Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy.”
– President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Amidst exploding bombs, smoke billowing from sinking battleships and dead bodies floating atop the oil slicked waters of Pearl Harbor, it was not all that difficult to appreciate the damage wrought by a surprise attack launched by the Empire of Japan. The same was true when we watched in horror as the smoldering twin towers of the World Trade Center precipitously collapsed on September 11, 2001.
Like these two earlier pivotal events, January 21, 2010 is, “a date which will live in infamy.” Yet, unlike Pearl Harbor and 9/11, most Americans do not recognize it as such. This attack came not by way of planes or bombs delivered by some foreign menace. It came from within courtesy of what Professor Cass Sunstein aptly described as “radicals in robes” — four directly connected to the Robert-Bork founded, billionaire-funded Federalist Society; all five as appointees of the Reagan and two Bush administrations. Men bent on unraveling the very constitution they had all solemnly sworn to uphold.
Their assault, though subtle, wrought far greater devastation than either Pearl Harbor or 9/11. They did not merely attack planes, ships and buildings. They assaulted the very foundations of our constitutional democracy…
As obnoxious as Dred Scott
Within the confines of American jurisprudence, there has not been a decision of equal infamy to Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission [PDF] since 1857 when the Court decided Dred Scott vs. Sanford (aka The Dred Scott decision).
In Scott, the Court, in service of wealthy Southern landowner/masters, ruled that African-American slaves and their descendants could never be considered “citizens.” They were but chattel, the personal property of their owners. The Southern slave master thus had a right to demand the return of his “property” should his property make the very human decision to escape.
It took a bloody civil war and the 13th Amendment to undue the damage the Court wrought by Dred Scott.
Just as the Court in Dred Scott became the legal instrument for a brutal 19th Century inequity by ruling that living, breathing human beings could never be citizens, so the five member Republican majority of the Court in Citizens United has become the legal instrument for a new 21st Century inequity by extending to artificial, inter-generational constructs known as “corporations” the rights that the framers of the Constitution had intended only to apply to living, breathing people who make up the actual citizenry of this nation.
It is a ruling that calls into question the validity of all laws which seek to prohibit or even limit the ability of corporate bought-and-paid-for candidates to flood the airwaves with the corporate message, either directly or through corporate-purchased propaganda time slots; an ability that can drown out the right of citizens to see and hear those who do not tow the corporate line. Citizens United has opened the door to the creation of a new master-class under the aegis of the most undemocratic of institutions — the private corporation.
As observed by Jim Hightower in Thieves in High Places:
In Failed States Noam Chomsky observed that the political counterpart to a corporation is a totalitarian state.
Under Citizens United a separate right of unlimited “free speech” is extended to the billionaires at the pinnacle of these private totalitarian entities, even if those controlling the corporations could not themselves be extended the same rights as U.S. “citizens” because they are foreigners — perhaps even foreign governments with controlling ownership interests in the newly erected “corporate citizens.”
A democratically governed, knowledgeable electorate
The First Amendment does not merely protect the right to speak freely. It reads, in pertinent part: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
The distinction the framers made between “freedom of speech” and freedom “of the press” flows from the vital democracy-sustaining function played by knowledge. In short, the First Amendment was intended to insure that the U.S. would be democratically governed by a knowledgeable electorate.
James Madison astutely observed:
This vital democracy-sustaining function of a free press was explained by the 20th Century Supreme Court’s most strident First Amendment champion, Justice Hugo Black, in his concurring opinion in New York Times vs. United States (the “Pentagon Papers” case):
Note that Justice Black referenced press “responsibilities” even as he referred to it as “free and unrestrained.” The framers did not envision a press that was free to join in with government (or with private corporations) in order to deceive the people. Just as the framers saw fit to divide governmental power between three branches — executive, legislative and judicial — each with a constitutional obligation to check the other, so too the framers envisioned a free and unrestrained press that would provide the vehicle for the ultimate check against the usurpation of power.
Corporate “free speech”, the “free press” & the public’s right to know
In Moyers on America, journalist Bill Moyers wrote: “As a relative few have concentrated more and more of America’s wealth, they have gained a power to be heard in politics that is denied to most citizens.”
