j_b

Wouldn't legally loose arguments tend to, you know, violate the rule of law, which is supposed to 'represent our values and ethics'? You're acting like the SC squeeked this one by 'on a technicality'. A law that denies a non-profit from running a political ad? Hardly a 'nit' issue. When the rule of law violates basic ethics (corporate money swamping out the speech of the people and corrupting pols in this case) there isn't any point in trying to have a legally consistent argument.

It's fetishism insofar you invest meaning in the constitution that isn't there. It was written when human societies and language itself were different and nobody had a crystal ball. To presume the original intent was to give human rights to corporations so they could overwhelm popular speech just doesn't follow from the evidence. 100+ years of legal fiction to impose corporate personhood is nothing more than that.

it's all Obama's fault. Poor Pikas.

did you read the analysis? Yes, I did read it a couple of times a few days ago when it came out. I would also tend to differentiate between for profit corps and associations that represent people democratically. But, I also don't consider having a completely legally tight argument as critical to this discussion. Pushing fetishism of the law to its most absurd end doesn't sit too well with me. The law is supposed to represent our values and ethics and when it doesn't work it should be ditched or amended accordingly.

Corpus Ex Machina Diary of a Mad Law Professor By Patricia J. Williams This article appeared in the February 15, 2010 edition of The Nation. January 28, 2010 In 1976 the Supreme Court held in Buckley v. Valeo that the expenditure of money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. The implications of that case came to an absurd and unfortunate head with the January 21, 2010, decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. While the Buckley case allowed individuals unlimited spending in pursuit of political ends, Citizens United allows corporations that very same grace, and then some. It is a strange moment in jurisprudence. On the one hand, corporations frequently restrict the expressions of employees or others within their purview: what they may wear, what their T-shirts may say, what political messages they may post on the walls of their cubicles. On the other, the inanimate entity of the corporation itself will now enjoy a range of First Amendment benefits not limited by principles of debate or substance, and it will be constrained only by the size of its treasury in deploying whatever technological bullhorn has the greatest chance of drowning out everyone else. Hence, the questions on many minds are why "freedom" (as in speech) has become the functional equivalent of "expenditure" (as in money) and why on earth corporations are considered "persons" to begin with. First, the Buckley decision has always been controversial, though until now it has been interpreted as allowing expenditures as a subcategory of the expressive power of living individuals only. A corporation, by contrast, is not only not human, it is property. A corporation has no natural life span, it does not vote and many are multinational. Corporations, even nonprofits, are necessarily exclusionary--their very existence premised on bottom-line calculations, competitive power grabs, branding and prospecting for self-promotion. A corporation is obliged by its bylaws to pursue its stated purpose and no other. It doesn't change its nonexistent mind or respond with compassion or feel empathy. Thus, the "corporate citizenship" that the majority in Citizens United touts so blithely is a very different beast from citizenship founded on a constitution of enfranchised individuals and premised on a constituency of souls united in allegiance to an ideal of community, an egalitarianism of society, the mutual shelter of a nation. Second, a word about the history of legal "persons": for more than a hundred years, certain inanimate entities have been granted the status of fictive personhood for limited purposes. The concept grew out of the necessity for businesses to negotiate as well as to be accountable in the marketplace. When, for example, a company manufactures a defective product and sells it to you, you sue the company--not the individual executives or employees (unless there has been some act of extreme wrongdoing on their part). In other words, the company is a kind of juridical stand-in for a person, with that status rooted in the efficiency interests of contract and property law. It takes either the most simple-minded or the most cynical state of mind to conclude from this basis that corporations are entitled to the same panoply of civil and dignitary rights as actual, fully endowed people (as in, "We, the..."). The Citizens United opinion begs the question: for whom is our Bill of Rights? Is a corporation really a "who" or a "whom"? If a public "person" is capacious enough to encompass a privatized "corporate" plurality, then are "We, the people" not thereby reduced by propertied fiefdoms huddled behind a facade of "free" republicanism? If, once upon a time, enfranchisement was calculated according to such diminishing metrics as "three-fifths of a person," does not this ruling confer a similar, if magnifying, mathematical disproportion upon the organizational prostheses we know as corporations? In 1935 the great legal realist philosopher Felix S. Cohen wrote a wonderfully illuminating article called "Transcendental Nonsense," in which he debunked (at least for that generation) the notion of corporations as persons. Cohen challenged the reasoning of the Court of Appeals of New York when it asked "Where is the corporation?" in a decision about the proper venue for a suit lodged in the State of New York against the Susquehanna Coal Company, a Pennsylvania corporation. "Nobody has ever seen a corporation," Cohen pointed out. "What right have we to believe in corporations if we don't believe in angels? To be sure, some of us have seen corporate funds, corporate transactions, etc. (just as some of us have seen angelic deeds, angelic countenances, etc.). But this does not give us the right...to assume that it travels about from State to State as mortal men travel." Cohen denounced such thinking as essentially "supernatural." He reminded jurists that a corporation does not really have a body with only one fixed head--that it may have a corps of employees in multiple states simultaneously. "When the vivid fictions and metaphors of traditional jurisprudence are thought of as reasons for decisions, rather than poetical or mnemonic devices for formulating decisions reached on other grounds, then the author, as well as the reader, of the opinion or argument, is apt to forget the social forces which mold the law and the social ideals by which the law is to be judged," he wrote. In Citizens United, the Roberts Court has deployed just such a delusionary poetic device: "prosopopoeia," or a figure of speech that bestows upon an abstract entity the power of speech. Mssrs. Snap, Crackle and Pop, for example. The Geico gecko. The constructive endowment of speech unto such unendowed figurations is a common imaginative enterprise of the human mind. But the transference of such expressive power is always driven by, and must always be recognized as, a fiction in service to some very specific nonimaginary end. If there is no such grounding in practical purpose, we humanize a golem. We think Mr. Clean is addressing us in real time. We hallucinate. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100215/williams

