"Our nation's speech dynamic is changing, and informative voices should not have to circumvent onerous restrictions to exercise their First Amendment rights,"wrote Kennedy for the majority, setting aside a century's limited progress in separating the power of money from the power of the vote. By "informative voices" of course, he means The Insurance industry, the Health care industry, The Oil Companies and all who seek to profit by influencing and restricting our choices. That's one small step forKBR, Halliburton, United Health Care, Exxon and Cargill -- and one giant step backwards for you and me.
At a time of national outrage as concerns the true loyalties of our elected representatives, could this affirmation of the power of money over the power of the individual come at a worse time?
Today's ruling, by Big Money's representatives in the court may not change much, considering the ease with which corporations have been able to influence every last detail of our lives as it is, but it's a bad step in a bad direction.
Hi all. Octopus, thanks for your visit and comment at Politics Plus. After a quick look here, I added yours to our blogroll.
ReplyDeleteOn topic, I predicted this decision from SCOTUS and see it as the culmination of a series of their mistakes stemming from giving corporations the rights of individuals without the responsibilities that normally accompany them. I'm sure I'll be covering this in tomorrow morning's posts.
TomCat:
ReplyDeletethe culmination of a series of their mistakes
Right; except these are not mistakes, Tom. They are horrible decisions, yes, from the POV of we, the people. But we, the people don't matter much in the Corporate States of America (other as the source of labor and growing wealth for the ruling class).
These are the next logical steps in the on-going dismantling of whatever pretenses of democracy we've had.
BTW, a cute pic. :)
Returned from lunch break, which I lost no thanks to SCOTUS, this is a devastating setback. Replacing a Kennedy with a Brown was bad enough; having every facet of our lives taken over by corporate brown shirts is the last straw. I'm outa here!
ReplyDeleteIf the framers had any inkling what corporate person hood would turn into, they would have imposed strong constitutional limits. This is the opposite of democracy ... and the end of it (and the end of us too).
"In a statement, he (President Obama) said he is telling his administration "to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less."
ReplyDeleteIt will be our job to keep up a written/phone campaign voicing our outrage over this ruling and demanding congress act to reverse this horribly anti-American decision.
What else can we call this abomination that threatens to further insulate Washington from main stream America? This summer we should organize a march on Washington demanding a complete overhaul of the corrupt political system that is hopelessly broken. No more "war chests", no more paid ads, no more lobbists.
TV exposure should be equally divided among any group that wishes to run a candidate and individual contributions should be used to run offices. Each legitimate candidate should receive from a federal fund x amount of dollars for travel. The people need to re-engage in the political system. If you want your candidate to win, get out and work for them, speak for them.
It is time to take back our country and reset our political system.
Previous decisions have basically said that money is free speech. If so, do corporations have the same right as individuals to spend their money on political activities?
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this hurts America, is only another example of how the law has a funny way of taking us to where we do not want to go.
All rights have limitations. The Congress has to set those limitations. Another issue Republicans will not be willing to join in on.
It's no longer God Bless America, it's God Save America.
Good post and comments.
ReplyDeleteA simple allosaurus can ferret out the obvious quicker than a pig can find a truffle – the new SCOTUS decision, in addition to the whole “corporations are people, too” foolishness, is most likely based upon a strict constructionist view of the constitution. The obvious as I see it:
1. Basic principle: freedom of speech is a good thing and shouldn’t be infringed.
2. New entities (or entities whose great size amounts to a bump up in quality of influence and power) have arisen in recent decades, entities that threaten to introduce a catastrophic imbalance between the influence of ordinary citizens’ speech and theirs.
3. A pragmatic or “living” view of the constitution would try to keep this new imbalance from rendering free speech useless as a means of preserving the republic. Free speech is good in itself, and as such it is, as Cardinal Newman would tell us, productive of further good. So you don’t want anything threatening it or its efficacy and potential—not even if that “anything” is itself a modality of free speech. But the current majority on the SCOTUS apparently adopt a constructionist view, so they refuse to take into account the likelihood of destructive, corruptive effects stemming from the aforesaid imbalance. They can’t or won’t find some reserve in the constitution, in other key documents, or more generally in our traditional attitudes and approaches to liberty that would allow them to exercise this pragmatic imperative. Corporations, they insist, are people and can spend a trillion dollars getting their message across to achieve their goals. Bad decision.
4. Both the literalist and the organic or “living” view of the constitution involve ideology and metaphor. The first view seems to me childish and impractical, while the latter honors the fact that – as Lincoln reminds us in the Gettysburg Address – democratic forms of government are like living beings: they are born; they live for as long as their structure, their will, and their reserves can keep them going; and then they die. The SCOTUS’s decision has stared this latter stage in the face and said, “I give up.” That is not the normal way of a living being, which will, when cornered, fight. They’ve let us down and given in to some dark political Death Drive, a veritable Thanatos-Instinct. If the Republic wishes to return to a state of quiescence, then I suppose SCOTUS’ decision is aligned with the people. But not otherwise.
5. What’s to be done? Well, if the SCOTUS can’t look within our institutions and find the necessary reserves, the people must find that reserve in themselves. I don’t mean to sound like an 1980s predictor of communications utopia. All the same, ask for help for suffering Haiti these days, and people promptly cellphone-text you millions of dollars in small amounts. Individual political contributions are way up, if memory serves from 2008. And the Web, for all our complaints about its serving as a venue for spreading misinformation (enter the global village idiot!), is another such reserve. It really ought to be much harder nowadays for the big corporations to spread word-manure without getting the Joe Wilson salute: “YOU LIE!”
Finally, I don’t mean to be a yeasayer. I was just reading an article about racism in one of the online magazines, and the author suggested that it’s a pretty intractable problem because it has to do with unconsciously learned responses. No doubt – and I think big ad campaigns exploit, by means of repetition of powerful images, precisely that sort of unconscious patterning. If you can repeat something infinitely many times because you have infinitely much money, you have an advantage over mom-and-pop manipulators like the rest of us. So yes, the SCOTUS decision seems to me a serious affront to self-government. But we have our resources, too, and in the end republics thrive or fail according to the pluck and caliber of the citizens who inhabit them. Some sustainable counter-legislation would help, too.
A contradiction and a conundrum: There is free speech, and there is an aspect of language that informs thought ... maybe not the thoughts we like or the kinds that ennoble us ... but are dangerous nevertheless. Like the kind of language that reduces people to something less than human, who can be more easily disposed of when reduced to the language of "vermin."
ReplyDeleteAnd there are corporations, hardly living and breathing entities, with more power than the people to create the language of elimination and extermination. Very cowardly and intellectually lazy, this decision by the SCOTUS ... and damn scary too.
bloggingdino said,"and I think big ad campaigns exploit, by means of repetition of powerful images, precisely that sort of unconscious patterning."
ReplyDeleteThis got me to thinking - always dangerous - we are so focused on fighting the negative images, negative talk, negative video. There is so much of it relentlessly cropping up, it's like an endless game of Whack A Mole.
Why not produce powerful positive images in ads and other campaigns and media. A Love Your Neighbor Day with posters,vendors, whatever in gatherings all over the country.
Just drown out their hatred and ignorance by shining our own light.
Give people a sense of hope and belonging and worth. Inspire others to do more and be more.
If great gatherings could be organized in the 60s and 70s without the instant communication of cell phones and internet, imagine the possiblities today.
Actually, it's judicial overreach that gives Obama an opening, one he's been taking with gusto since Wednesday morning.
ReplyDelete