justices' questions during the hour-long session revealed the difficulty of the case and the reality that the court's previous rulings on free speech make it hard for individuals to claim they have been harmed by even horrific statements regarding public issues.
Despite their sympathy for the bereaved father, the justices, including Anthony Kennedy, often a key vote, clearly struggled with how to avoid a decision that encroaches on valid, although hateful, protest messages.
Justice Elena Kagan referred to the demonstrators as "taking advantage of a private funeral to express their views," yet noted they apparently adhered to ordinances about keeping their distance from the church. Ginsburg's questions suggested that state and local laws about where protesters may gather might sufficiently protect the sanctity of funerals.
As the justices heard arguments in the overflowing courtroom, the drama continued outside as Phelps' followers, who regularly travel the country to demonstrate at military funerals, protested in front of the marble-columned building.
Wednesday's case arose after Matthew Snyder, a Marine Corps lance corporal, was killed in Iraq in 2006. Fred Phelps and members of the Westboro Baptist Church — who comb media reports nationwide for news of military funerals — saw that Matthew would be memorialized in Westminster, Md. They protested near the Catholic church with signs that read, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "Fag Troops" and "Pope in Hell."
The Westboro congregation is made up mainly of Phelps' relatives. They preach that God hates gay people and protest what they say is a national tolerance for homosexuality, particularly under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. (Snyder was not gay.)
Westboro members separately posted on the Web a video "epic" about their protests titled The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. The video indicated Albert Snyder and his ex-wife had "taught Matthew to defy his creator" and "raised him for the devil."
Lower court decisions
Snyder sued for damages based on the emotional distress Phelps and his followers caused him and won $5 million in a jury verdict. The trial judge said Snyder was not a "public figure," which diminished the free speech protections for Phelps and his followers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the verdict, saying the question was not the private or public status of Snyder but rather the "type" of speech at issue.
"As utterly distasteful as these signs are," the 4th Circuit said, "they involve matters of public concern, including the issue of homosexuals in the military, the sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church and the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens."
In his appeal Wednesday, Snyder's lawyer, Sean Summers, said, "Mr. Snyder simply wanted to bury his son in a private, dignified manner."
Summers said demonstrators did not go on church grounds and did not violate any local statutes, yet argued that they cannot claim the usual First Amendment protections for free speech because of the "private, targeted nature" of their harsh words against Snyder.
Justice Stephen Breyer drew out from Summers that Snyder had not seen the offensive signs until after the funeral on a television report.
Summers urged the justices not to rely fully on a 1988 case, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, that said public figures and public officials may not recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress unless they prove the statement was deliberately false — a high standard to meet. The 1988 case involved Hustler magazine's parody of Jerry Falwell, a nationally known fundamentalist preacher, that suggested he lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. The court said the parody was not intended to assert the truth.
Summers said Snyder is not a public figure, as Falwell was.
Justice Kagan picked up on the Falwell precedent, noting the court had warned against jurors being allowed to impose liability based on their subjective views of "outrageousness." Summers responded that the context of a funeral should matter and separate it from Falwell.
Lawyer Margie Phelps represented her father and his Westboro followers. She said their protest met all the rules set by prior court decisions.
By turns passionate and pointed in her legal arguments, Phelps repeatedly referred to Westboro as "a little church" intent on preaching its message, which she characterized as, "Nation, hear this little church. If you want them to stop dying, stop sinning."
'Umbrella' of protection
Phelps insisted that any protesters who want to track down military families would be shielded by the First Amendment. She said that only if their activity rose to the level of "stalking, following, importuning" would an individual have a possible claim.
She told the justices that Albert Snyder's public comments about his son's death turned him into a public figure — a point that drew skepticism from many of the justices, including Samuel Alito.
Alito expressed doubts that bereaved family members could be turned into "public figures" by providing obituary information to a newspaper or expressing pride in a son's service.
Phelps stressed the wide "umbrella" of protection for "speech on public issues."
Justice Kennedy said he wanted help "in finding some line" between speech that merits protection and speech that does not.
Wednesday's case is one of the most closely watched of the term. The courtroom was filled, and spectators spilled into special seats set up in the alcoves. Outside, a handful of Fred Phelps' followers carried signs with messages such as "God Hates You."
Groups backing Snyder, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and 48 states, stressed the need to protect the privacy of grieving military families. Free speech groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say Phelps' horrific message is exactly the kind of unpopular, offensive speech the First Amendment was intended to protect.
A ruling in the case of Snyder v. Phelps is likely before next summer when the court recesses.
KEY CASES THAT DEALT WITH ISSUE
The case of Snyder v. Phelps tests First Amendment standards for liability in a dispute between two private parties. Here are some court touchstones involving the free speech of the news media and other private entities when challenged by individuals seeking damages for reputational, emotional or other injuries based on a defamatory report:
New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964: Finding the First Amendment protects the press from libel lawsuits by public officials unless the disputed report was published with "actual malice," which the court defined as a "deliberate falsehood" or one published in "reckless disregard of the truth."
Gertz v. Robert Welch, 1974: Ruling that private individuals do not have to prove such "actual malice" in their libel actions against a publication or other speaker. The court said private citizens lack public officials' ability to rebut allegations about their conduct and can meet a less demanding standard in state law to recover damages.
HustlerMagazine v. Falwell, 1988: Finding that public figures and public officials may not recover damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress without meeting the malice standard and proving that the statement was deliberately false or made with reckless disregard of its truth. The case involved Hustler magazine's parody of Jerry Falwell, a nationally known fundamentalist preacher, that suggested he lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse; the court said the parody was not intended to assert the truth.
Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 1990: Declaring that a publication's designation of a report as "opinion," rather than actual fact, does not exempt it from a libel action. The case involved a newspaper column that referred to a wrestling coach as a "liar" based on his testimony before a state athletics board.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Principled and Pure Court?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/a-principled-and-pure-fir_b_439082.html
Lawrence Lessig
Co-founder of Change Congress, founding board member, Creative Commons
January 27, 2010
The Principled and Pure Court?: A Reply to Glenn Greenwald
Salon's Glenn Greenwald is just about the most persistent and effective critic of money in politics today. He is among the least starry-eyed reporters studying Congress. But his essay defending the Court's judgment in Citizens United would have been better had he sprinkled a bit of the skepticism he has for Congress on the words penned by the Court. For the story of the First Amendment in the Supreme Court's hands is not quite as pretty as Greenwald would tell it.
The First Amendment, Greenwald tells us, is an absolute. It applies not to "persons"; it "simply bans Congress from making any laws abridging freedom of speech." This law plainly banned these entities -- whether persons or not -- from a freedom of speech. Ergo, this law is, and should have been found to be, unconstitutional.
Sounds good. Sounds principled. Sounds refreshingly different from anything else that happens within the reach of DC (i.e., good and principled).
But apply that same test to the following (not so hypothetical) free speech case: A bunch of doctors practice in family planning clinics. The government issues a rule that says certain doctors in certain clinics are not allowed to discuss abortion as a method of family planning. They can talk about abstinence. Or condoms. But they are not allowed to advise their pregnant patients that they have the liberty to abort their fetus.
Sounds like -- under the First Amendment Greenwald describes -- a simple case. Whether or not doctors are persons (and at least some are just mere mortals), they should have the freedom to speak. Advising someone about a legal medical procedure is among the core freedoms one would expect a Free Speech Clause to serve.
Yet in 1991, in an opinion by Chief Justice Robert's former boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the case of Rust v. Sullivan, the Court found no First Amendment problem at all with the government's restriction on doctors' speech. Indeed, it wasn't even a difficult case according to the Court ("no question but that the statutory prohibition contained in § 1008 is constitutional.")