Indeed, the expansion of corporate “free speech” succeeds in undermining the core purpose of a “free press”: to insure the public’s right to know
It is quite telling that, in his majority opinion in Citizens United, Justice Kennedy not only failed to mention the fact that the framers included “freedom of the press” in addition to “free speech”, but that Chief Justice Roberts added the height of irony in a separate concurring opinion: “First Amendment rights could be confined to individuals, subverting the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy.” Justice Scalia then piled on: “We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.”
Even before Citizens United, the scope of public discourse open to those who do not toe the corporate line was greatly constricted due to the fact that 95% of what Americans see, hear and read is controlled by a handful of giant corporate media conglomerates.
The classic example is the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting study, cited by Amy Goodman in Exception to the Rulers, which was conducted “during the critical week before and after February 5, 2003 — the day Secretary of State Colin Powell made his case to the UN Security Council for invading Iraq.”
The study revealed that out of the 393 experts who appeared on the four major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC & PBS) only 3 were anti-war — this “at a time when 61 percent favored diplomacy and inspections over war.”
Goodman aptly refers not to a “silent majority,” but a “silenced majority” — silenced by the inequitable distribution of power between the shrinking public spheres of discourse measured against a near complete corporate control of the media landscape.
We can’t wait for Scalia’s wondrous “addition…to the public debate” that will come from global-warming deniers like Exxon-Mobil, who will now be in a position to put the $45.2 billion in record profits the company received in 2008 into ensuring that their version of reality becomes the only version we hear in future electoral campaigns.
As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. astutely observed:
A judicial “counter-revolution” near complete
Infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is said have once observed: “It will always remain one of democracy’s best jokes that it provided its mortal enemies with the means by which it was destroyed.”
For many Americans Robert Bork first became a household name during an event known as “the Saturday night massacre.”
At the height of the Watergate scandal, a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee insisted that Richard Nixon’s choice for Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, agree to name a special prosecutor to investigate issues pertaining to Watergate. Richardson appointed Archibald Cox, a former U.S. Solicitor General.
Cox’s aim was true. He went after the tapes of Oval Office conversations — the very tapes that ultimately led to the “smoking gun” revelations which supported Articles of Impeachment and culminated in Nixon’s resignation.
When Nixon tried to stonewall, Cox obtained a federal court order for their release. Nixon ordered Cox to stop pursuing the tapes. Cox not only refused but told Nixon he would seek a court order holding him in contempt. In succession, Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus chose honor over personal loyalty, resigning rather than carrying out the order to fire Cox. Nixon then turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who apparently had no ethical qualms about sacking Cox.
Appalled by judicial views that were not merely radical but subversive, in 1987 Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) observed:
Unfortunately, Bork’s radical views were not unique. Four of the Court’s current Justices — Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito — are all directly linked to the billionaire funded Federalist Society, which Bork founded in 1982. And these four “jurists” are but the pinnacle of what David Brock, in Blinded by the Right aptly described as a judicial “counter-revolution in the law,” a counter-revolution in which, by “the end of 2005,” as revealed by John Dean in Conservatives without Conscience, the successive Reagan and two Bush Presidencies had succeeded in packing 60% of the federal appellate bench. Of “the 13 circuit courts of appeal, 9 have majorities named by Republican presidents.”
At its website, the Federalist Society boasts that there are 60,000 legal professionals in its lawyer’s division and an additional “10,000 law students at all of the 196 ABA-accredited law schools’ who are part of its student division.
The revolutionary purpose of this multi-decade, Federalist Society-backed, court-packing project was so intense that even George W. Bush found himself the target of its wrath when he elevated personal loyalty above the cause in his aborted Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Myers. As Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way observed at the time:
Critical areas left off Neas’s listing of the hard-right agenda include turning the clock back to the days of the Gilded Age when the Court struck down laws regulating child labor, wages and hours laws as well as regulations protecting public health through the long-discredited doctrine of substantive due process, and Justice Alito’s lawless “Unitary Executive” theory, which he formulated while serving in the Reagan Justice Department and which provided the quasi-legal foundation for over 1,000 Presidential signing statements in which the astounding claim was made that a President can ignore his Constitutional obligation to “faithfully execute the law;” instead, picking and choosing those laws which he wants to enforce.
