So people exercise their First Amendment rights to assemble and associate to form … people? Cause that’s what a corporation is, right?
Puzzling.
Yes, that was my point, what was yours?
If you are insinuating that I said anyone shouldn’t be able to protest you are wrong, I would be raising hell if they were being shut down.
Personally I am hoping that the movement finds a direction and results in change, they will fail at that if they keep holding up the Left’s version of an “Obama is a muslin” signs.
Oh wait, not I miss-read, and was giving you too much credit.
The right of political speech was denied due to corporate artificial person-hood but that is not why Citizens United was overturned.
You can go and read the decision.
“The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.””
The court decided that it didn’t matter in what way a group assembled, that the government did not have the right to restrict political speech from those groups.
The “corporate person hood” claim is as to this decision is of no bearing and if corp person-hood was ended tomorrow this standing would still apply to corporations.
Political speech can not be denied to ANYONE is the point of the ruling.
Having a hard day, Citizens united was not overturned 2 U.S.C. § 441b was.
Republican Mitt Romney tried to sell that too. Not only did he fail, he was laughed at. This is not a freedom of speech issue. This is a corporate power grab, same old ploy corporations have been using over the last 150 years.
Sorry, no sale.
Your assertions are an appeal to popularity, a fallacy.
Yes it did benefit Corporations, do you have any real cite that it is not a freedom of speech issue?
Did you read the decision?
This may be one of the few times I am on the same side as Mitt but I don’t see how it invalidates the ruling.
So besides trying to associate me with someone you find repugnant can you explain why the government should have the right to arbitrary limit political speech?
Why should organized labor be gagged 30 days before an election while fox news is not?
Are the republicans free to shut down my voice as an atheist because they do not agree?
As I said above, when you protect rights you end up supporting people you do not agree with because the same rights that allow them to speak are what allow you to speak.
Well… to begin with there is no such organization as 'Occupy Chicago." They are not registered as a group, have no agenda, and have no leadership… so how could they have a set of demands?
Now there is a group of individuals known in the media as “Occupy Chicago” that is leaderless and has thrown around a few ideas, but I would hardly call that a list of demands. Don’t you need to have someone to make demands to, in order to have demands at all?
Even your own link says;
“And in Chicago at least, they are gradually finding a voice. While the New York protest has been criticized for its catch-all grievances, the Chicago version settled on a platform that was approved Saturday at a “general assembly,” an exercise in direct democracy.”
Who is in this so-called “general assembly?” What are the requirements to be in this “general assembly?” Are these elected positions? What are the qualifications to vote for a general assembly member?
Why am I so sticky on this? Because if Occupy Chicago can be classified as a group with demands, the media and opponents can dissect them. This evolving movement known to the media as “Occupy Chicago” is a movement that is not ready for issues or leadership. Enemies, such as the Teabaggers are salivating to find a way to dismantle the 99%. Please watch your selection of words when posting on this topic. Thank you.
The baggers have many of the same complaints. i would not be surprised to see some of the smarter ones join in. There are Ron Paul types and Libertarians joining. We have a common foe and common causes.
Eh. It is in the vernacular now to link these various “Occupy” groups with their geographic location. OWS is on Wall Street. Others are not on Wall Street, but they’re at Chicago, San Francisco, LA, or wherever. That’s what they are going to be called. It would be best to get used to it since it’s not something you can fight.
Your entire post is one long red herring. You are intentionally trying to blend a lot of ideas together to hijack this thread. Face it Wall Street has no defense for what it has been doing, and you are calling on the usual ‘righty’ distractions to confuse the issue.
Why not go teabagging with your friends instead, and enjoy what is left of the teabagger movement? Teabaggers are fading for not keeping political promises made in 2010.
The 99% are going global in Canada and the UK already. Teabaggers are going nowhere, but into the history books as a radical faction who took hold of the off-year 2010 election. They are bigots who do not like having an African American president. Teabagging is too limited for an international movement. The 99%ers have already reached across the Atlantic Ocean. Bye, bye! 
Wow more personal attacks, and Strawmen with absolutely no content.
Look through my posts in this thread, you may realize you are just spreading vitriol against someone who has similar goals.
Bullying may look like it works to you but it really doesn’t help to accomplish any goals.
I am trying to be proactive and work to find real changes this excitement can move forward with.
But it is apparent that you just want to go out and yell your head off until everyone is tired and goes home with nothing changed.
So please enjoy your ignorance, I am no longer going to take the time to respond to your posts.
I still think this movement needs to find a direction, or it will all be for nothing.
I think moving forward with changes like pass through voting rights for pension holders and mutual-fund owners, like many Union employees or 401K owners have would be a huge step, right now it is the investment company that gets to make those vote.
Also I have said we should extend the excessive earnings tax to C corps, 39% of the $74,000,000,000 in CASH apple is holding onto is a lot.
But who needs ideas or organized citizen efforts to make changes…when calling people names is so productive?
Define a direction. the baggers have a host of complaints and they appear together in parades. A movement does not require a single issue. It merely needs a specific target which is the bankers/top 1 percent. The economy did not go bad. It was destroyed and the people were robbed. The people are suffering while the criminals not only go free but live in luxury and still somehow get treated with deference.
