Matt Davies for January 22, 2010

oh davies - excellent!

So it begins!

^Got blown out the window.

Who would have thought that all of legacies that Bush left us, the destroyed economy, the 9/11 tragedy, two dumb wars, a divided country, that most important (and worse) would be the Bush Court.

If you want to know what the future will be like read any good American History book about the 1880 - 1900’s period when The Robber Barons ruled, and ran, the Nation.

Back to the era of the Robber Barons. Look forward to pollution, contamination, and no recourse, because the government will work for the corporations, and not you. Alexis d’Tocqueville had our number.

why would you think corporations are people? Explain that please. Every person who works at that corporation, or buys shares in that corporation, has their individual free speech rights. Why does an artificial economic entity gain more free speech rights than actual people?

Corporate interests will sposor both the democrats and the GOP, but I still think it’s a bad thing.

All the executives in the company have their vote, plus their own money to give to the candidate they want. Why should they use their company to influence the campaign more than normal people do?

church, got a link for your data? And you know that giving numbers for one entity without providing numbers for other entities (banks, lobbyists, etc.) isn’t meaningful data.

The real point here is that there’s too much special interest influence in D.C. as it is. The SCOTUS decision will increase special interest influence; in my mind, to the detriment of the country. this isn’t a right or left issue; it’s an issue about the power and influence of special interests.

go to: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/index.php for info with context

The same folks who say unions shouldn’t use their bankroll for political contributions without member votes on each contribution now say that the corporations I hold stock in, as a shareholder, CAN spend MY money on campaigns WITHOUT MY VOTE!! Of course reading proxy statements is about as simple as the “Health Care Bill” when boards give themselves and CEOs salaries and bonuses.

When it comes to having the power to bury the individual, the corporations have a lot longer record than unions, even corrupt unions.

Five members of the US Supreme Court have once again shown their dedication to the proposition that government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich shall not perish from this earth. But that is, of course, what they were put there to do….

Henri

Nice try, av8tor, but wrong. Freedom of speech is of the people. The Court went the wrong way with this a long time ago, when they decided money = speech, meaning that rich people have, effectively, more votes than the poor. That is anathema to anyone who truly believes in the Constitution. The Supreme Court decision to make corporations people and to remove constraints on their spending, along with the money = speech decision, will go down in history as comparable to the Dred Scott decision. And I object to ALL organizations using disproportionate power in this manner, not just corporations. Some of the ones that conservatives hate, e.g., MoveOn.org, at least get their money AND their direction from the people donating. Corporations (and to a lesser extent unions) don’t.

church, I don’t quite get the “you liberals didn’t complain before” meme that’s showing up here. I have long decried the influence of special interests (of all bents) on D.C. I don’t like the ability of “soft-money” to allow special interests to hide behind cutely-named committees so no one knows who is really giving the message. (one example, one of the first ads on healthcare reform out of the chute was by “Conservatives for Patient Rights” headed by the former head of a very large for-profit healthcare chain that was found guilty of Medicare and Medicaid fraud and was fined more than $3 billion, largest fine in history.)

So we agree on one thing: we need more corporate influence/control like we need a hole in the head. And I don’t want special treatment in D.C. for unions, either.

I’m just trying to think this through. If you take a strict interpretation of the clause ““Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”, then I suppose all forms of censorship would be illegal – and yet the courts have allowed various forms of censorship over the years – to say nothing of restrictions on speech which incites to violence, and so on. The courts seem to hold that certain kinds of restrictions do not amount to abridging the freedom of speech.

Furthermore, it is one thing to say that any person has the right to speak, and another thing to say that a corporation has the right to spend endless money on campaigns. There may be a certain justification in regarding corporations as persons for certain legal purpose, but corporations do not, for example, have a right to citizenship, as flesh and blood people do, the don’t carry passports, they don’t have a right to vote, and so on. Even in legal terms they are not persons in the full sense.

I believe that the owners of corporations had the right to speak before this ruling, so it doesn’t seem to be the case that the rights of any flesh and blood individual have been protected in a way they were not previously protected.

Can anyone explain why this is a good ruling?

loonecat, not me, but here’s a couple of people that do:

http://tinyurl.com/SCOTUSgreenwald

http://www.slate.com/id/2227239/

BCS – these are good links. I don’t think I’m persuaded yet, but I will certainly think about it. I’m not convinced, for instance, that a corporation is quite like a group of people who band together for a common purpose – or whatever the wording in the Salon article said. But there were some interesting and valuable points made.

church, no, it didn’t change my mind, for the reasons I’ve written about here and other toons. It makes corporations/unions/soft money committees more entitled to free speech than mere citizens who don’t have billions at their disposal to pay for movies, ads, mass mailings, etc. We mere citizens have limits on contributions we can make to candidates. Now, corporations have no limits on what they can spend to elect or destroy candidates.

I still have problems with the concept of a corporation having the rights of individual people. They’re not people, they’re economic entities. Every person who works for a corporation, or has stock in a corporation has a right to free speech. But now corporations have more rights, seems to me.

Here’s links to the viewpoint lonecat and I seem to share:

http://tinyurl.com/SCOTUSNewsweek

http://www.slate.com/id/2242210/pagenum/all/#p2

http://tinyurl.com/SCOTUSterrifying

http://www.slate.com/id/2242208/

BCS – thanks for these links – particularly the second, from slate, which has good argumentation. There are some complicated issues here, and I think it’s worth taking the time to think them through – and to read arguments from both sides. You are to be commended for supplying links to both sides. Good on you.

<=======NO NO Neocon! Its all men are created equal and Corporations are created better!