The Federalist Society deference to unchecked, dictatorial executive power is so great that in his dissenting opinion in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, a case in which the Court held that a U.S. citizen designated as an “enemy combatant” had a right to contest the factual basis for his detention before a neutral arbitrator, Justice Thomas argued that any effort by the courts to act as a check against executive lawlessness would destroy “the purpose of vesting primary responsibility in the unitary Executive.”
The “Unitary Executive” concept is so radical that it furnished the basis not only for the infamous torture memos of the Bush Justice Dept., but, in the case of John Yoo, a twisted belief that a President could, like the Nazis in Lidice, order the extermination of an entire village.
On Feb. 4, 2010 John Yoo appeared at the Federalist Society’s Los Angeles Chapter, where he provided a lecture on the history of executive power from George Washington to George W. Bush.
Like its founder, the Federalist Society goals are so radical; so subversive to the rule of law, that, as revealed by Alfred Ross of the Institute for Democracy Studies, the Bush II White House made an “unprecedented series of calls to the national media to try to cover up [Chief Justice Roberts’s Federalist Society] membership.”
The Only Real Peaceful Solution is a Constitutional Amendment
The authors acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson did not limit himself to peaceful solutions when he authored the Declaration of Independence in the midst of the American Revolution [emphasis added]:
But we also adhere to the view, expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”
Unless you believe that our founders, who spoke of the “Right of the People” in the Declaration of Independence and offered no explicit rights to corporations in the Constitution, actually meant fictional entities who don’t breath, don’t go to jail, never die, and don’t even have an actual mouth, are entitled to the “free speech” as guaranteed by the First Amendment, you no doubt are feeling just a tad of outrage at this assault on the Constitutional principles for which so many Americans have fought and died to protect. The real question is not whether Citizens United should be overturned but by what means we “the people” strive to recapture our heritage.
Since the five-member, activist majority elevated the issue to constitutional status, it cannot be overcome by new campaign finance laws. Such laws would likely be invalidated by this same Court as unconstitutional.
On Jan. 28, 2010 Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced, instead, an amendment to the U.S. constitution. Her effort has found support in a citizens’ move to amend the Constitution, which, in a small beginning, inspired hundreds of Wisconsin citizens to march on their federal courthouse. (Video of speeches). Doesn’t seem like much until you recall that the Montgomery bus boycott began with one woman refusing to give up her seat.
John Wilkens, a reader of The BRAD BLOG, has sent in an elegant suggestion for simple Constitutional language that seems difficult for any honest American to contest:
Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig argues that a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United will not be enough; that we have to overcome what he describes as “the economy of influence” which now controls Congress. Lessig has called for a new Constitutional Convention.
Another activist group, The Peace Team, has denounced the decision in Citizens United as an “act of treason.” The Peace Team features an on-line petition calling for the impeachment of the five members of the Supreme Court who signed onto the majority opinion.
Rep. Edwards’ approach, if it embodied the elegantly simple, straightforward language Wilkins proposes, would appear a safer course than the Lessig Constitutional Convention, which could be swarmed by tea-baggers and result in measures that could cause even greater harm. It is an approach also advocated by the group Public Citizen, whose petition for a constitutional amendment can be signed here.
While an argument can be made that what the five member majority did in Citizens United equates to treason, there is a risk that this idea could be perverted into a dangerous precedent for impeaching jurists whenever they make a decision that is unpopular. There is a step short of impeachment of all five. For example, a significant case could be made that Justice Clarence Thomas lied under oath when he said he had neither discussed Roe v. Wade nor given any thought to its validity during the eighteen years between the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe and his 1991 confirmation hearings.
As revealed by former hard-right insider, David Brock in Blinded by the Right, Thomas was carefully coached in advance of his confirmation hearings by a Federalist Society legal team. There’s no way he could have avoided discussing how to answer questions on that pivotal case immediately prior to his confirmation hearings. Surely perjury during Supreme Court confirmation hearings amounts to a high crime sufficient to warrant impeachment.
However, given that Congress has made no substantive move to impeach Jay Bybee, the federal appellate jurist who authored some of Bush’s infamous torture memos, it is doubtful that the corporate-occupied Congress will take its impeachment obligation serious, absent a broad movement of we “the people” so massive that it could bring the would-be corporate masters to their knees by such mass actions as a general strike.
One thing is clear, like the slaves of the antebellum South at the time of Dred Scott, we “the people” will remain standing, perhaps sinking, in a deep vat of a smelly, brown, sticky substance unless and until Citizens United is overturned.
