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User Info Freedom Of Speech: How Quaint; entered at 2010-01-22 14:06:14
Bananamerican
Posts: 854
Registered: 2009-05-28 Anytown U.S.A.
i said bye bye yesterday....but i feel I'm owed a coda on this subject...especially as i was "banned" (free speech anyone?) from Breaking yesterday on this breaking topic despite many other "political" posts taking up space in Breaking...


First of all you ALL need to read this:
http://athenwood.com/uphistory.shtml

it concerns the origins of Corporate "Personhood".
it concerns one JC Bancroft Davis, former president of Newburgh and New York Railway Company (19th century Oligarch)
In 1883 he'd become Reporter of Decisions for the Supreme Court....
Acting as court reporter in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case,

"Below is the letter from Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite to court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis informing Davis that it didn't much matter whether or not he included a comment about the arguments before the court that corporations were persons "as we avoided meeting the constitutional questions in the decision."

The decision did not rule that corporations are persons: Davis added it in the headnotes (commentary) on his own, and subsequent courts have incorrectly based decisions since 1886 on the headnotes and not the case. (Thanks to Michael Kinder, who found this in the J.C. Bancroft Davis collection of personal papers in the National Archives in Washington, DC, where they had been sitting, unnoticed, for over a century.)

The letter from Davis to Waite asking if he got the comments right precedes Waite's response. Davis writes, after quoting language stating that corporations are persons, "please let me know whether I correctly caught your comments and oblige [reply]."


Karl said:
But with that said, I do believe there is a serious problem with campaigns and politicians - and corruption thereof.

And here, I have a solution.

Public employees... should not be able to receive a campaign donation (in any form) from anyone except an actual constituent...

Let the corporations (and individuals), along with PACs, Unions and others buy all the issue and even candidate ads they want - so long as they honestly identify who is funding the speech in question.

But bar all public employees from receiving any campaign contribution from anyone other than a natural person who is registered to vote in the area represented by that particular politician, with violators subject to felony prosecution. If such an act is traced to a corporation the firm's charter is revoked"

These are NOT solutions. They are not current law. These "solutions" are not even on anyone's radar... Nor will they EVER be on anyone's radar as they threaten newly empowered and turbocharged Corporate "speech". They are, in other words, "pie in the libertarian sky".

As others have correctly stated, individual members of corporations are already protected under the 1st amendment.

Today, there is a divergence between the interests of U.S. multinational corporations and the interests of U.S. citizens. American multinationals are the principal actors in the transfer of wealth from the middle class in the 21st century and have been able to function without resistance from captured government agencies. America's founders and early presidents warned that the safety of the new republic depended on keeping corporations on a tight leash -- not abolishing them, but keeping them in check...


EDIT:

Karl just said:
....o then there is no such thing as Freedom of The Press.
...Last time I checked all (or essentially all) those newspapers were corporations"

OK, now you've jumped the shark buddy....

Last modified: 2010-01-22 17:46:14 by bananamerican

2010-01-22 14:06:14