#OccupyWallStreet

The BBQ Pit
541

I’d be willing to guess that the crux of the biscuit here is corporate personhood as it relates to political power. I dare imagine that a remedy could be crafted to diminish or eliminate such emanations of corporate personhood without banishing corporations altogether, or even doing them grievous harm.

I’d be willing to be that the shrieking insane radicals gathered would, by majority vote, accept such a compromise quite readily.

Oh. It ticks, does it? Like a precision, well oiled bit of complex machinery. What a relief.

542

Easy pickin’s! My buddy Irving had an uncle Benny who was cremated, and he’s already a Benny urned!

543

One of these days I’ll learn to just never use an analogy under any circumstances. It’s like I’m a highway system and you guys are tollbooths.

My problem is that Bricker’s demand for specificity was an obviously disingenuous cavil; one of many. First there were no demands. Then there were too many. Then they were too vague. Now they’re so specific as to be unrealistic because they’d require an amendment. It’s all bullshit. Rather than just say to begin with “I am against these people’s interests, and they are against mine,” people are pretending that they have half a dozen fucking procedural objections, like: I’d really be interested to hear what they have to say, but they’re just so silly that it’s difficult, and I’m so sad about that.

To be clear: I’m not worried about what the world would be like without corporate personhood at all, and neither is Bricker or any of you, because everyone in the world who has bothered to think about it knows that the real issue here isn’t about destroying the entire concept of corporate rights and responsibilities across the board so that nothing like it is ever seen again. I haven’t seen any insistence that we need to overturn Colonial precedents. Meanwhile there are popular objections to a current high-profile trend in our treatment of corporate personhood, and those are obviously, to anyone who cares enough to spend 45 minutes reading about it, what are probably being referenced by the phrase “Ending corporate personhood.” It’s not at all hard to figure out what these people are upset about, and what they generally want to see happen. It’s a fairly mainstream issue by now.

That they would like things that are very different from the way it is now is not really reason to dismiss them as jokes, and the idea that all of this is supposedly insufficiently explained in a three word blurb and thus apparently the protestors are too unthinking to take seriously, despite the fact that the current Constitutionality of corporate personhood and impracticality of dramatic change to it is addressed in the letter quoted in the god-damned OP of this thread, which he wrote his own god-damned self, is what I’m talking about. That’s just a way to stretch out the amount of time some of us can spend sneering at the protestors. Instead of saying “I don’t want what they want,” we’ll pretend it’s incomprehensible whether they want anything in the first place, even though it absolutely is not; it takes 5 minutes to get the broad strokes, even if you think the strokes are too broad. It’s lazy. And if you get corrected or effectively rebutted on one point, hey, no big deal - you didn’t even mean that in the first place! You’ve got plenty more reasons you can come up with to say they’re for shit!

[QUOTE=Shodan]
You have no idea what you want, no idea of what will happen if you get it, and you want it right away. Good luck with that.
[/QUOTE]

You’ve made this up out of whole cloth. I’m not with the Occupy Wall St. people and have never met any of them, and I don’t subscribe to many of their beliefs. You’ve come to the right place for making shit up about people, at least.

544

It’s called “argumentum ad nauseum”. The right wing apologists on the SDMB have been using it for quite some time now. You’ll get sick of it and give up eventually.

-Joe

545

No it wasn’t - it was a perfectly legitimate question.

Nope. I have no idea what their interests are. Neither do they. And when they are asked to explain what they want, they quickly demonstrate that they have not a clue in the world about what they are asking for.

I don’t know that. Neither do the protesters, and neither do you.

It’s very hard. In fact, it is damn near impossible. Because they don’t know what they want to happen.

No, the reason to dismiss them as jokes is because they don’t know what the hell they are saying, no basic understanding of the problem, and no reasonable solutions at all.

This is bullshit. Throw out a slogan, and then refuse to explain it because it takes more than 5 minutes? Bullshit.

It’s because they have no position to defend.

“Corporations are evil! Corporate personhood should be abolished!”

“Does that mean you want to abolish corporations? Have you thought thru the consequences of that?”

“I’m not going to explain my position! It’s obvious, and you’re just against my interests anyway!”

:rolleyes:

If it helps, take the “you” as addressed to the protesters.

Regards,
Shodan

546

First, I have to say, well explained, Jimmy Chitwood, and thank you for that post.