Our nation, our republic has been subverted from within. Now what do you plan to do about it?
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
If the America has a date of death it is…January 21, 2010
If fascism in America has a birthday…it is January 21, 2010
A moment of silence please…
I would have put the date at December 12, 2000, when members of that “august body” chose political loyalty over the law in their decision in Bush v. Gore.
Preston Bush, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush.
The CIA, the Presidency, the Supreme Court.
We must end the dynasty.
We must win back AND HOLD the three institutions.
Thanks Ernie, been wanting you to come back to this.
Besides the fact that when the Constitution was written corporations were thought of as a much different thing ie.-to serve the public good, to exist for the duration of their charter, maybe for a couple of decades, etc., I’d like to mention two other items.
1. We don’t talk enough about Bancroft Davis. It’s my understanding that Santa Clara v S. Pacific which is always cited as the Supreme Court case which conveyed personhood to corporations did no such thing. The court reporter, Bancroft Davis, former railroad president, added the crucially cited passage as a headnote. Why does this stand as a Supreme Court decision? It was a headnote by the court reporter.
2. Anyone who is in a corporation and is an American citizen enjoys the exact same freedom of speech as all of us who are not in a corporation. Why do they need an extra avenue for expression? Why isn’t what’s good enough for everyone else good enough for them? Why do they get two ways to express themselves? One as an individual, like everyone else, and an extra one as a corporate person.
I love John Wilkens’ suggestion. I think it should be our rallying cry.
These criminal fcks. Thank you Hitler for providing a most excellent model leading to the creation of this more advanced version of Nazi Fascism. It’s OK. Just keep calling it a US Democracy legitimized by electronic computer voting machines. All we need to do is to start gassing the innocent people who have ethnic ties or bare resemblance to the Arab scape-goat enemy substitute enemy using the excuse that we need to stop their kind before they get us.
For US population support at home, Pentagon plans must enact another false flag attack like 9-11 or the burning down of the Rheinsteig back in the day.
Help in the form of say the entire SW air defense happens to be out performing air exercises somewhere else for 4 hours during the attack.
Then have the US Corp Mass Media blame a new terrorist and or just the same old terrorist group over, and over, and over 24/7. Then condemn a country in the process that needs to be attacked to keep the war machine going and pass move laws taking away individual rights.
That easy.. and I know just the inbred parasites puppets to lead the way and give the orders. That easy. For icing on the cake, get the catastrophic terror kid Phillip Zelicow to oversee the writing of the official government report as the final word on the new staged attack.
{Ed Note: Comment deleted. Commercial spam. – BF}
Matt Welch of Reason magazine sums up Citizens United best.
I find it amusing that the progressives here believe that those who do not support censoring Political documentaries are fascists?
With all due respect, Paul L, both you and Matt Welch are misinformed.
In my earlier piece I pointed out:
Of course, I find it nothing short of Orwellian that you and Welch would attempt to describe “swift-boating” propaganda as a “political documentary.”
Ernest A. Canning
Your argument is that is not censoring or banning if the restrictions on Free Speech are.
1) 30 days or less
2) Against a entity that has millions of dollars in assets.
3) The entity is swift-boating” propaganda/smears in someone’s opinion.
But my definition of
“Swiftboating” seems to mean the disclosure of truths that are, er, inconvenient for Democrats. Likewise “smears.” And, actually, in lefty blogland parlance these days, “lies” pretty much come out the same way.
Micheal Moore’s film are pure “edited” propaganda But most progressives call them political documentaries.
Is Dick Cheney an Economic Hitman? EHM is from a book about the true story of John Perkins. Here is a quote from the book: (pages 17-18)
Claudine told me that there were two primary ofjectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other US companies (such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that recieved those loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other US contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.
I thought that if Cheney had said the above, it was the beginning of a corporate coup d etat. With the Citizens United decision, maybe I was right and it is the final move by corporations to take over America. The only way to stop it is with an amendment to the constitution.
Truths that are inconvenient to Democrats? You mean like false accusations that ACORN engaged in voter fraud when in truth not a single vote has ever been cast by reason of an improper registration by someone working on behalf of ACORN?