Why? How? Well the doctors at issue worked in family planning clinics that had received at least some of their funds from the government. And in exchange for that benefit, the government was free to gag the doctors however it wished. The doctors were free of course to work in a family planning clinic not funded at all by the government (for of course, there are plenty of those) (that's a joke). But so long as the doctors take this benefit from the government, they've got to live by the rules of the government, at least so long as those rules serve some legitimate state end.
So how is this case related to Citizens United? For the law wasn't applying exclusively to entities that had received something from the government. It was applying to all corporations.
But of course, corporations do receive a gift from the government. The government limits the legal liability of investors in that corporation in exchange for their risking their capital to spur innovation and growth. That benefit is significant. And the First Amendment question is whether in granting that benefit, the state would be free to limit the political advocacy that corporations engage in.
It seems astonishing to imagine the state couldn't. State law has historically had wide freedoms to condition the corporate form as they wished. This fact has led some, including my colleague, Sina Kian, to argue that Citizens United is less than people think. That the decision notwithstanding, states could build this limit into their corporate charters. Or that maybe even Congress could induce states to do the same. The question then would be the reason the government had for demanding the entity give up this liberty in exchange for the corporate form. Traditionally, the burden of that question is the easiest for the government to meet -- is there any state interest at all? In Rust, the interest was that that government didn't like abortion.
But I agree with Greenwald that there is something unseemly in the idea that the government could restrict the speech of a class because it doesn't like the speech of that class.
Yet this is the most confused part of the commentary (and reaction) of most to this kind of regulation. If the government's reason for silencing corporations is that they don't like what corporations would say -- if it thinks, for example, that it would be too Republican, or too pro-business -- then that's got to be a terrible reason for the regulation, and we all ought to support a decision that strikes a law so inspired.
That, however, is not the only, or the best, justification behind the regulations at issue in Citizens United. Those rules not about suppressing a point of view. They're about avoiding a kind of dependency that undermines trust in our government. The concentrated, and tacitly, coordinated efforts by large and powerful economic entities -- made large and powerful in part because of the gift of immunity given by the state -- could certainly help lead many to believe "money is buying results" in Congress. Avoiding that belief -- just like avoiding the belief that money bought results on the Supreme Court -- has got to be an important and valid interest of the state.
If the Court really means to say that entities that fund or create other entities can't limit the power of those entities to speak -- so the government can't stop doctors from talking about abortion, or the IRS can't stop non-profits from talking about politics -- then we really have crossed a Bladerunner line. For that conclusion really does mean that these entities were "created with certain unalienable rights," even though they were created by a pretty pathetic creator -- the state.
My point is not that the state's power to condition should be unlimited. The point instead is that it's not so simple, or absolute, as Greenwald would have it. And given the true complexity of these evolving and complicated doctrines, it is certainly fair to be critical in the extreme of this decision by the Court, favoring speech that most believe it naturally likes (unlike abortion-speak), in a decision that ignores the judgment of Congress about the conditions under which the integrity of that body, or any election, proceeds.
If they actually carry through with the implication it seems to suggest, then history will certainly judge this as an outlier in the Court's portfolio. Not, Keith Olbermann notwithstanding, on the level of Dred Scott. But certainly in the house of Lochner.
Lawrence Lessig
Co-founder of Change Congress, founding board member, Creative Commons
January 27, 2010
The Principled and Pure Court?: A Reply to Glenn Greenwald
Salon's Glenn Greenwald is just about the most persistent and effective critic of money in politics today. He is among the least starry-eyed reporters studying Congress. But his essay defending the Court's judgment in Citizens United would have been better had he sprinkled a bit of the skepticism he has for Congress on the words penned by the Court. For the story of the First Amendment in the Supreme Court's hands is not quite as pretty as Greenwald would tell it.
The First Amendment, Greenwald tells us, is an absolute. It applies not to "persons"; it "simply bans Congress from making any laws abridging freedom of speech." This law plainly banned these entities -- whether persons or not -- from a freedom of speech. Ergo, this law is, and should have been found to be, unconstitutional.
Sounds good. Sounds principled. Sounds refreshingly different from anything else that happens within the reach of DC (i.e., good and principled).
But apply that same test to the following (not so hypothetical) free speech case: A bunch of doctors practice in family planning clinics. The government issues a rule that says certain doctors in certain clinics are not allowed to discuss abortion as a method of family planning. They can talk about abstinence. Or condoms. But they are not allowed to advise their pregnant patients that they have the liberty to abort their fetus.
Sounds like -- under the First Amendment Greenwald describes -- a simple case. Whether or not doctors are persons (and at least some are just mere mortals), they should have the freedom to speak. Advising someone about a legal medical procedure is among the core freedoms one would expect a Free Speech Clause to serve.
Yet in 1991, in an opinion by Chief Justice Robert's former boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the case of Rust v. Sullivan, the Court found no First Amendment problem at all with the government's restriction on doctors' speech. Indeed, it wasn't even a difficult case according to the Court ("no question but that the statutory prohibition contained in § 1008 is constitutional.")
Why? How? Well the doctors at issue worked in family planning clinics that had received at least some of their funds from the government. And in exchange for that benefit, the government was free to gag the doctors however it wished. The doctors were free of course to work in a family planning clinic not funded at all by the government (for of course, there are plenty of those) (that's a joke). But so long as the doctors take this benefit from the government, they've got to live by the rules of the government, at least so long as those rules serve some legitimate state end.
So how is this case related to Citizens United? For the law wasn't applying exclusively to entities that had received something from the government. It was applying to all corporations.
But of course, corporations do receive a gift from the government. The government limits the legal liability of investors in that corporation in exchange for their risking their capital to spur innovation and growth. That benefit is significant. And the First Amendment question is whether in granting that benefit, the state would be free to limit the political advocacy that corporations engage in.
It seems astonishing to imagine the state couldn't. State law has historically had wide freedoms to condition the corporate form as they wished. This fact has led some, including my colleague, Sina Kian, to argue that Citizens United is less than people think. That the decision notwithstanding, states could build this limit into their corporate charters. Or that maybe even Congress could induce states to do the same. The question then would be the reason the government had for demanding the entity give up this liberty in exchange for the corporate form. Traditionally, the burden of that question is the easiest for the government to meet -- is there any state interest at all? In Rust, the interest was that that government didn't like abortion.
But I agree with Greenwald that there is something unseemly in the idea that the government could restrict the speech of a class because it doesn't like the speech of that class.
Yet this is the most confused part of the commentary (and reaction) of most to this kind of regulation. If the government's reason for silencing corporations is that they don't like what corporations would say -- if it thinks, for example, that it would be too Republican, or too pro-business -- then that's got to be a terrible reason for the regulation, and we all ought to support a decision that strikes a law so inspired.
That, however, is not the only, or the best, justification behind the regulations at issue in Citizens United. Those rules not about suppressing a point of view. They're about avoiding a kind of dependency that undermines trust in our government. The concentrated, and tacitly, coordinated efforts by large and powerful economic entities -- made large and powerful in part because of the gift of immunity given by the state -- could certainly help lead many to believe "money is buying results" in Congress. Avoiding that belief -- just like avoiding the belief that money bought results on the Supreme Court -- has got to be an important and valid interest of the state.
If the Court really means to say that entities that fund or create other entities can't limit the power of those entities to speak -- so the government can't stop doctors from talking about abortion, or the IRS can't stop non-profits from talking about politics -- then we really have crossed a Bladerunner line. For that conclusion really does mean that these entities were "created with certain unalienable rights," even though they were created by a pretty pathetic creator -- the state.