Having said that I also have to say that Bricker and John Mace are quite right about the importance of corporate personhood, but I think both are way off base about the importance of that concept to the protestors.

My clear understanding as an observer is that these folks are angry about the unequal political influence that has accumulated to corporations and the very wealthy. When we read “End Corporate Personhood” on a banner, the message is not “destroy the underpinnings of our world economy”, but rather “end excessive corporate influence over democratic legislative processes”. It’s that inequity around which the entire “Occupy” movement revolves.
As elucidator noted, it’s the crux of the biscuit here, and IME that biscuit was leavened by the SCOTUS holdings which equate spending with “speech” as a protected right. I guess a mo’ better banner might say Spending Isn’t Speech; It’s Broadcast Volume, but that’s gonna take more crayons and won’t stand out as well on video.

But I doubt you’ll find any brazen anarchists among the OWS participants who couldn’t be reasonably persuaded by a calm rationale for corporate personhood. OTOH, I doubt you’d find many who wouldn’t prefer that those corporate persons were held to the same degree of influence as us eating and breathing kinds of persons.

547

Okay, then can you please explain specifically how you are going to prevent people from forming into groups and donating time and money to causes and candidates they would like to see succeed?

Although you may have a point - organizations that are wealthy, greedy, and often corrupt do influence elections far too much.

Regards,
Shodan

548

We were responding to what people are posting here, not so much what the protesters are saying.

549

Nope. I don’t want the government to do any such thing. I’d like the government to continue to place limitations on the monetary amount individual persons can donate, or spend on pro/anti candidate messaging, or even on purchased media for direct issue advocacy. I don’t consider such spending limitations to be violative of free speech.

I have no problem limiting the political influence of unions and trade organizations to the same degree that corporations are limited. Do you?

However, I’ll note that the table should be examined carefully, in that the “organizations” listed are quite disparate in their functions and in their political actions & influence. For instance, there are essential inherent differences between two of the top heavily Democratic leaning orgs on the table.

-Can you spot the details which make ActBlue essentially opposite from the IBEW on the Democratic<->Plutocratic scale of political influence, even though they both tilt overwhelmingly toward the Democratic Party?

But I’m not really saying anything different than ‘luc’ and Johnny Chitwood, am I?

550

You were talking about corporations earlier. Now you are talking about individuals. Was that inadvertent?

I mention it because of things like EMILY’s List, which donates to pro-abortion female candidates. Under your system, if I donated $10K to my local Senate candidate, and the limit was $10,000, could I never donate to another candidate, or just for that election cycle?

How about donated services? Do those count, and how are they tallied?

A bit more specificity would be helpful.

So? Are you saying that limits on donations are dependent on - well, what exactly?

Regards,
Shodan

551

We were talking about corporate personhood, and the extent to which equal protection under the law for such persons can afford them inordinate political influence, depending on how we define the rights being protected by law. That’s why I made a point to talk about “individual persons”, not just “individuals” so that the slow among us can follow along more easily.

What do you think is fair, considering the fact that I haven’t proposed a particular system? Personally, I’d limit your amount to any particular candidate per election cycle, but not limit the number of candidates to which you could donate. But I’m OK as long as a) there’s a defined limit and b) it’s applied equally to corporate persons and corporeal persons alike.

Actual donated work should be limited to one person-hour per real time hour to avoid massive donated labor from organizations. As far as other “services”, I suppose these could be limited to a specific market dollar value. Again, as long as the limits apply equally, I’m happy.

And I’m only answering in specifics to show that they’re really not a problem. But one doesn’t have to be able to specifically solve all aspects of a particular social or political issue in order to advocate a general approach to that issue. (I remember you took the same tack with those of us opposed to invading Iraq. At least you’re consistent, but a flat learning curve over a nine year period doesn’t look so good.)

552

I’m saying the table is comparing trade unions with corporations with non-profit clearinghouses. Be careful what you glean from that data, because OpenSecrets hasn’t organized it into any real sort of information, they leave that to the reader.

553

Its bound to be a thorny problem. Maybe it cannot be done, but our first problem is dealing with people who don’t want it done, period. They have, you may have heard, great hulking gobs of money. Shit, if the kind of money just the Koch Brothers alone have spent in the last five years were ours, a year from now Congress would be passing the legislation funding English as a Second Language Program for Gay Whales.

