During the discussion, Fox host Brian Kilmeade asked pro-labor guest Robert Zimmerman if President Obama was taking a “big risk” by opposing Walker’s law. Zimmerman responded by saying that Obama was speaking “for the mainstream of our country, and the mainstream of Republican governors who are not siding with Governor Walker.” Kilmeade responded by saying, “I think Gallup, a relatively mainstream poll, has a differing view. And here’s the question that was posed. Do you favor or disfavor of taking away collective bargaining when it comes to salaries for government workers. 66 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed, 9 percent up in the air.
Imagine my surprise when I found that the polls said not such thing:
Americans strongly oppose laws taking away the collective bargaining power of public employee unions, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. The poll found 61% would oppose a law in their state similar to such a proposal in Wisconsin, compared with 33% who would favor such a law.
It appears that FOXNEWS CEO Roger Ailes will have his own problems with the truth:
“It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary . . .
Now, court documents filed in a lawsuit make clear whom Ms. Regan was accusing of urging her to lie: Roger E. Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News and a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani. What is more, the documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discussed her relationship with Mr. Kerik.”
Malcolm Gladwell states that social media cannot cause social change, stating that the weak-ties created by social media participation and the low-levels of engagement are not sufficient to produce revolutionary change.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.
It wasn’t the birthers or the truthers who earned the nod for helping shape America’s future: It was the makers. Their protests, their sit-ins, take the simple form of making things and sharing them with each other, online and off. The quietness of their ways, the heads-down determination of the scientist instead of the chin-jutting attitude of the street fighter, might make them easy to overlook. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a significant and enduring movement. it doesn’t mean the will of these millions of people doesn’t count, simply because it’s expressed in a way that doesn’t look like protest did five decades ago.
Best of all, the people who actually make these things happen aren’t just sitting around clicking “Like” on things online. As has been true since the earliest days of the blogosphere, the best minds in social media get together in person to help plan the future.
As an early 1960s vintage member of the then-new conservative movement, I remember us focusing on the 10th amendment during the 1964 Goldwater campaign. It has been a staple of conservative thought, and the continued dormancy of 10th amendment enforcement has been one of the failures of our now half-century-old movement.
But just as the Tea Party movement in so many ways seems to represent the 2.0 version of our movement, so I again thought about the 10th amendment anew. After about 10 seconds’ thought, it struck me that the best way to revive the 10th Amendment is to repeal the 17th Amendment — which changes the first paragraph of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution to provide that each state’s senators are to be “elected by the people thereof” rather than being “chosen by the Legislature thereof.” (As I Googled the topic, I found out that Ron Paul and others have been talking about this for years. It may be the only subject that could be proposed and ratified at a constitutional convention with three-fourths of the state legislatures.)
That’s a fabulous idea. Let’s let the much cheaper local whores do the bidding of the corporations. These poor companies are going to have to spend a lot more money if they expect to buy 435 House seats and endless local and state offices, so any break they can get would be good for the economy.
That was not one of them. Fifty little corrupt House of Lords would not be better than the US Congress.
Did you know Corporations are people too, and that they have a right to free speech (which of course equals money), even though they can’t speak. Why someday, Corporations may even be given the right to vote!
For most of our Nation’s history, Supreme Court doctrine comported with the Constitution’s text and history. Governments created corporations and conferred on them special privileges to encourage investment and economic growth, but, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall in the famous Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, corporations were “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law. 1 Corporations were neither “citizens nor part of “We the People. A corporation was a “creature of the law that did not possess inalienable human rights, but rather “only those properties which the charter of creation confer on it. 2 Corporate interests were protected in some ways, of course ”for example, corporations could assert rights under provisions like the Constitution’s Contract Clause, which prohibits states from “impairing private contracts “ but corporations could be extensively regulated to ensure that they did not abuse the special privileges and protections governments conferred on them that were not shared by individuals.
This was the settled understanding both before the Civil War, and after, when the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, requiring states to respect the fundamental rights of all Americans. This settled understanding was thrown into question in 1886 when the Court’s decision in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.3 appeared to announce ”because of the court reporter’s note ” that corporations were “persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Supreme Court’s actual opinion never reached the constitutional question in the case, but the court reporter “ himself a former railroad man “ took it upon himself to insert into his published notes Chief Justice Waite’s oral argument statement that the Fourteenth Amendment protects corporations. Through this highly irregular move, bereft of any reasoning or explanation, the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals “ for some purposes at least “ was introduced into constitutional law. In the 1920s and 1930s “ as the nation was roiled by the Great Depression “ many speculated that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had “smuggled into the Amendment “a capitalist joker, 4 giving corporations special rights and protections under an Amendment ratified to secure equal citizenship for living Americans, but it is now clear that this joker was created by the court reporter and developed by the Lochner era Supreme Court.
Corporate personhood has been reaffirmed over the last Century, but has been somewhat constrained by campaign finance laws passed by Congress, at least until those Conservative activist justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts) ignored precedents with yesterday’s ruling. Corporations (as well as Unions and special interest groups) can essentially shovel unlimited amounts of money into the election process. Given that the candidate with the most money usually wins, the winner is decided by whoever has the deepest pockets, which is never the voter.
This is also nothing new “ Conservatives have been preparing for this moment for 40-years, starting with the Powell Memo authored by then right-wing activist and eventual Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. [wiki] in 1971.
Although its influence is disputed, the framework Powell established was executed smartly by the Conservative movement, undermining academia, conning the poor and middle-class to vote against their own self-interest, created the think tanks that dream up foreign adventures at the expense of other’s blood and the taxpayers treasure, starting the Culture Wars, and allowing corporations to take over the political process.
The cruelest irony? The Constitutional Amendment that granted equal protection to the newly freed slaves subsequently shackles us to a corporate master.
Forget about Ted Kennedy’s seat, tea baggers, Scott Brown, smacking down bankers, and healthcare reform. THIS is the important news of the week. For all the talk of socialism, what you have just seen what amounts to a codification of the corporate welfare state.
For most of our Nation’s history, Supreme Court doctrine comported with the Constitution’s text
and history. Governments created corporations and conferred on them special privileges to encourage
investment and economic growth, but, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall in the famous Trustees of
Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, corporations were “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and
existing only in the contemplation of the law. 1 Corporations were neither “citizens nor part of “We
the People. A corporation was a “creature of the law that did not possess inalienable human rights,
but rather “only those properties which the charter of creation confer on it. 2 Corporate interests were
protected in some ways, of course ”for example, corporations could assert rights under provisions like
the Constitution’s Contract Clause, which prohibits states from “impairing private contracts “ but
corporations could be extensively regulated to ensure that they did not abuse the special privileges and
protections governments conferred on them that were not shared by individuals. This was the settled
understanding both before the Civil War, and after, when the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the
Constitution, requiring states to respect the fundamental rights of all Americans.
This settled understanding was thrown into question in 1886 when the Court’s decision in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.3 appeared to announce ”because of the court reporter’s note ” that corporations were “persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Supreme Court’s actual opinion never reached the constitutional question in the case, but the court reporter “ himself a former railroad man “ took it upon himself to insert into his published notes Chief Justice Waite’s oral argument statement that the Fourteenth Amendment protects corporations. Through this highly irregular move, bereft of any reasoning or explanation, the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals “ for some purposes at least “ was introduced into constitutional law. In the 1920s and 1930s “ as the nation was roiled by the Great Depression “ many speculated that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had “smuggled into the Amendment “a capitalist joker, 4 giving corporations special rights and protections under an Amendment ratified to secure equal citizenship for living Americans, but it is now clear that this joker was created by the court reporter and developed by the Lochner era Supreme Court.