Few can defend them. A few admire the scope of their theft, thinking to themselves if they could have gotten away with a scam of that scale, they may have done it too. But they were not a hell of a lot different than Madoff.
They have to pay for their crimes before the business of America can return. We have to pressure the politicians and the justice department to do their jobs.
I see it as a potential Luther moment- you know, before the 99 theses could be nailed onto the door he had to figure out specifically what his problem was.
I think the movement is raising awareness of a variety of issues. A lot of people feel ripped off, and now scrutinizing the banks, the political process, Wall Street and so on is becoming a national hobby. If everyone is studying these issues as much as I have been, at the very least people will come out of this less likely to be fooled. It has an aspect of a public trial as well- if the protesters bother with months of meetings and fail to make any accusations that stick, then I guess it was just an outpouring of emotion after all. I don’t personally think it’ll end that way.
I’d kind of like to see 3rd political party emerge out of this. Increasing inequality is leaving people feeling under represented.
The GOP would like nothing better that that.
As I said in the thread in the Elections forum, if this turns into a real political movement, it will likely benefit someone like Ralph Nader much more than Obama. The Tea Party had some successes, but it had some real disasters, too.
:rolleyes:
There is content on the website “occupychi.org” that may or may not be a mouthpiece of some, none, or all of the protesters located at the intersection of LaSalle St. and Jackson Blvd. in Chicago, IL, USA. Said content may or may not represent demands of some, none, or all of said protesters…
Well the group exists primarily because the Dems have been bought out and a lot of people know it. Their failure has created it. I’m afraid the Dems may be in for some rough times. I see Occupy Wall Street as a symptom of the disaffection of people who would ordinarily be happy to simply vote Dems and let their guys take care of business. But a lot of people don’t believe that works any more.
Don’t feel like you have to pretend. I am ok with Bricker being your favorite. I just don’t want to be unintentionally insulting.
But there is more to those links. The yoga philosophy bit- I don’t really understand it honestly- but if you just skim it and take a look at the ending, you see that what they are going for is ‘liberation’. It purports to be a step-by-step set of instructions to achieve that, claiming that along the way a person is likely to develop ‘supernormal human powers’. In its way it is an examination of what it means to be human in the first place.
It seems like every culture has something like this. Nirvana, enlightenment, liberation, an afterlife, divine favor or what have you. The yoga philosophy take is interesting because it claims to be a DIY method- it is therefore testable, and 'dopers like testable. Anyway, in the context of the American Constitution I believe one basis for extending rights to people is the Enlightenment idea that people are ‘ends in themselves.’ (Correct me if I am wrong).
A corporation is not even a being. It has no subjective awareness, it can’t achieve ‘liberation’ even in theory, and it isn’t an end-in-itself, but clearly a means-to-an-end instead. Why on Earth would we pretend it is a person for the sake of extending it human rights? And what we’ve done is allow supernormal political expression, as most ordinary humans are unable to contribute tens of millions to advance their interests.
I get the importance of maintaining limited liability, allowing it to enforce contracts- people have decided a corporation is a valuable tool. But I stuggle to see the sense in arguing that we can’t limit it speech without violating the Constitution. What person is not allowed to express their political opinion if corporations’ political spending/influence is limited? Frankly it seems to cut the other way, namely that extending this right to corporations crowds out the rights of actual humans to be heard, participate in their government and achieve true representation.
I can see that. However, the general consensus is that both parties are bought, one perhaps less than the other, but in any case the people are not being represented but rather oppressed and ripped off. The Democrats IMHO have a better chance of recapturing their credibility, but an entirely new party might do better in the long run.
What I’d really like is a third party on the left that pushes the dems to the right, the dems become the new conservative party and the GOP lumbers off into the sunset to retire on Whig Island.
Its gonna be a battle of money against people power. When you see OWS marching, you can almost hear the scratchy sound in the background, the noise of fat cats writing checks. And now, of course, thanks to the Supremes (may the Goddess shrivel their dicks like worms on a griddle!), they can do it in utter anonymity, they can write their checks to Americans for Crunchy Goodness and other such organizations with a proud history of civic virtue going back weeks.
Add to that the full-court press from Republican state legislators to slow, hinder, and, if at all possible, outright deny potential Dem voters.
We need every ally we can muster. Even lukewarm, half-hearted, half-assed Clintonista “business friendly” “centrist” Democrats. Even then, it ain’t gonna be easy. You can expect five rightish leaning TV ads for every one our ours. Look at Lizzy Warren, bless her heart. Great candidate, totally solid. Brown is gonna outspend her maybe ten to one.
Can people power trump money? Wouldn’t that be fucking wonderful?! Hope is the thing with wings. Republicans are the things with shotguns. And we live in interesting times. And we dare not lose.
Nope. But I can be sure of one damn thing, and that is that if a populist movement arises to split the Dem Party, that movement will get big fat checks from Americans for Crunchy Goodness. Why build a new party rather than change the one thats already there?
Now, is that the same old grim song about coalition politics? And does it leave a sour taste in my mouth? Yep. But you have to win to make the changes you want. Yuck-o-rama, but there it is. Nobody would be more pleased than I to see a populist party rise and take power. I would also like a unicorn that eats Republicans and shits Maui Wowee.
Risk is too great.