My point is not that the state's power to condition should be unlimited. The point instead is that it's not so simple, or absolute, as Greenwald would have it. And given the true complexity of these evolving and complicated doctrines, it is certainly fair to be critical in the extreme of this decision by the Court, favoring speech that most believe it naturally likes (unlike abortion-speak), in a decision that ignores the judgment of Congress about the conditions under which the integrity of that body, or any election, proceeds.
If they actually carry through with the implication it seems to suggest, then history will certainly judge this as an outlier in the Court's portfolio. Not, Keith Olbermann notwithstanding, on the level of Dred Scott. But certainly in the house of Lochner.
What the Supreme Court got right
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/22/citizens_united/index.html
Friday, Jan 22, 2010
What the Supreme Court got right
By Glenn Greenwald
The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for "electioneering" purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I'm deeply ambivalent about the court's ruling. There are several dubious aspects of the majority's opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising "judicial restraint" through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints.
I want to begin by examining several of the most common reactions among critics of this decision, none of which seems persuasive to me. Critics emphasize that the Court's ruling will produce very bad outcomes: primarily that it will severely exacerbate the problem of corporate influence in our democracy. Even if this is true, it's not really relevant. Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn't. In general, a law that violates the Constitution can't be upheld because the law produces good outcomes (or because its invalidation would produce bad outcomes).
One of the central lessons of the Bush era should have been that illegal or unconstitutional actions -- warrantless eavesdropping, torture, unilateral Presidential programs -- can't be justified because of the allegedly good results they produce (Protecting us from the Terrorists). The "rule of law" means we faithfully apply it in ways that produce outcomes we like and outcomes we don't like. Denouncing court rulings because they invalidate laws one likes is what the Right often does (see how they reflexively and immediately protest every state court ruling invaliding opposite-sex-only marriage laws without bothering to even read about the binding precedents), and that behavior is irrational in the extreme. If the Constitution or other laws bar the government action in question, then that's the end of the inquiry; whether those actions produce good results is really not germane. Thus, those who want to object to the Court's ruling need to do so on First Amendment grounds. Except to the extent that some constitutional rights give way to so-called "compelling state interests," that the Court's decision will produce "bad results" is not really an argument.
More specifically, it's often the case that banning certain kinds of speech would produce good outcomes, and conversely, allowing certain kinds of speech produces bad outcomes (that's true for, say, White Supremacist or neo-Nazi speech, or speech advocating violence against civilians). The First Amendment is not and never has been outcome-dependent; the Government is barred from restricting speech -- especially political speech -- no matter the good results that would result from the restrictions. That's the price we pay for having the liberty of free speech. And even on a utilitarian level, the long-term dangers of allowing the Government to restrict political speech invariably outweigh whatever benefits accrue from such restrictions.
I'm also quite skeptical of the apocalyptic claims about how this decision will radically transform and subvert our democracy by empowering corporate control over the political process. My skepticism is due to one principal fact: I really don't see how things can get much worse in that regard. The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin: "banks own" the Congress). Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions -- their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold -- and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can't imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There's not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday's issuance of this ruling?
I'm even more unpersuaded by the argument -- seen in today's New York Times Editorial -- that this decision will "ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections." What evidence is there for that? Over the past five years, corporate money has poured far more into the coffers of the Democratic Party than the GOP -- and far more into Obama's campaign coffers than McCain's (especially from Wall Street). If anything, unlimited corporate money will be far more likely to strengthen incumbents than either of the two parties (and unlimited union spending, though dwarfed by corporate spending, will obviously benefit Democrats more). Besides, if it were the case that this law restricts the ability of Republicans far more than Democrats to raise money in election cycles, doesn't that rather obviously intensify the First Amendment concerns?
Then there's the always intellectually confused discussions of stare decisis and precedent. It's absolutely true that the Citizens United majority cavalierly tossed aside decades of judicial opinions upholding the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions. But what does that prove? Several of the liberals' most cherished Supreme Court decisions did the same (Brown v. Bd. of Education rejected Plessy v. Ferguson; Lawrence v. Texas overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, etc.). Beyond that, the central principle which critics of this ruling find most offensive -- that corporations possess "personhood" and are thus entitled to Constitutional (and First Amendment) rights -- has also been affirmed by decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence; tossing that principle aside would require deviating from stare decisis every bit as much as the majority did here. If a settled proposition of law is sufficiently repugnant to the Constitution, then the Court is not only permitted, but required, to uproot it.
Ultimately, I think the free speech rights burdened by campaign finance laws are often significantly under-stated. I understand and sympathize with the argument that corporations are creatures of the state and should not enjoy the same rights as individuals. And one can't help but note the vile irony that Muslim "War on Terror" detainees have been essentially declared by some courts not to be "persons" under the Constitution, whereas corporations are.
But the speech restrictions struck down by Citizens United do not only apply to Exxon and Halliburton; they also apply to non-profit advocacy corporations, such as, say, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions, which are genuinely burdened in their ability to express their views by these laws. I tend to take a more absolutist view of the First Amendment than many people, but laws which prohibit organized groups of people -- which is what corporations are -- from expressing political views goes right to the heart of free speech guarantees no matter how the First Amendment is understood. Does anyone doubt that the facts that gave rise to this case -- namely, the government's banning the release of a critical film about Hillary Clinton by Citizens United -- is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to avoid? And does anyone doubt that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting the speech of organizations composed of like-minded citizens who band together in corporate form to work for a particular cause?
What is overlooked in virtually every discussion I've seen over the last 24 hours is how ineffective these campaign finance laws are. Large corporations employ teams of lawyers and lobbyists and easily circumvent these restrictions; wealthy individuals and well-funded unincorporated organizations are unlimited in what they can spend. It's the smaller non-profit advocacy groups whose political speech tends to be most burdened by these laws. Campaign finance laws are a bit like gun control statutes: actual criminals continue to possess large stockpiles of weapons, but law-abiding citizens are disarmed.
In sum, there's no question that the stranglehold corporations exert on our democracy is one of the most serious and pressing threats we face. I've written volumes on that very problem. Although I doubt it, this decision may very well worsen that problem in some substantial way. But on both pragmatic and Constitutional grounds, the issue of corporate influence -- like virtually all issues -- is not really solvable by restrictions on political speech. Isn't it far more promising to have the Government try to equalize the playing field through serious public financing of campaigns than to try to slink around the First Amendment -- or, worse, amend it -- in order to limit political advocacy?
There are few features that are still extremely healthy and vibrant in the American political system; the First Amendment is one of them, and the last thing we should want is Congress trying to limit it through amendments or otherwise circumvent it in the name of elevating our elections. Meaningful public financing of campaigns would far more effectively achieve the ostensible objectives of campaign finance restrictions without any of the dangers or constitutional infirmities. If yesterday's decision provides the impetus for that to be done, then it will have, on balance, achieved a very positive outcome, even though that was plainly not its intent.
Friday, Jan 22, 2010
What the Supreme Court got right
By Glenn Greenwald
The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for "electioneering" purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I'm deeply ambivalent about the court's ruling. There are several dubious aspects of the majority's opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising "judicial restraint" through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints.
I want to begin by examining several of the most common reactions among critics of this decision, none of which seems persuasive to me. Critics emphasize that the Court's ruling will produce very bad outcomes: primarily that it will severely exacerbate the problem of corporate influence in our democracy. Even if this is true, it's not really relevant. Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn't. In general, a law that violates the Constitution can't be upheld because the law produces good outcomes (or because its invalidation would produce bad outcomes).
