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Whose Rights?
A new Supreme Court decision promotes corporate rights at the expense of the rights of citizens. What happens when the legal structure itself stands in the way of democracy?
Yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission-giving corporations the ability to spend money directly to influence federal elections under the Constitution's First Amendment-was inevitable. It represents a logical expansion of corporate constitutional "rights"-which include the rights of persons which have been judicially conferred upon corporations. "Personhood" rights mean that corporations possess First Amendment rights to free speech, along with a litany of other rights that are secured to persons under the federal Bill of Rights.
The expansion of corporate rights and privileges under the law has been deliberate, beginning nearly two hundred years ago with the Dartmouth decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that private corporations had rights that municipal corporations-governments composed of "we the people"-did not.
For the past two centuries, new court decisions have only expanded corporate rights and privileges. For those who think that the way to stem this tide is to find the perfect lawsuit, stop looking. It doesn't exist, for there is no magic bullet.
Rather, in order to reverse decisions like Citizens United, the whole concept of corporate "rights"-and the way they interfere with the exercise of rights by people, communities, and nature-must be examined. And, it's not simply that corporations have "personhood" rights. It goes well beyond that.
Today's structure of law gives corporations a spectrum of legal and constitutional rights which they routinely wield against people, communities, and nature. Corporations have more rights, for example, than the communities in which they seek to do business. They can and do use those rights to lobby Congress, impact elections, and to decide for us what we eat, whether mountaintops are blown off or not, whether there are fish in the oceans, and on and on. Their constitutional and other legal rights, together with their wealth, guarantee that they can define the debates that lead to the adoption of new laws-and often write the laws themselves.
Thus the context for understanding the Citizens United decision is that we have a minority set of corporate interests, empowered by government to wield their rights against a majority. It is the history of this nation. The abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement all built movements of people in order to drive rights (for slaves, for women, for African Americans) into law-which necessarily meant eliminating rights for a minority, such as the slaveholder. In the end, it is our constitutional structure of law that purposefully places the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities, and nature. History shows that strong peoples' movements can make change by changing the legal structure itself.
In some ways, the Citizens United ruling is merely part of a predetermined destiny set by a 1700s constitutional structure that placed greater priority on the rights of property and commerce than on the rights of people and nature. Reversing Citizens United means reversing that constitutional legacy.
Today, to those who recognize that we do not have democracy when corporations located thousands of miles away are making decisions about our communities instead of us, who recognize that we cannot have sustainability so long as corporations are able to decide how clean our air and water can be, who recognize that we'll never have true health care reform so long as corporations have greater access to our elected representatives than the people who voted for them-to those people, yesterday's decision should be understood as just another brick in the wall, another step down a path that will only continue unless and until a real movement for the rights of people, communities, and nature is built. That is the work we are doing. We hope you will join us.
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Show AllThe reason why the SCOTUS, and groups like the ACLU and Human Rights Watch can breathtakingly call laws against the domination of the national discourse by the wealthy and powerful "censorship" arises from a confusion over the word "freedom", and this confusion is a deliberate result of the capitalist-liberatrianism that dominates thinking in the US.
The operative word is "power" not "freedom" or its closely realted cousin "rights". Take the word "freedom" or "right" in any sentence, and replace it with "power" and the sentence's meaning is almost always improved.
Yet udner the dominant "libertarian" philosophy, "freedom" and "rights" sits as an worshiped absolutes - detached from physical reality itself! In the real physical world, the imposition of pure "freedom", without considerations of power relations, simply evolves, through power accumulation, to a state where unlimited "freedom" is enjoyed by a wealthy minority, and the minimum-state of freedom to choose between selling one's labor under whatever condition the boss-buyer imposes, or starvation, for the majority. So, absolutist beliefs in "freedom" in the real physical world gurarantee virtually no freedom for the great majority!
Nothing original here. Marx, and even Adam Smith covered this stuff, with the likes of Proudhon and Emma Goldman digging deeper into the roots.
The operative word is POWER, not "freedom" or "rights". Societies must guarantee that power is shared eqitably regardless of personal wealth or lack therof. To the extent that in market-economy-societies unavoidably confer power proportional to wealth, these economies must be changed. only if participation in power is shared equally, can there be freedom, to paraphrase Cicero.
