A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they're treated as public nuisances and evicted.
First things first. The Supreme Court's rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats.
Such millionaires and billionaires aren't contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.
Wall Street is punishing Democrats for enacting the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (weak as it is) by shifting its money to Republicans. The Koch brothers' petrochemical empire has financed, among many other things, candidates who will vote against environmental protection.
This tsunami of big money into politics is the real public nuisance. It's making it almost impossible for the voices of average Americans to be heard because most of us don't have the dough to break through. By granting First Amendment rights to money and corporations, the First Amendment rights of the rest of us are being trampled on.
This is where the Occupiers come in. If there's a core message to the Occupier movement it's that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy.
Yet when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard -- in one of the few ways average people can still be heard -- they're told their First Amendment rights are limited.
The New York State Court of Appeals along with many mayors and other officials say Occupiers can picket -- but they can't encamp. Yet it's the encampments themselves that have drawn media attention (along with the police efforts to remove them).
A bunch of people carrying pickets isn't news. When it comes to making views known, picketing is no competition for big money .
Yet if Occupiers now shift tactics from passive resistance to violence, it would spell the end of the movement. The vast American middle class that now empathizes with the Occupiers would promptly desert them.
But there's another alternative. If Occupiers are expelled from specific geographic locations the Occupier movement can shift to broad-based organizing around the simple idea at the core of the movement: It's time to occupy our democracy.
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The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.: In God's Economy, Everyone Has Enough
And if the "idea" is for their congressional muppets (think about it) to repeal environmental and safety regulations to create extra profits for their corporate masters at the cost of the health and even the lives of the rest of us?
F/F.
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Both are owned by the big money and do not want any kind of spectacle calling their actions into questions. the one thing they both do want is the unwashed masses fighting over the scraps and with each other.
To illustrate this, Orwell used a traffic circle metaphor. If a single driver drives too fast or stops, he has affected the freedom and liberty of the other drivers.
The Preamble of the Constitution clearly outlines the role of the US government to 1) establish justice, 2) insure domestic tranquility, 3) provide for the common defense, 4) promote the general welfare, and 5) secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
It is clear that this SCOTUS and the current Congress of game-fixers and economic saboteurs favors (3) at the expense of the other four, while purloining the flag, religious symbols, and constitutional covenants for their own self-interests.
As a statement of intent, the preamble does not have the force of law, as do the articles - it is subject to far to many broad interpretations. If, for instance, "promote the general welfare" was a statement of the legal power of the federal government, no articles would have been necessary - the government could just do whatever it chose to define as promoting the general welfare.
Of course, all of this historical perspective is now totally lost. Conservatives and Libertarians just want to kill everything related to the welfare state believing that if they only do this we will once again become citizens! They don't understand that welfare state arose for a reason and that without tackling those reasons first, eliminating the welfare state will just make things even worse. Progressives no longer know the reasons for their positions - they just do it instinctively. If Conservative are against the big government they must be for it!
All of this is a result of a deliberate manipulation of American people by globalist establishment. They are followers of Hegel; they skillfully use the Hegelian dialectic to make the state (them) the supreme entity in our society. That is why the "state" (government) grows regardless which "party" is in power. We Americans have allowed foreign ideologies to fundamentally change us. The proof of this is all around us. From citizens to mere subjects.
That's the best you have to offer???
Scalia and his gang stole the 2000 election. Don't have a lot of faith in elections.
I'll bet I have voted more consistently than you.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-cassello/occupy-chicago-scores-vic_b_1094088.html?ref=chicago
The 'Bill of Rights' does not require a paid off judge to 'interpret' them to the citizenry.
If it takes 2 months of having a mass of citizens sitting in a park to get your point out if not across, then so be it.
There is no time limits in the 'Bill of Rights' and the 1% can not be allowed to install any either.
'Safety', 'Health Hazard',... Where are these police with these trumped up charges when non-living corporate beings are actively destroying the environment that we the living, breathing, humanity have to continue to living in.
I could go on with this screed against corporate oligarchy but as a DBA I've got to get back to work.
People were getting sick at Zuccotti. It was clearly a health hazzard. The place was a physical disaster.
Lol!
The speech rights of corporations have nothing to do with whether they are "people" or not.
Money spent on speech is certainly speech, just like any other money spent on a right.
Time to stop commerce from moving.
To call an effective general strike, you need the unions on your side. To get the unions, you need to transform them back into combat units of the class struggle. To transform the unions you need to help the union members replace their leadership with unashamed class fighters. Since union leadership roles are all elected positions but suffer from the same problem as regular political positions in that incumbents have an advantage in elections, to get fighters elected you need to agitate among the union rank and file. To agitate among the union rank and file, you really need to be a union member yourself.
See? Much work to be done.
Tell me that 80 year old grannie was a threat to public order! Tell me how she was such a violent danger to the police! I don't see any OWS violence, all I see is the police thuggery.
Strangely enough, the police are having their unions and bennies threatened, why aren't they guarding the occupiers and joining the march? Instead they seem to be revelling in violence!
If you're looking for sustained public support, and OWS should be, this is no way to run a protest.
But I don't think enough of the OWS protesters have what the civil rights protesters had in them.
Where corporations put their money relative to politics ought to be not only freely accessable to everyone, but should be printed in newspapers, commented upon on television, and available on blogs like HP. We should be allowed to be aware of who and what corporations, through this avenue, throw their support for - and against.
Having said that, the most disturbing aspect is the funneling of secret money through PAC's and SuperPAC's that allows the donors to remain secret. So to your point, we should be aware of who is giving money to candidates.
If we can't get limits on contributions perhaps we can get some transparency into contributions?
The goal of America used to be to build up the standard of living of its people and that of other nations around the world. Now it seems intent on leading the race to the bottom.