One of the central lessons of the Bush era should have been that illegal or unconstitutional actions -- warrantless eavesdropping, torture, unilateral Presidential programs -- can't be justified because of the allegedly good results they produce (Protecting us from the Terrorists). The "rule of law" means we faithfully apply it in ways that produce outcomes we like and outcomes we don't like. Denouncing court rulings because they invalidate laws one likes is what the Right often does (see how they reflexively and immediately protest every state court ruling invaliding opposite-sex-only marriage laws without bothering to even read about the binding precedents), and that behavior is irrational in the extreme. If the Constitution or other laws bar the government action in question, then that's the end of the inquiry; whether those actions produce good results is really not germane. Thus, those who want to object to the Court's ruling need to do so on First Amendment grounds. Except to the extent that some constitutional rights give way to so-called "compelling state interests," that the Court's decision will produce "bad results" is not really an argument.
More specifically, it's often the case that banning certain kinds of speech would produce good outcomes, and conversely, allowing certain kinds of speech produces bad outcomes (that's true for, say, White Supremacist or neo-Nazi speech, or speech advocating violence against civilians). The First Amendment is not and never has been outcome-dependent; the Government is barred from restricting speech -- especially political speech -- no matter the good results that would result from the restrictions. That's the price we pay for having the liberty of free speech. And even on a utilitarian level, the long-term dangers of allowing the Government to restrict political speech invariably outweigh whatever benefits accrue from such restrictions.
I'm also quite skeptical of the apocalyptic claims about how this decision will radically transform and subvert our democracy by empowering corporate control over the political process. My skepticism is due to one principal fact: I really don't see how things can get much worse in that regard. The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin: "banks own" the Congress). Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions -- their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold -- and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can't imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. All of the hand-wringing sounds to me like someone expressing serious worry that a new law in North Korea will make the country more tyrannical. There's not much room for our corporatist political system to get more corporatist. Does anyone believe that the ability of corporations to influence our political process was meaningfully limited before yesterday's issuance of this ruling?
I'm even more unpersuaded by the argument -- seen in today's New York Times Editorial -- that this decision will "ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections." What evidence is there for that? Over the past five years, corporate money has poured far more into the coffers of the Democratic Party than the GOP -- and far more into Obama's campaign coffers than McCain's (especially from Wall Street). If anything, unlimited corporate money will be far more likely to strengthen incumbents than either of the two parties (and unlimited union spending, though dwarfed by corporate spending, will obviously benefit Democrats more). Besides, if it were the case that this law restricts the ability of Republicans far more than Democrats to raise money in election cycles, doesn't that rather obviously intensify the First Amendment concerns?
Then there's the always intellectually confused discussions of stare decisis and precedent. It's absolutely true that the Citizens United majority cavalierly tossed aside decades of judicial opinions upholding the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions. But what does that prove? Several of the liberals' most cherished Supreme Court decisions did the same (Brown v. Bd. of Education rejected Plessy v. Ferguson; Lawrence v. Texas overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, etc.). Beyond that, the central principle which critics of this ruling find most offensive -- that corporations possess "personhood" and are thus entitled to Constitutional (and First Amendment) rights -- has also been affirmed by decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence; tossing that principle aside would require deviating from stare decisis every bit as much as the majority did here. If a settled proposition of law is sufficiently repugnant to the Constitution, then the Court is not only permitted, but required, to uproot it.
Ultimately, I think the free speech rights burdened by campaign finance laws are often significantly under-stated. I understand and sympathize with the argument that corporations are creatures of the state and should not enjoy the same rights as individuals. And one can't help but note the vile irony that Muslim "War on Terror" detainees have been essentially declared by some courts not to be "persons" under the Constitution, whereas corporations are.
But the speech restrictions struck down by Citizens United do not only apply to Exxon and Halliburton; they also apply to non-profit advocacy corporations, such as, say, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions, which are genuinely burdened in their ability to express their views by these laws. I tend to take a more absolutist view of the First Amendment than many people, but laws which prohibit organized groups of people -- which is what corporations are -- from expressing political views goes right to the heart of free speech guarantees no matter how the First Amendment is understood. Does anyone doubt that the facts that gave rise to this case -- namely, the government's banning the release of a critical film about Hillary Clinton by Citizens United -- is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to avoid? And does anyone doubt that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting the speech of organizations composed of like-minded citizens who band together in corporate form to work for a particular cause?
What is overlooked in virtually every discussion I've seen over the last 24 hours is how ineffective these campaign finance laws are. Large corporations employ teams of lawyers and lobbyists and easily circumvent these restrictions; wealthy individuals and well-funded unincorporated organizations are unlimited in what they can spend. It's the smaller non-profit advocacy groups whose political speech tends to be most burdened by these laws. Campaign finance laws are a bit like gun control statutes: actual criminals continue to possess large stockpiles of weapons, but law-abiding citizens are disarmed.
In sum, there's no question that the stranglehold corporations exert on our democracy is one of the most serious and pressing threats we face. I've written volumes on that very problem. Although I doubt it, this decision may very well worsen that problem in some substantial way. But on both pragmatic and Constitutional grounds, the issue of corporate influence -- like virtually all issues -- is not really solvable by restrictions on political speech. Isn't it far more promising to have the Government try to equalize the playing field through serious public financing of campaigns than to try to slink around the First Amendment -- or, worse, amend it -- in order to limit political advocacy?
There are few features that are still extremely healthy and vibrant in the American political system; the First Amendment is one of them, and the last thing we should want is Congress trying to limit it through amendments or otherwise circumvent it in the name of elevating our elections. Meaningful public financing of campaigns would far more effectively achieve the ostensible objectives of campaign finance restrictions without any of the dangers or constitutional infirmities. If yesterday's decision provides the impetus for that to be done, then it will have, on balance, achieved a very positive outcome, even though that was plainly not its intent.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
High court ruling a game-changer
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/21/supreme.court.analysis/
Analysis: High court ruling a game-changer for campaign spending
Bill Mears, CNN Supreme Court Producer
January 21, 2010
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban political spending by certain groups.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Supreme Court makes a landmark ruling Thursday on campaign finance
Ruling changes the way independent spending on elections is conducted
The FEC will now be tasked to craft new rules to ease limits on corporate spending
Washington (CNN) -- Campaign 2010 is in full swing: Massachusetts elected its new U.S. senator this week, and the first congressional primaries are just days away.
Now the first task for every federal candidate in this midterm election year will be to read the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday on campaign finance for a reality-check road map to their political future. The 183-page decision promises to completely change the way independent spending on elections is conducted.
In Citizens v. Federal Election Commission, the justices in a large sense have erased the subtle but important distinction between corporate donors, which are subject to regulation, and individual donors, who largely are not.
"It's about money," said Lawrence Noble, former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission and a national expert on campaign spending. "It's about free speech and it's about the ability of corporations to influence elections through the use of their treasury money."
The FEC will now be tasked with taking this high court opinion and crafting new rules to ease limits on corporate spending. The big winners will be businesses, unions and advocacy groups seeking to influence the elections, mainly through what are called "issue ads." Other beneficiaries will be television networks like CNN and radio stations that regularly air these campaign commercials.
The potential to upset a long-standing, if shaky balance over regulating political speech created a frenzy of cockeyed alliances among groups normally at odds, and spawned nearly four dozen legal briefs in connection with the case the court ruled on Thursday.
It being a case about politics, it was no surprise mini-campaigns were launched on both sides.
