Supreme
Court's Ridiculous Reasoning Turns First
Amendment Rights Upside Down
Progressive
Authors Call for Total Ban on Campaign
Corruption, so that We, the People may
be Heard.
For Immediate Release:
(Free-Press-Release.com)
January 24, 2010 -- Machines and
institutions do not speak and do not
breathe. The Jolly Green Giant,
Aunt Jemima and Ronald McDonald are not
real and therefore do not, or should not
get real rights as living, breathing
people. Yet, we the people are the voice
not heard.
The Supreme Court
made a landmark decision in January
2010. The decision claims to uphold the
First Amendment -- for corporations,
restricted from using general funds to
influence political campaigns since
1947. Now they may spend whatever they
want to buy elections. Corporate
institutions now get the same rights as
individuals to speak and spend on
messages, of course with immeasurably
more money and extensive infrastructure.
This allows machines of corporations to
be more closely tied to machines of the
state.
Also in 1947,
George Orwell wrote 1984. In it he
coined the term oligarchical
collectivism: the linking of
institutions, as with our corporations
and the state. A new book, The
Complete Patriot's Guide to Oligarchical
Collectivism: Its Theory
and Practice,
defines patriotism in universal concepts
through the Five Freedoms of the First
Amendment.
The Guide supplies
the historical and philosophical
evidence that the Bill of Rights are to
protect and preserve the rights of
individuals, not of institutions. A
primal concept of the United States is
to limit state involvement with
corporate and religious institutions,
and to limit the interaction of these
institutions with the state, or to limit
oligarchical collectivism.
The First
Amendment guarantees freedom of thought,
speech, press, and peaceful political
action for the citizenry. "Congress
shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press, or the right of people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the government for a redress of
grievances."
The First
Amendment secures these rights as a way
for individuals to counter oligarchical
collectivism and the mechanics of
institutional ties. "Institutions are
not individuals," as I note in The
Patriot's Guide. -- Ethan,
Author of
The Complete
Patriot's Guide to Oligarchical
Collectivism: Its Theory and Practice,
Progressive Press, 2009.
The Bill of Rights
guarantees the freedom of political
speech, of speaking truth to power, not
any and all speech. There was no intent
to do away with "natural law," or social
restraints on speech that violates
privacy or does harm, such as libel,
false advertising, provocations,
obscenity, blackmail -- or corruption.
Because these
limitations on speech are so
well-grounded in precedent, SCOTUS took
an end run -- reminiscent of its gift of
the stolen election to Bush by a
specious "equal access" argument.
The majority
endorsed the fatuous opinion that, "By
taking the right to speak from some and
giving it to others, the Government
deprives the disadvantaged person or
class of the right to use speech to
strive to establish worth, standing, and
respect for the speaker's voice."
Corporations are
disadvantaged persons? They need to buy
elections to be socially accepted? As if
it were at issue whether poor minorities
could speak out! This is so misleading
as to be a bare-faced fraud. We, the
People are the disadvantaged voice that
cannot make itself heard!
The case before
the court involved advertising spending
by corporations to influence an
election. In frank terms, /i]corruption.
Can corporations now take the profits
they make from us to pay for false
advertising, if it will establish their
worth and standing -- especially if they
are disadvantaged by uncompetitive
products?
Our government is
not allowed to spend our tax money on
influencing elections, either. It is a
"disadvantaged person." So should the
government now establish state-sponsored
media to support its candidates?
Wouldn't that be tyranny, just what the
framers meant to guard against with the
Bill of Rights?
But wait -- since
the corporations already own the
government -- we are already there.
Corporatism is the party of oligarchy
that owns, runs and finances our
semblance of a two-party democracy, the
media, education system, and just about
everything. That's the conclusion of a
recent book,
Corporatism: The
Secret Government of the New World
Order,
by Prof. Jeffrey Grupp.
Behind the scene,
the legal issue was not free speech, but
whether corporations are persons with
the same rights as individuals. In the
dissenting minority opinion, Justice
Stevens wrote that the Framers of the
Constitution "had little trouble
distinguishing corporations from human
beings, and when they constitutionalized
the right of free speech in the First
Amendment, it was the free speech of
individual Americans they had in mind."
He is right.
Glen
Yeadon
has shown in
The Nazi Hydra
in America how severe were the
restrictions on corporations in the
early days of the USA. Gradually SCOTUS
gave them more powers, with railroads
recognized as persons by the Robber
Baron court in 1886 -- which opened the
way to twisting the Bill of Rights
against itself. Yeadon advocates a
stripping of corporate powers and a
return to personal liability by owners.
As Stevens
concluded, "The Court's opinion is thus
a rejection of the common sense of the
American people, who have recognized a
need to prevent corporations from
undermining self government since the
founding."
Our whole problem
is the sway of the money power over our
polity. Campaign financing is really
bribery, plain and simple. Politicians
are beholden not to their
constituencies, but to their sponsors.
The Court's
radical corporatist libertarianism can
only be met now with radical purism:
Outlaw all campaign financing. If we can
ban advertising for cigarettes, we can
ban it for candidates. With electronic
media, there is less need than ever to
spend bags of money buying votes.
Anyone with a
reputation and some good ideas should be
able to get attention. Political
candidates are newsworthy in themselves.
Let them triumph in the marketplace of
ideas, not in the muck of selling favors
to the highest bidders. And may the best
one win. For once.
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