if there ever was an issue this community could unite around, I knew this could be it! Save the Pika Obama won't protect pika endangered by climate change by RLMiller The pika, pronounced as "Bye-Bye, Ms American Pie-ka" is neither a yellow Pokemon nor a font, but a hamster-sized rabbit relative. It lives throughout the Western United States at high elevations, and it's extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, dying after only a few hours of 78 degree temperature. Which makes it the pocket-sized poster child for climate change (the larger version being white, furry, and ursine). Last May, the Fish & Wildlife Service agreed to consider listing the pika. In an eyebrow-raising move, the agency noted that its potential decline was caused solely by climate change, not by other human-caused events such as habitat destruction. The decision was due February 1, 2010. The pika lives at or near mountaintops known as sky islands. Individual pikas' range is about 2 kilometers, so they can't simply abandon one mountain for an adjacent one. A January 2010 article in the journal BioScience describes the pika's plight, which generally is more sensitive to longer hotter summers than to particularly hot but isolated days: "The problem with global warming is that if [pikas] lose [their] snowpack, which provides insulation in winter, they freeze to death, and if the ambient air temperature heats up too much in summer, then they fry. That's the challenge," Peacock says, who has studied pika population genetics. "They're already at the top of the mountain. If you heat it up substantially, there's no place for them to go."

The corporate personhood debate refers to the controversy (primarily in the United States) over the question of what subset of rights afforded under the law to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons. In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Corporations were recognized as persons for purposes of the 14th Amendment in an 1886 Supreme Court Case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394. Some critics of corporate personhood, such as author Thom Hartmann in his book "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," claim that this was an intentional misinterpretation of the case inserted into the Court record by reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis. [1] Bancroft Davis had previously served as president of Newburgh and New York Railway Co. Proponents of corporate personhood believe that corporations, as representatives of their shareholders, were intended by the founders and framers to enjoy many, if not all, of the same rights as natural persons, for example, the right against self-incrimination, right to privacy and the right to lobby the government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate

It has everything to do with the legal fiction of corporate personhood.

Did FW hack jb's password? Dude, you aren't even wealthy. So, STFU, commie.