Competing reaction to the ruling from groups and individuals suggest a sea change in the business of federal elections.
"It's the Super Bowl of bad decisions," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar, himself a former Pennsylvania congressman.
"For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process," said Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers. Our democracy depends upon free speech, not just for some but for all."
Other interested parties include wealthy, politically active donors -- such as liberal financier George Soros and moderate businessman and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who have spent vast sums of their own money to back political causes or fund their own campaigns for office.
The case stems a documentary on Hillary Clinton. Produced last year by the conservative Citizens United, "Hillary: The Movie" was a scorching attack on her.
At the time of the 90-minute movie's premiere, Clinton was locked in a tough primary fight with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but her candidacy failed before the feature was widely shown, or had any real impact on the race. A federal court blocked Citizens United from airing ads, as well as airing the documentary on cable television's video-on-demand.
The film later appeared in several theaters, and was released on DVD and the Internet -- outlets that are not subject to federal regulation.
The Supreme Court initially heard the case in March 2008, looking at the conflict between, on one hand, Congress' expressed desire to control the power of well-financed private groups to spread their political messages and, on the other, concerns over the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The court apparently could not reach a conclusion on whether independent groups are subject to the same federal oversight as political committees.
"I've seen this movie," Justice Stephen Breyer wryly noted at the time. "It's not a musical comedy."
Re-arguments were ordered, and the scope of the case was expanded significantly, into whether important precedents banning direct corporate spending in campaigns should be re-examined.
One of those precedents was in 1990, when the high court supported state laws preventing corporations from using what the majority called "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth" to support candidates, largely through their own advocacy ads. The ruling required the money to come only from a group's closely regulated political action committee, not directly from what are called "general treasury" funds.
The idea was to ensure corporate money was not spent on election-related issues that union members, shareholders, or employees might oppose. PACs are funded only through individual donations.
And in 2003, the justices upheld the landmark Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, widely known as the McCain-Feingold law, which took effect the day after the November 2002 elections.
Among its many provisions were a ban on "soft money," the unlimited and unregulated contributions to national political parties; a ban in the 60 days before an election on advocacy ads -- those criticizing or supporting a candidate's stand on an issue; and contribution limits and donor disclosure requirements.
Supporters of the law say it was designed to prevent corruption in politics. Opponents said it would criminalize free speech and association.
Since its enactment, the high court has written 22 opinions trying to interpret the law. The Citizens United case was the first in recent years to confront the free speech argument head on.
In its most narrow scenario, the five-member conservative majority handed the "Hillary" moviemakers a partial defeat, saying they are subject to donor disclosure requirements. But that was only a subplot in a far broader free-speech opinion that will benefit other outside groups with a political message they are itching to promote.
"Today's decision is a minor revolution in campaign finance law," said Thomas Goldstein, founder of ScotusBlog and a prominent appellate attorney. "The court's decision overturns the previously settled distinction between corporate and individual expenditures in American elections. It presumably applies equally to state and local elections, given that the court [now] recognizes a First Amendment right."
The "Hillary" movie case could launch a range of as-yet-unanswered questions about political speech and government regulation.
Because the filmmakers argued their work was information, not political advocacy, should the government place itself as the ultimate arbiter of what is "news"? Some media groups say no. " 'Hillary: The Movie' does not differ, in any relevant respect, from the critiques of presidential candidates produced throughout the entirety of American history," said the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a brief to the high court.
And can distinctions be drawn over regulating 30-second or one-minute "attack ads," and a 90-minute documentary that could be viewed as an ideological "informercial"? Those distinctions could be future fodder for the courts.
At is core, McCain-Feingold clearly will continue to have an impact on every candidate, and everyone that raises or spends campaign dollars. But the law's full power has been blunted significantly.
Now the high court has mediated that tricky line, favoring the right of expression of corporations and individuals over congressional efforts to protect against electoral corruption.
Coming soon to a television near you: campaign ads, ads, ads.
Analysis: High court ruling a game-changer for campaign spending
Bill Mears, CNN Supreme Court Producer
January 21, 2010
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban political spending by certain groups.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Supreme Court makes a landmark ruling Thursday on campaign finance
Ruling changes the way independent spending on elections is conducted
The FEC will now be tasked to craft new rules to ease limits on corporate spending
Washington (CNN) -- Campaign 2010 is in full swing: Massachusetts elected its new U.S. senator this week, and the first congressional primaries are just days away.
Now the first task for every federal candidate in this midterm election year will be to read the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday on campaign finance for a reality-check road map to their political future. The 183-page decision promises to completely change the way independent spending on elections is conducted.
In Citizens v. Federal Election Commission, the justices in a large sense have erased the subtle but important distinction between corporate donors, which are subject to regulation, and individual donors, who largely are not.
"It's about money," said Lawrence Noble, former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission and a national expert on campaign spending. "It's about free speech and it's about the ability of corporations to influence elections through the use of their treasury money."
The FEC will now be tasked with taking this high court opinion and crafting new rules to ease limits on corporate spending. The big winners will be businesses, unions and advocacy groups seeking to influence the elections, mainly through what are called "issue ads." Other beneficiaries will be television networks like CNN and radio stations that regularly air these campaign commercials.
The potential to upset a long-standing, if shaky balance over regulating political speech created a frenzy of cockeyed alliances among groups normally at odds, and spawned nearly four dozen legal briefs in connection with the case the court ruled on Thursday.
It being a case about politics, it was no surprise mini-campaigns were launched on both sides.
Competing reaction to the ruling from groups and individuals suggest a sea change in the business of federal elections.
"It's the Super Bowl of bad decisions," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar, himself a former Pennsylvania congressman.
"For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process," said Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers. Our democracy depends upon free speech, not just for some but for all."
Other interested parties include wealthy, politically active donors -- such as liberal financier George Soros and moderate businessman and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who have spent vast sums of their own money to back political causes or fund their own campaigns for office.
The case stems a documentary on Hillary Clinton. Produced last year by the conservative Citizens United, "Hillary: The Movie" was a scorching attack on her.
At the time of the 90-minute movie's premiere, Clinton was locked in a tough primary fight with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but her candidacy failed before the feature was widely shown, or had any real impact on the race. A federal court blocked Citizens United from airing ads, as well as airing the documentary on cable television's video-on-demand.
The film later appeared in several theaters, and was released on DVD and the Internet -- outlets that are not subject to federal regulation.
The Supreme Court initially heard the case in March 2008, looking at the conflict between, on one hand, Congress' expressed desire to control the power of well-financed private groups to spread their political messages and, on the other, concerns over the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The court apparently could not reach a conclusion on whether independent groups are subject to the same federal oversight as political committees.
"I've seen this movie," Justice Stephen Breyer wryly noted at the time. "It's not a musical comedy."
Re-arguments were ordered, and the scope of the case was expanded significantly, into whether important precedents banning direct corporate spending in campaigns should be re-examined.
One of those precedents was in 1990, when the high court supported state laws preventing corporations from using what the majority called "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth" to support candidates, largely through their own advocacy ads. The ruling required the money to come only from a group's closely regulated political action committee, not directly from what are called "general treasury" funds.
The idea was to ensure corporate money was not spent on election-related issues that union members, shareholders, or employees might oppose. PACs are funded only through individual donations.
And in 2003, the justices upheld the landmark Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, widely known as the McCain-Feingold law, which took effect the day after the November 2002 elections.
Among its many provisions were a ban on "soft money," the unlimited and unregulated contributions to national political parties; a ban in the 60 days before an election on advocacy ads -- those criticizing or supporting a candidate's stand on an issue; and contribution limits and donor disclosure requirements.