We cannot change this through leagal or legislative means. The constitution of the US, and many other countries (as Zelaya found out in Honduras), through their institutionalization of "freedom" and "rights" absent power relations, guarantees conditions of disempowerment and un-freedom will continue to exist for the majority.
How can we effect change and empower the people? Draw your own conclusions.
Sometimes "power" is the best substitute for "freedom" but I believe sometimes "control" is appropriate.
As for great quotes from posterity regarding this issue, one of my favorites is from Bertrand Russel (which gdgoodman reminded us of the other day):
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
Consider the sentence: "I have the freedom to go eat at a Chinese restaurant tonight"? But why do I have "freedom" to go to the restaurant? Because I have the money i.e. the economic power to buy the meal and obtain the transportation, to get there. So, a better way to word this is "I have the power to go eat at a Chinese restaurant tonight."
In your Bertrand Russel quote, where would the restraint ("control") on the liberties of the fortunate come from? It would come from _power_ wielded by the less fortunate. So, I stand by my point that "power" is the operative word. "Power to rhe people" was not a revolutionary slogan for nothing.
How about Power to The People, inc,?
BTW I am suggesting The People as the name of a unity party for the dozen or so third-parties that better reflect the American people than does the Corporate Duopoly.
Imagine stomping the streets for The People...
Gary
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
-- Abraham Lincoln
Oh, I do not dispute that "power" is a good substitute. Rather, I was suggesting that sometimes the even stronger and more disturbing word "control" could be substituted for "freedom." Power, whether legal, economic, or physical, can at times be opposed and moderated or defeated by the power of another in conflict (you had the power to eat at the restaurant but if the manager decides to close it early you are out of luck, but if you had control over the restaurant, then the manager can't thwart your plans). "Control" implies power without the possibility of significant opposition. Corporations usually seek more than just government-granted power that may be applied in their economic environments. Instead they seek control over the economic conditions.
Human inalienable rights.
What happens when the legal structure itself stands in the way of democracy?
Rivers of Blood?
It'll take another civil war to annul the shell game that corporations have played with personhood. They own the government, so it's not likely you can just "vote" for this particular change.
Or you could simply wait for your society to collapse, which seems to be the default "strategy" of most people in rich countries.
How can you can a corporation a person if you can't shoot it when it tries to rob you?
All the Supreme Court did was make it official. Do you think it makes one jot of difference whether you get a Democrat or a Republican senator/congressman/president? It hasn't for as long as I can remember, it's just a choice of who you want to be screwed by.
"All the Supreme Court did was make it official."
They sure did. Now they are irrelevent, too. They ALL gotta go.
Corporations are lifeless yet immortal, limited in liability and unlimited in power, top-down in management and bottom-up in consequences, and corporations are legally persons without any humanity.
Gary
"It really hasn't been demonstrated at any level by any major corporation that it can nurture what is euphemistically called creativity."
-- Peter Bart
Found this piece of the puzzle from a few years back. Worth reading.
How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0119-04.htm
If $$ = Speech according to the Supremes and power increases geometrically according to the amounts of $$ one has then speech is being seen as the equivalent of a share of democracy by these men. In a Corp. state power is seen as who in their view are the largest shareholders. They simply see the rest of us as the rabble with a few shares and NO real power. How does one treat such shareholders with contempt and thats exactly how were all being treated by these creatures. In the conservatives view 1 man 1 vote is the enemy and its these kinds of rulings that are the "natural" remedy. They hate the idea of an egalitarian society they are economic and political royalists.
Does anyone know the role of the AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION in this affair? I attempted to decipher their amicus brief on their website and was defeated by the legalese. As they challenged the Vermont attempt at finance reform in 2003, I suspect they supported this additional judicial coup. If that is so, I will never send them another dime.
Tony Vodvarka
The supported overturning campaign law and "free speech." See the brief they filed (needs a pdf reader) at the great site SCOTUS Wiki:
http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission
Gary
Perhaps the time has come for us to elect people who can't be bought, or sold.
What would we do if some of our terrorists (oh I mean pilots) were captured, tortured, and held indefinitely in an island prison. Also we were not told whether they were dead or alive.
What if some people that were captured were not in the armed services.
We would go in and try to get them out and complain about injustice and probably increase the terrorism (oh I mean the drones).
Think about it for awhile without all the prejudiced judgement that we are right and they are wrong.