"We already discussed it and nobody could show deregulation was directly responsible for permanent job insecurity, the lowering of wages, getting rid of the social safety net, union busting, and oligopolies"

It still doesn't change the fact that corporate personhood, therefore speech, is fiction despite over a century of supreme court attempts to give an edge to corporatists. It is a matter of free speech alright but it is that of making sure corporations don't swamp out people's speech. Freedom of the press is specifically accounted for in the constitution, whereas corporations aren't even mentioned even though they already existed at the time of writing, so I am not sure what the yammering is about. One dollar, one vote is clearly anti-democratic and this ruling is taking us further in that direction.

Pitchfork time about health care at MSNBC (play the video): Ed Schultz calls Lieberman a coward

hey, even the gipper used that one ...

I beg to differ but the evidence suggests Dali did it a lot more often than the rest of us.

That's going to be quite a change from Harper

Dude, the only reason they deny you health insurance is because of your unhealthy lifestyle that caused you to get sick (i.e. your own fucking fault if you believe the billions spent yearly in advert on junk food). What kind of commie are you to put your rights before the [wave flag]freedom [/wave flag] of insurance execs to decide if they want to insure you?

Ever noticed how neoliberal policies always produce the exact opposite of how they are sold to the public? Are we supposed to speculate it ain't per chance? (Orwell doing somersaults in his grave) no job security, no benefits, debt slavery = "economic freedom" in neoliberal newspeak monopolies/oligopolies control on prices = "greater competition to lower prices" in neoliberal newspeak corporate welfare = "free market" in neoliberal newspeak letting the crooks fleece the consumer and taxpayer at will = "getting the government off our back" in neoliberal newspeak etc ..

As of 2003: "It has been seven years since Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, the law that called for deregulation of cable and telecom markets. Consumers were promised more competition and lower prices. Instead, cable rates have shot up 48 percent nationwide since 1996. Cable rates have increased nearly three times as fast as inflation. 95 percent of Americans homes still have only one choice for a cable company. As for local telephone service, rates have increased 23 percent since the Telecommunications Act was passed. Before deregulation, there were eight major companies providing local phone service, each to a different area of the country. Today those eight companies have shrunk to four as a result of massive consolidation. The two biggest companies, Verizon and SBC, each control 30 to 40 percent of the nation's local phone business. Long-distance rates have technically dropped over the last seven years, but for most consumers, the drop in rates is totally offset by the huge increase in long-distance fees. Most consumers are now paying just as much or more for long-distance than they did a few years ago, thanks to the tall stack of fees that long-distance companies now stick on your phone bills. Today, the only places where local and long-distance rates have been significantly reduced are the states where regulators have aggressively regulated -- not deregulated -- leasing arrangements that enable competitors to connect to the local telephone companies' monopoly infrastructure." Media Deregulation: Dangerous to Democracy.

"with more energy deregulation, Enron and the nation would continue to flourish." Ken Lay (CEO Enron) Another 59 days later Enron was bankrupt.

who could sensibly argue that alternatives to neo-feudalism would fare better? really?

Deregulation of the cable industry has failed The Telecommunications Act of 1996 restructured the entire telecommunications industry and left virtually all cable subscribers without protection from unrestricted rate hikes. Since the Act was signed into law, cable rates have skyrocketed; service levels have declined; cable concentration has heavily increased; vertical integration between critical programming developers and cable distributors has gone unabated; wireline cable competitors have faced enormous obstacles going head-to-head with cable incumbents; incumbent cable operators have effectively exploited statutory loopholes in order to deny vital programming content to emerging competitors; and the cable industry now also dominates the broadband residential high-speed Internet market. How creating oligopolies doesn't lead to greater competition (duh!) what? who could have a problem with cable operators self-regulating?

Deregulation of the energy sector gave us brown-outs and Enron, which has clearly nothing to do with the culture of greed and corruption that caused the financial collapse.

Ha! to be finally free to see one's job outsourced to China. Only real free men can appreciate that.

"That was discussed before and nobody can make the claim that deregulation has anything to do with a crisis that doesn't exist"