Supporters of the law say it was designed to prevent corruption in politics. Opponents said it would criminalize free speech and association.
Since its enactment, the high court has written 22 opinions trying to interpret the law. The Citizens United case was the first in recent years to confront the free speech argument head on.
In its most narrow scenario, the five-member conservative majority handed the "Hillary" moviemakers a partial defeat, saying they are subject to donor disclosure requirements. But that was only a subplot in a far broader free-speech opinion that will benefit other outside groups with a political message they are itching to promote.
"Today's decision is a minor revolution in campaign finance law," said Thomas Goldstein, founder of ScotusBlog and a prominent appellate attorney. "The court's decision overturns the previously settled distinction between corporate and individual expenditures in American elections. It presumably applies equally to state and local elections, given that the court [now] recognizes a First Amendment right."
The "Hillary" movie case could launch a range of as-yet-unanswered questions about political speech and government regulation.
Because the filmmakers argued their work was information, not political advocacy, should the government place itself as the ultimate arbiter of what is "news"? Some media groups say no. " 'Hillary: The Movie' does not differ, in any relevant respect, from the critiques of presidential candidates produced throughout the entirety of American history," said the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a brief to the high court.
And can distinctions be drawn over regulating 30-second or one-minute "attack ads," and a 90-minute documentary that could be viewed as an ideological "informercial"? Those distinctions could be future fodder for the courts.
At is core, McCain-Feingold clearly will continue to have an impact on every candidate, and everyone that raises or spends campaign dollars. But the law's full power has been blunted significantly.
Now the high court has mediated that tricky line, favoring the right of expression of corporations and individuals over congressional efforts to protect against electoral corruption.
Coming soon to a television near you: campaign ads, ads, ads.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Judge: Wikileaks gets its domain name back
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9883240-38.html
February 29, 2008
Judge: Wikileaks gets its domain name back
Posted by Declan McCullagh
Public Citizen attorney Paul Levy, who had asked to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks, speaks to reporters outside the federal courthouse in San Francisco after the judge hands down his ruling.
SAN FRANCISCO--Wikileaks is getting its domain name back.
After spending more than three hours hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys--two representing the Swiss bank that fought to get the site's plug pulled and about 10 who have been trying to get the site back online--a federal judge here has ruled in favor of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks, which uses Wikileaks.org as its primary domain, is a whistle-blowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.
"The court denies the motion for preliminary injunction, and the court hereby dissolves the injunction against (domain name registrar) Dynadot, and the litigation may now proceed," said U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who had called a brief recess around 11:40 a.m. PST, indicating that he was inclined to revisit his order from earlier this month that effectively pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.org domain name.
White said he will issue a written order very soon and added that he is skeptical that an injunction would survive free-speech scrutiny: "There are serious questions about prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment, which the court can make no definitive findings about at this point."
"The court has the obligation to get it right," White had told attorneys for Bank Julius Baer, or BJB, earlier Friday. "I took an obligation to uphold the Constitution. The court has its own obligation to raise these issues. Contrary to what you say, my obligation is to look down the road and see where this thing is going."
From the bank's perspective, it sued Wikileaks in federal court in California because the registrar, Dynadot, is located here. (Wikileaks alleges that the documents in question show that the bank supports the "ultrarich's offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding, and money laundering.")
But a host of free-speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.
They threw down a series of legal land mines against BJB, including that Wikileaks can't be sued in a U.S. court by a foreign company because it consists of foreigners; that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents any action against Dynadot; that the First Amendment prohibits an overly broad attack against a Web site just to delete a subset of pages; that Dynadot cannot refuse to transfer the domain name to another registrar; and so on.
Some of the filings amounted to an implicit criticism of White, who granted the allegedly First Amendment-problematic order in the first place. So the first thing White did on Friday was defend himself--more to the half dozen reporters in the back of the room than to the attorneys.
"The parties need to understand, and those in this courtroom need to understand, the status of this case," White said. "This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit...Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order."
While giving his ruling, White explained that the case is properly in his jurisdiction, in part because the domain name holder, an Australian citizen living in Kenya, sent an attorney to court Friday.
One attorney for BJB said there were no First Amendment problems, invoking a U.S. Supreme Court precedent dealing with an intercepted conversation played by a radio station because, "We allege, your honor, that Wikileaks has actively solicited the theft of private information...they are participants in the illegality."
BJB also said, "We're talking about private banking information, account numbers, personal numbers like Social Security numbers...all this is private information that's not newsworthy... None of the publishers here today would want their own banking information posted on the Internet."
The judge's preruling reply: "Let me play devil's advocate here. Is it newsworthy if some prominent citizen is... evading taxes, laundering funds? Wouldn't that be something in the public interest?"
Topics: Censorship, Corruption
Tags: Wikileaks, privacy
February 29, 2008
Judge: Wikileaks gets its domain name back
Posted by Declan McCullagh
Public Citizen attorney Paul Levy, who had asked to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks, speaks to reporters outside the federal courthouse in San Francisco after the judge hands down his ruling.
SAN FRANCISCO--Wikileaks is getting its domain name back.
After spending more than three hours hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys--two representing the Swiss bank that fought to get the site's plug pulled and about 10 who have been trying to get the site back online--a federal judge here has ruled in favor of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks, which uses Wikileaks.org as its primary domain, is a whistle-blowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.
"The court denies the motion for preliminary injunction, and the court hereby dissolves the injunction against (domain name registrar) Dynadot, and the litigation may now proceed," said U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who had called a brief recess around 11:40 a.m. PST, indicating that he was inclined to revisit his order from earlier this month that effectively pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.org domain name.
White said he will issue a written order very soon and added that he is skeptical that an injunction would survive free-speech scrutiny: "There are serious questions about prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment, which the court can make no definitive findings about at this point."
"The court has the obligation to get it right," White had told attorneys for Bank Julius Baer, or BJB, earlier Friday. "I took an obligation to uphold the Constitution. The court has its own obligation to raise these issues. Contrary to what you say, my obligation is to look down the road and see where this thing is going."
From the bank's perspective, it sued Wikileaks in federal court in California because the registrar, Dynadot, is located here. (Wikileaks alleges that the documents in question show that the bank supports the "ultrarich's offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding, and money laundering.")
But a host of free-speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.
They threw down a series of legal land mines against BJB, including that Wikileaks can't be sued in a U.S. court by a foreign company because it consists of foreigners; that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents any action against Dynadot; that the First Amendment prohibits an overly broad attack against a Web site just to delete a subset of pages; that Dynadot cannot refuse to transfer the domain name to another registrar; and so on.
Some of the filings amounted to an implicit criticism of White, who granted the allegedly First Amendment-problematic order in the first place. So the first thing White did on Friday was defend himself--more to the half dozen reporters in the back of the room than to the attorneys.
"The parties need to understand, and those in this courtroom need to understand, the status of this case," White said. "This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit...Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order."
While giving his ruling, White explained that the case is properly in his jurisdiction, in part because the domain name holder, an Australian citizen living in Kenya, sent an attorney to court Friday.
One attorney for BJB said there were no First Amendment problems, invoking a U.S. Supreme Court precedent dealing with an intercepted conversation played by a radio station because, "We allege, your honor, that Wikileaks has actively solicited the theft of private information...they are participants in the illegality."
BJB also said, "We're talking about private banking information, account numbers, personal numbers like Social Security numbers...all this is private information that's not newsworthy... None of the publishers here today would want their own banking information posted on the Internet."