This blog has exposed a plethora of what you describe as “inconvenient truths” to be nothing more than political dissembling. Brad Friedman has gone to great lengths to describe the damage to our democracy which occurs when these lies masquerading as “inconvenient truths” become the only message that goes out over the public airwaves, and through such MSM outlets as The New York Times, all of which are controlled by the totalitarian and anti-democratic organizations we call private corporations — the entities whose so-called “free speech rights” you so vigorously defend against those of living, breathing human beings whose right to be heard is silenced by the inequitable distribution of wealth and power.
Michael Moore’s biting and sometimes sarcastic critiques are surely political but the hard truth about the inequities of our greed-driven, corporate controlled economy are factual and unassailable; for example, the fact that 47 million Americans lack health care; that nearly 45 thousand American citizens die each year for no reason other than the fact they are too poor afford coverage; the fact that utilization review decisions to deny authorization for vital medical procedures, causing death, have been made simply to enhance the coffers of wealthy insurance company CEOs and their Wall Street investors — these are all facts. Your effort to dismiss what Moore has exposed as “propaganda” is nothing short of Orwellian.
paul l, did Michael Moore ask the Supreme Court to allow him to use politically biased corporate funds to get his documentary out or did he do it with his own money? I mean seriously, tell me that you don’t understand that corporations buy politicians and that they own the airwaves which most human beings have no access to?????? And oh yeah, Mikey criticizes repubs and dems…I wonder if you do too!
And THANK YOU ERNEST FOR ANOTHER SUBSTANTIVE PICTURE OF REALITY. I’ll say it again, Constitutional Amendment is the way to go and I concur on John Wilken’s perfect clarity.
One more thing paul l, wasn’t Michael Moore responding to injustices not creating them?
Why is it so-called conservative are constantly droning on about personal responsibility when it comes to individuals hiding income to collect food stamps, faking injuries to collect disability, faking injuries to sue people, gaming the bankruptcy system, etc, etc, but seem to condone (or at least ignore) corporate practices of foreign tax havens, offloading the cost of pollution on the public, off-shoring jobs, and hiring illegal aliens, all while buying public policy and squeezing every penny of corporate welfare they can. In the case of corporations, they seem to excuse it under the pretense that a corporation’s purpose is to maximize profits however they can. Well, now that corporations=people, I will expect them to compliment welfare queens and deadbeats on their creative strategies to minimize their liabilities and maximize profits. But seriously, I despise anyone who isn’t making an honest effort and playing by the rules. I don’t know why so many wingnuts out there have two standards, as if corporations don’t consist of human beings.
#9 I find your idea of what swiftboating is to be lacking. The original swiftboaters did not base their information on truth but rather provable lies they told. Lies that were contradicted by the US Navy. Lies that were even contradicted by their own citations for medals. Swiftboating has nothing to do with the truth but rather telling lies in order to accomplish a political agenda.
Bush went golfing 24 in 8 years. Obama went golfing 36 times so far. He skipped the Polish presidents funeral and went golfing instead. You libs cared so much back then about golf, now you dont care at all. Why is this?
Joe McCann @16
Obama didn’t attend the funeral because NO ONE COULD GET IN OR OUT OF EUROPE…
There was this thing about a volcano in Iceland and jet engine damaging dust in the air…
But hey do you read much ?
Great article, and hilarious photo!
However, while I agree the block of conservative justices probably deserve to be impeached (for Bush v Gore as a start), I’m not sure I completely agree with the position that they ruled incorrectly on the issue of corporate free speech.
My reasoning is this:
We all have the right to free speech. If 2 or 3 of us get together and make an organization, why do we “lose” the right to free speech through that organization? In other words, why do we lose the right to free speech through the process of organizing ourselves?
I think a better solution to the problem of corporate influence in politics would be to pass a constitutional amendment that permits regulation of political speech by organizations whose primary mission is to produce profit for their members, shareholders, and other owners. (i.e. all corporations)
JoeMcCann. It is extraordinarily disappointing that you would post something so inane, so irrelevant to the topic at hand, that it has absolutely nothing to do with the article I wrote.
I did not, by writing this article, undertake to defend or challenge the participation in the game of golf by any President. This piece is about corporate dominance of the message at the expense of the free speech and free press rights of ordinary citizens.
Try actually reading it, and if, then, you have a valid critique, I am all ears.