If, say, Elizabeth Warren and Paul Krugman were to sit down with me and Krugman, the chipmunk from Mensa, says “We tried, 'luc, really we tried. Turned this thing inside out and upside down, and there is just no way to solve this fucking problem that won’t do irreparable damage.” (I expect at this point Ms Warren would blush prettily…)

I would say, well, shit, ain’t that a bitch! Well, thanks for trying, guess we’ll have to win this one with our sincerity and enthusiasm.

But I think they probably would come up with something workable. If they were to advise that they would be lost without my acute insights, I should be happy to oblige. I’d most likely tell you guys about it. Maybe mention it, in passing. Once or twice.

554

I’d personally (at this late stage in the game) be comfortable with a non-profit class of Political Action Committee-type groups, like ActBlue, provided you couldn’t donate any more to them in an election cycle than you could to any given political figure.

This would provide an avenue for the wealthy to in an sense “double down” by contributing both directly and via as many PACs as agreed with their political positions–provided the PACs were each likewise constrained as to their total seasonal contribution to individual politicians.

In a more general sense–there absolutely has to be a way for people to choose to exercise their right to free speech to address political issues, and contributions to candidates are a good way to do that. However, there also, imho, has to be a way to prevent the system from being corrupted by wealthy influences of any stripe or creed, and one possible way to do that is by implementing a donation cap so no one donor or cabal of donors can simply massively outspend competing voices. To me this is as obvious as the reason why we don’t have a poll tax–money should as much as practical not be a gatekeeper for political influence, either direct (the vote) or indirect (campaign contributions).

555

I find it hilarious that a spontaneous, quasi-anarchic anti-corporate protest already has a “legal team.”

Frankly, I find the whole thing altogether like the Tea Party: a sincere, though wildly generalized howl of protest, which has been rapidly subsumed into the same ol’ partisanship. Already you have Obama and Pelosi – big-money corporate-owned politicians to the bone – jumping on board. And you can guarantee they won’t get pushed off.

Who was it that said the first time is Tragedy, the second is Farce?

556

Yeah, only dirty hippies are skeptical about corporate personhood. Dirty hippies like former Chief Justice Rehnquist He harrumphs:
“This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a “person” entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886).”
Then he quotes that other wild eyed judicial activist, Chief Justice Marshall:
“Early in our history, Mr. Chief Justice Marshall described the status of a corporation in the eyes of federal law: ‘A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created.’” Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 (1819). And finally, Rehnquist had the nerve to argue that not all of the Bill of Rights necessarily applies to Corporations: “The free flow of information is in no way diminished by the Commonwealth’s decision to permit the operation of business corporations with limited rights of political expression. All natural persons, who owe their existence to a higher sovereign than the Commonwealth, remain as free as before to engage in political activity.” Dirty hippy.

Oh yeah. Demands. Don’t worry, they will come (inevitably prompting modern conservatives to do a 180 and whine about shrillness). Unions are looking at this mass movement with interest. They have resources. They also have economists and assorted policy wonks on staff and on call.

557

It’s a far left idea (ending corporate personhood). Whether you want to conflate far left with dirty hippie, that’s on you. I never said anything about dirt or hippies.

And like I said earlier, if we need to have a dialog on what the limits of corporate personhood are, that’s a valid argument to be made. “End corporate personhood”, as has been proposed by posters in this thread, would set the economy back centuries.

558

I dunno, the go-to guy for ending corporate personhood is Thom Hartmann - and he’s the one who I obtained the Rehnquist quotes from. If a corporation no longer is extended freedom of speech, it no longer has the same rights as a person. So that would be ending corporate personhood. The slogan is an obvious reference to Citizens United, simplified for a public audience.

559

Ok, admittedly there’s probably more to it than this. And tossing out a century or so of precedent should be done with some care. You can’t legislate on a bumper sticker, you can only simplify. Of course message board discussions are another matter.

560

Why? It was done by subterfuge, by a ex head of a railroad who became the Supreme Court recorder.
The idea that a corporation is a person is silly. I don’t see the obits of corporations dying. I don’t think they get sick.
The founding fathers were afraid of them and had no problems with revoking ones charter for acting against the public interest. We are sure as hell not going to do that. So what do we do to control them? They run and own the government, now they want to control elections. There are no brakes on them. Yet we accept that they should act without a conscience. They should do anything they can to increase profits without caring about its impact on the land or the people. They fight any government input.