The judge's preruling reply: "Let me play devil's advocate here. Is it newsworthy if some prominent citizen is... evading taxes, laundering funds? Wouldn't that be something in the public interest?"
Topics: Censorship, Corruption
Tags: Wikileaks, privacy
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Kucinich files lawsuit
http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_7867042
Kucinich files lawsuit after party denies him place on ballot
The Associated Press
01/02/2008
AUSTIN—Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, along with supporter Willie Nelson, have filed a lawsuit to get Kucinich on the ballot in Texas after they say the Texas Democratic Party rejected his application.
The civil lawsuit was delivered late Wednesday afternoon to U.S. District Court for the Western District of the United States, Kucinich spokesman Andy Juniewicz said late Wednesday evening.
The lawsuit says that Kucinich was informed by the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday that his application was "defective" because he crossed out a loyalty oath in the application that said he would swear to support whoever the Democratic nominee for president might be.
The lawsuit asks that a temporary restraining order be issued to stop the Texas Democratic Party from certifying to the Texas Secretary of State a list of candidates and to restrict the secretary of state from accepting any list that doesn't include the name of a qualified candidate who refuses the loyalty oath.
Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, also wants the court to declare that the oath requirement violates the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment in the Constitution.
"He's right to challenge a blind loyalty oath to the Democratic Party because it's un-American," Willie Nelson said in a news release from the Kucinich campaign.
Calls for comment made to the Texas Democratic Party and the secretary of state's office after business hours on Wednesday were not immediately returned.
Kucinich files lawsuit after party denies him place on ballot
The Associated Press
01/02/2008
AUSTIN—Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, along with supporter Willie Nelson, have filed a lawsuit to get Kucinich on the ballot in Texas after they say the Texas Democratic Party rejected his application.
The civil lawsuit was delivered late Wednesday afternoon to U.S. District Court for the Western District of the United States, Kucinich spokesman Andy Juniewicz said late Wednesday evening.
The lawsuit says that Kucinich was informed by the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday that his application was "defective" because he crossed out a loyalty oath in the application that said he would swear to support whoever the Democratic nominee for president might be.
The lawsuit asks that a temporary restraining order be issued to stop the Texas Democratic Party from certifying to the Texas Secretary of State a list of candidates and to restrict the secretary of state from accepting any list that doesn't include the name of a qualified candidate who refuses the loyalty oath.
Kucinich, a congressman from Ohio, also wants the court to declare that the oath requirement violates the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment in the Constitution.
"He's right to challenge a blind loyalty oath to the Democratic Party because it's un-American," Willie Nelson said in a news release from the Kucinich campaign.
Calls for comment made to the Texas Democratic Party and the secretary of state's office after business hours on Wednesday were not immediately returned.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2218.shtml
The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Jul 23, 2007
I protest, as of the very first line of Bush’s July 17 “Executive Order” (meaning not necessarily read or approved by Congress). I protest this “Order,” which itself is in flagrant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to freedom of speech, the press, and to protest, despite the fact that that right has been violated by various courts in various eras in contentious situations like the one we have today.
I protest also that the Bush “Order” sanctions its own unconstitutionality by invoking the Constitution for its enforcement in the first line: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Remember the Constitution is the document Bush called “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as he went forth to dismiss the right of habeas corpus and fought for renewal of the illegal USAPATRIOT Act.
The outlaw protects his illegal war
Yet, in this new illegal stroke of a pen Bush outlaws all protest in the United States against his scurrilous Iraq war. And with this law, he turns all of us (US) who do not nod in bobble-doll agreement with him into “the enemy." That is, if any act [of ours], provision of funds, goods, or services by [which can he mean anything], to, or for the benefit of same threatens the ‘stabilization of Iraq,’ which can equally mean anything.
I also maintain that the ‘stabilization of Iraq’ can be best achieved by a quick and diplomatic withdrawal of all troops from that beleaguered country, whose physical, spiritual, and human toll is destabilized each additional day we remain there. Our stay encourages resistance, as does our asserting ourselves as ‘an occupying force.” What’s more, we have totally failed at replacing the infrastructure we destroyed, and we have depleted Iraq’s human resources due to death, disease, and flight.
Exactly what and who ‘destabilized’ Iraq?
Moreover, the ‘destabilization’ of Iraq was created by illegal means, by the assertion of Bush and his band of outlaws, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al, and their knowingly untruthful assertions that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and were prepared to use them; and that, in fact, President Hussein had procured ‘yellow cake uranium from Niger” to use in the production of WMD for imminent use on America.
These assertions were proven to be a pack of lies by no less than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Africa, found the “yellow cake” assertion to be fiction not fact, and asserted same in his New York Times op-ed, What I Didn’t Find in Africa. For this Wilson, an international business consultant and Untied States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995 had his wife, Valerie Plame, outed as a CIA officer, also jeopardizing the operatives working under her command. This ended her career not to mention endangering or ending the lives of those who worked for her.
In fact, outing a CIA officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. As is lying the United States into a unilateral, preemptive war a crime -- a war which drew the protests about its illegality from our allies and the United Nations.
Subsequently, the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity was traced to the office of Vice President Cheney, which begat a Department of Justice investigation into this crime, headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 28, 2005, the VP’s chief assistant, I. Lewis Libby, was amazingly the only one indicted for the crime of passing Plame’s name and identity along to news reporters. Libby was subsequently sentenced on June 14, 2007, to 30 months of prison time and a $250,000 fine. Quelle dommage as the French say -- what a horrible thing. Ah, but then not so horrible because President Bush amazingly commutated the felon’s sentence. And Bush might, given his kingly druthers, completely pardon Scooter.
Additionally, UN fact-finder Hans Blitz and his investigators could find no trace of facilities for the production of WMD throughout Iraq. Blitz’s lack of findings compounded the evidence of the high-crime of misleading America into war. And still no one was fully prosecuted and imprisoned for that crime, which borders on treason.
What about the outlaws’ involvement in 9/11?
Nor were there any firings, denunciations or prosecutions for the administration’s failures to prevent 9/11, which event wrongly contributed to the war on Iraq. Truly, quelle dommage, considering the largest intelligence organization in the world, the CIA, and the largest Department of Defense, with a compound budget of $600 billion plus, were unable to stop 19 rag-tag “terrorists” with box-cutters from cruising airliners-as-missiles into the World Trade Towers on 9/11. Could we possible have more outlaws at large here, above and beyond the seven of the purported hijackers living in the Middle East today?
In fact, at this point not only do I protest but I accuse the government of criminal negligence, if not active participation, in the execution of 9/11’s horrific events. These very events gave the Bush administration to complete their the coup d’etat.
This change gave the administration the power to first preemptively, illegally, declare war on Afghanistan and attack it, supposedly in search of Osama bin Laden, of whom a look-alike confessed to the crimes on a poorly made tape, most likely by the CIA. The day before 9/11, bin Laden had checked into a Pakistan hospital for his kidney condition. As of July 2001, he had entered the American hospital in Dubai for dialysis and met with his CIA handler; so much for homemade patsies and their producers. As to explanation of the events of 9/11, please take a look here at what really happened.
The larger outlaws’ purpose of 9/11
The larger purpose of 9/11 was to be the inciting incident to create “The War on Terror” to secure Afghanistan and build pipelines to tap the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin countries and send those precious resources down to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean for export. Of course, the larger purpose of invading Iraq was to secure its oil as well, and provide a steady flow for the Texas-driven, price-gouging outlaws and the insatiable thirst of their SUV-driving clientele, et al.