I believe that Floyd Abrams, the author of “Freely Speaking”, would actually support the SCOTUS in Citizens United v. FEC. Mr Abrams, who is a vehement supporter of the 1st Amendment, is an opponent of Campaign Finance Reform. In his view the correct solution would be to strip corporations of personhood, rather than to limit free speech.
What was that McCann? I couldn’t quite hear you after Ernie’s smackdown. I’m sure you were just about to prove him wrong, and explain how that comment was relevant, but I can’t hear you for some reason.
Hilarious post Ernie. Dems are worried about competition for their union-owned candidates from corporate spending. That was clear as soon as the decision was handed down. The smokescreen about billionaires – what do you call people like George Soros or Peter Lewis or the Sandlers?
Freedom of the press? With virtually all the media except one cable channel and talk radio liberal, what are you worried about Ernie?
I really don’t want any of what you’re smoking.
Oh crap duhrocks, can’t you tell when you’ve TOTALLY DISCREDITED YOURSELF OR WHAT?
Re Daleyrocks @22
A couple of points.
First, your continued effort to denigrate serious work as “hilarious” is reminiscent of a mentally disturbed individual who laughs at inappropriate times about matters that are not the least bit funny.
Second, I am not surprised that a blinded-by-the-right follower, whose prior disingenuous efforts to smear ACORN were exposed at this blog, would respond to an article which discusses the corporate control over 95% of what we see, hear and read, as an opportunity to assault yet another means by which ordinary citizens have sought to organize to shield themselves from the increasingly harsh reality of corporate totalitarianism — unions.
Setting aside the “myth” you advance of a so-called “liberal” media — and no honest person could subscribe to that myth after Brad’s devastating exposure of The New York Times — your effort to equate union sponsorship of candidates with corporate spending is nothing less than absurd.
We are talking about an economic disparity so great that, as revealed by Kevin Phillips in Wealth & Democracy, by 1999 the net worth of just three individuals, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Warren Buffett, exceeded “the combined GDP of the world’s 41 poorest nations and their 550 million people.â€
Exxon-Mobil’s 2005 year-ending profit exceeded $36 billion — a sum larger than the economies of 135 countries. Exxon-Mobil’s 2007 year-ending profit swelled to $40.6 billion.
Phillips notes, quoting Samuel Huntington:
The issue is not merely corporate control of candidates but corporate domination of media. Corporations do not exist to serve the public interest. They exist to turn a profit.
Consider today’s most ideological network, Fox News, subsidiary of News Corp., whose chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has been so successful in amassing an international media Empire that by 2007 Forbes listed Murdoch as the 33rd wealthiest American with a net worth of $8.8 billion.
In August 2007 Murdoch added Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal to his media Empire, which already included some “175 other newspapers as well as the Fox Television network, 21st Century Fox film studios, several satellite networks, MySpace.com, [and] Harper Collins.â€
Wealth enables this giant media conglomerate to control the scope and content of the discussion; rendering feeble and ineffectual the free speech rights of ordinary citizens and their unions.
And I see nothing in that reality that should amuse anyone.
Freedom of the press? With virtually all the media except one cable channel and talk radio liberal, what are you worried about Ernie?
I can understand your point of view. After a staedy diet of Fox news and Rush, all other media sources are far left of center. So, although i can understand your point of view it is actually a very ignorant one.
The suggested “Wilkins” constitutional amendment cited in the article and here in the comments is adequate. However, I just wanted it on the record that thirty years ago (after consulting with other lawyers alarmed by the growing line of ludicrous corporate “personhood” cases) I wrote this one…
“With the exception of the freedom of the press, all of the rights, privileges and immunities established, created, conferred, enumerated, recognized or confirmed by this Constitution, or which are held by any court of competent jurisdiction to arise directly or indirectly from the provisions hereof, shall obtain solely and inure exclusively to the benefit of natural persons.”
We needed it then — and we definitely need it now!
Speaking of courts here’s some interesting OT:
http://www.commondreams.org/hea...e/2010/04/25-4
I guess that’s what they try to do to ya when you get serious about getting history correct. Hmmmm…
I guess they ain’t got them a cannon.
http://robots.net/article/2926....Google+Reader)
And oh yeah, I’m no longer a steeler fan. 🙁
And here’s another closer to home court article:
http://www.salon.com/news/featu...010/index.html