The Bush gang goes on and on, like the James brothers roaming across the spiky landscape of the Wild West, as of now the Wild Western World, hell-bent on demonizing and scape-goating Muslims, to keep Americans hungry for war with the world and their so-called attackers. This is for the purpose of creating a global American empire.
Thus 9/11 was a classic false-flag operation, ala Hitler’s Reichstag Fire, which I thoroughly protest, including the 3,000 lost souls on 9/11, the 3,800 American soldiers subsequently lost in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans lost in their respective countries, and the squandering of some $650 billion dollars, if not more, to do so.
So add mass murder and colossal financial theft to the tab of the outlaws’ crimes, which have generated more Wanted-for-Impeachment posters on the Internet than ads to meet pretty singles.
Thus, given this egregious list of crimes, this endangerment of the US population, the wanton attacks on two countries, the raising of hostilities with Muslim countries worldwide, as well as with Russia and China, I refer to you for study, guidance and precedence for action, not just a piece of paper but The Declaration of Independence,
America’s first great legal document says . . .
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States . . ."
Do King George of England’s offenses sound like King George of America’s offenses?
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:”
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:”
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”
“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation . . ."
“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . . ."
If you feel King George of America has failed the Declaration of Independence’s litmus test to lead, perhaps you should continue to protest, and protest even more loudly for his impeachment, along with Vice President Cheney’s, so as to put an end to their remorseless tyranny.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Jul 23, 2007
I protest, as of the very first line of Bush’s July 17 “Executive Order” (meaning not necessarily read or approved by Congress). I protest this “Order,” which itself is in flagrant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to freedom of speech, the press, and to protest, despite the fact that that right has been violated by various courts in various eras in contentious situations like the one we have today.
I protest also that the Bush “Order” sanctions its own unconstitutionality by invoking the Constitution for its enforcement in the first line: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Remember the Constitution is the document Bush called “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as he went forth to dismiss the right of habeas corpus and fought for renewal of the illegal USAPATRIOT Act.
The outlaw protects his illegal war
Yet, in this new illegal stroke of a pen Bush outlaws all protest in the United States against his scurrilous Iraq war. And with this law, he turns all of us (US) who do not nod in bobble-doll agreement with him into “the enemy." That is, if any act [of ours], provision of funds, goods, or services by [which can he mean anything], to, or for the benefit of same threatens the ‘stabilization of Iraq,’ which can equally mean anything.
I also maintain that the ‘stabilization of Iraq’ can be best achieved by a quick and diplomatic withdrawal of all troops from that beleaguered country, whose physical, spiritual, and human toll is destabilized each additional day we remain there. Our stay encourages resistance, as does our asserting ourselves as ‘an occupying force.” What’s more, we have totally failed at replacing the infrastructure we destroyed, and we have depleted Iraq’s human resources due to death, disease, and flight.
Exactly what and who ‘destabilized’ Iraq?
Moreover, the ‘destabilization’ of Iraq was created by illegal means, by the assertion of Bush and his band of outlaws, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al, and their knowingly untruthful assertions that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and were prepared to use them; and that, in fact, President Hussein had procured ‘yellow cake uranium from Niger” to use in the production of WMD for imminent use on America.
These assertions were proven to be a pack of lies by no less than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Africa, found the “yellow cake” assertion to be fiction not fact, and asserted same in his New York Times op-ed, What I Didn’t Find in Africa. For this Wilson, an international business consultant and Untied States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995 had his wife, Valerie Plame, outed as a CIA officer, also jeopardizing the operatives working under her command. This ended her career not to mention endangering or ending the lives of those who worked for her.
In fact, outing a CIA officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. As is lying the United States into a unilateral, preemptive war a crime -- a war which drew the protests about its illegality from our allies and the United Nations.
Subsequently, the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity was traced to the office of Vice President Cheney, which begat a Department of Justice investigation into this crime, headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 28, 2005, the VP’s chief assistant, I. Lewis Libby, was amazingly the only one indicted for the crime of passing Plame’s name and identity along to news reporters. Libby was subsequently sentenced on June 14, 2007, to 30 months of prison time and a $250,000 fine. Quelle dommage as the French say -- what a horrible thing. Ah, but then not so horrible because President Bush amazingly commutated the felon’s sentence. And Bush might, given his kingly druthers, completely pardon Scooter.
Additionally, UN fact-finder Hans Blitz and his investigators could find no trace of facilities for the production of WMD throughout Iraq. Blitz’s lack of findings compounded the evidence of the high-crime of misleading America into war. And still no one was fully prosecuted and imprisoned for that crime, which borders on treason.
What about the outlaws’ involvement in 9/11?
Nor were there any firings, denunciations or prosecutions for the administration’s failures to prevent 9/11, which event wrongly contributed to the war on Iraq. Truly, quelle dommage, considering the largest intelligence organization in the world, the CIA, and the largest Department of Defense, with a compound budget of $600 billion plus, were unable to stop 19 rag-tag “terrorists” with box-cutters from cruising airliners-as-missiles into the World Trade Towers on 9/11. Could we possible have more outlaws at large here, above and beyond the seven of the purported hijackers living in the Middle East today?
In fact, at this point not only do I protest but I accuse the government of criminal negligence, if not active participation, in the execution of 9/11’s horrific events. These very events gave the Bush administration to complete their the coup d’etat.
This change gave the administration the power to first preemptively, illegally, declare war on Afghanistan and attack it, supposedly in search of Osama bin Laden, of whom a look-alike confessed to the crimes on a poorly made tape, most likely by the CIA. The day before 9/11, bin Laden had checked into a Pakistan hospital for his kidney condition. As of July 2001, he had entered the American hospital in Dubai for dialysis and met with his CIA handler; so much for homemade patsies and their producers. As to explanation of the events of 9/11, please take a look here at what really happened.
The larger outlaws’ purpose of 9/11
The larger purpose of 9/11 was to be the inciting incident to create “The War on Terror” to secure Afghanistan and build pipelines to tap the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin countries and send those precious resources down to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean for export. Of course, the larger purpose of invading Iraq was to secure its oil as well, and provide a steady flow for the Texas-driven, price-gouging outlaws and the insatiable thirst of their SUV-driving clientele, et al.
The Bush gang goes on and on, like the James brothers roaming across the spiky landscape of the Wild West, as of now the Wild Western World, hell-bent on demonizing and scape-goating Muslims, to keep Americans hungry for war with the world and their so-called attackers. This is for the purpose of creating a global American empire.
Thus 9/11 was a classic false-flag operation, ala Hitler’s Reichstag Fire, which I thoroughly protest, including the 3,000 lost souls on 9/11, the 3,800 American soldiers subsequently lost in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans lost in their respective countries, and the squandering of some $650 billion dollars, if not more, to do so.
So add mass murder and colossal financial theft to the tab of the outlaws’ crimes, which have generated more Wanted-for-Impeachment posters on the Internet than ads to meet pretty singles.
Thus, given this egregious list of crimes, this endangerment of the US population, the wanton attacks on two countries, the raising of hostilities with Muslim countries worldwide, as well as with Russia and China, I refer to you for study, guidance and precedence for action, not just a piece of paper but The Declaration of Independence,
America’s first great legal document says . . .
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States . . ."
Do King George of England’s offenses sound like King George of America’s offenses?
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:”
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:”
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”
“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation . . ."
“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . . ."
If you feel King George of America has failed the Declaration of Independence’s litmus test to lead, perhaps you should continue to protest, and protest even more loudly for his impeachment, along with Vice President Cheney’s, so as to put an end to their remorseless tyranny.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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