Creative professional based in Arlington, MA. Specializing in web design for political campaigns, nonprofits, and small business.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Should we amend the Constitution to prohibit or restrict corporate spending on elections?
To me, this isn’t even a close question—but I’ll let a few people answer before I tip my hand.
(I’ll also let people do photo replies because I like to check boxes. And why not? Of course, if people respond with their feelings in picture form, it could get sort of surreal.)
To expand on my Tumblr answer to this question, I think that the debate as framed is missing the larger point - corporations should not have the same legal rights (or Constitutional protection) as individuals. The Constitution, and our entire legal system, is simply a social contract between individuals. A corporation is an artificial entity created within that legal system to confer rights upon a business organization (profit or nonprofit), and the real crime here is that the same Congressional representatives, lawyers, and interests that will trample all over the rights of the individual will rush to defend this fictional ‘corporate bill of rights’.
Corporations should have no First Amendment protection because the Bill of Rights was designed to protect individual rights. Case closed, no constitutional amendment required.
Further reading: Jim Sleeper in the Boston Globe.
1/27/10: P.T. Barnum day?
A thought that occurred to me last night: yesterday you had two of the most captivating and charismatic speakers of the past 25 years, Barack Obama and Steve Jobs, making highly anticipated and possibly historically notable presentations within hours of each other. Both delivered in a big way, Obama with his first State of the Union and Jobs with his long-hinted Tablet (still having trouble calling it the iPad), and both speeches were immediately dissected and argued over by warring and often irrational factions (Mac/PC and Dem/Rep; sorry Linux/Libertarian/Green). It was just an incredible day for rhetoric and vision, whether you agree with the speaker’s view of the world or not*. P.T. Barnum would be proud.
* if it’s not abundantly clear, I am a very clear supporter of the visions and capabilities of both men, even if I’m occasionally critical of execution.
Lieberman
So it appears that Joe Liberman has now hamstrung the health care “reform” bill to the point that there will be no public option, no expanded medicare, etc etc…leaving us with an absolute abortion of a bill that will merely force lower class citizens to buy ever-increasing private insurance. This from a man who has become a pathetic shadow of his former self. How odd, that a Senator from Connecticut would be a shill for the insurance and financial companies.
It’s time. It’s time to stop appeasing this jackass and pretending that he’s anything other than the Republican that he is. Strip him of his seniority, his Committees, of anything resembling power or a platform. Let him play out the string as Senator #100, unable to pass the lowest of bills. Let him crawl over to the Republicans and then lose handily in 2012.
Livejamie put it nicely:
People who claim that Obama is a communist don’t understand what communism is. People who claim that Obama is a socialist don’t understand what socialism is. People who claim that Obama is a fascist don’t understand what fascism is. People who claim that Obama is a Muslim don’t understand what Islam is. And people who support the Republicans because they’re capitalists don’t understand what capitalism is.I don’t know what to think of this video of last weekend’s right-wing-whacko D.C. march. This sort of thing used to anger me. Now, it’s more sad than anything.
I’m all for civilized, informed political discourse. This couldn’t be further from that.
Upside? Maybe Glenn Beck will form some kind of extreme right splinter party and marginalize the extremists even more. It’s not out of the question; these people seem to hate everyone that’s not they’re not familiar with, and well-to-do Republican representatives fall into this category as well.
George Grosz. Cain, or, Hitler in Hell. - Olga’s Gallery
I have a lifelong fascination with all things German, “outsiderish”, and confrontational, so it’s no surprise that I love George Grosz. Dadaist, anti-capitalist, anti-Nazi; Grosz was a deeply disillusioned and cynical artist with plenty of real-world activity to react against visually.
Unfortunately, this was also a pretty accurate description of most Weimar era progressives, and led directly to the major criticism against them: that they were conditioned as permanent critical outsiders and thus unable to transition into an effective governing class. Had they been more efficient at running a democracy, Hitler’s populist rhetoric may never have found a sympathetic audience and his first attempt at “revolution” (which ended in scorn and a jail sentence) may have been his only footnote in history.
I guess there’s probably a lesson here: if you want to change the world through political means, your time is better spent on day-to-day efficiency than criticism. Leave that to the artists, who, after all, are far better critics than a bureaucrat could ever be.
The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.
Paul Krugman (via The New York Times)
Krugman continues his run as our most impassioned and rational voice during this crisis, increasingly criticizing the Geithner/Obama plan as the details continue to unfold. He reiterates another important piece here in a recap of post-Depression financial regulation, pointing out that financial industries used to concentrate on the simple business of attracting depositors and giving out (reasonable term) loans. Boring business, but sustainable and valuable.
Nowadays, we’re sifting through the wreckage of a financial system that was built on usurious loans on the credit side and making money out of money on the investment side. Other industries were no better, leaving us with a nation that builds very little and seems to be dominant only in advertising and increasingly tarnished financial products built around usury. GM didn’t sell cars - they sold “no money down, 0% APR loans!!!”. American Express is in the business of selling debt and collecting infinite payments, not helping people with credit (see the industry reference to those who pay every month as “deadbeats”). Insurance companies are designed to maximize the “float” and invest it in products designed to increase short term stock gains, not the health, life expectancy, or property/casualty security of their clients.
Time to take the necessary steps to dismantle these “too big to fail” zombie banks and get back to concentrating on sustainable growth and long-term goals.
The primary constitutional principle at the heart of this case is the doctrine of equal protection. The concept of equal protection is deeply rooted in our national and state history, but that history reveals this concept is often expressed far more easily than it is practiced. For sure, our nation has struggled to achieve a broad national consensus on equal protection of the laws when it has been forced to apply that principle to some of the institutions, traditions, and norms woven into the fabric of our society. This observation is important today because it reveals equal protection can only be defined by the standards of each generation.
The process of defining equal protection, as shown by our history as captured and told in court decisions, begins by classifying people into groups. A classification persists until a new understanding of equal protection is achieved. The point in time when the standard of equal protection finally takes a new form is a product of the conviction of one, or many, individuals that a particular grouping results in inequality and the ability of the judicial system to perform its constitutional role free from the influences that tend to make society’s understanding of equal protection resistant to change. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes poignantly said, “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.
Iowa Supreme Court, Varnum v. Brien (via julyshewillfly) (via lafuguedantoine)
Glad to see this news today, and I hope that people are finally realizing that this “debate” will eventually be looked back on as negatively as the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. Even disregarding my personal opinion, I have never heard a good argument against gay marriage that wasn’t grounded in some sort of nebulous (usually religious) morality, fear of those who are different, or blind allegiance to the ‘tradition’ of what amounts to nothing more than a legal contract. Rule number one of any legal system should be that you can’t legislate morality, because it’s just too damn subjective.
Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks.
Vactrain Network
When I was about nine years old, I wrote a story for my third grade class about a distant utopia on a foreign world. Most of the details of that story have faded from memory, but the one “invention” that gripped my imagination then still has a hold on me now. I wrote about a series of tubes crisscrossing the planet, shuttling people aboard trains that zipped along in airless tubes. I was undoubtedly inspired by Jetsons cartoons and the pneumatic tubes at the local bank that I would watch from the backseat of my mother’s station wagon, and what I’ve learned since then was that it was hardly a new idea: HG Wells wrote of tube connecting New York and London in the late nineteenth century, Robert Goddard’s notes revealed advanced schematics for a “vactrain” tube from about 1910, and Robert Salter of RAND proposed a network in the seventies. More recent references have integrated Maglev technology to eliminate friction with any track.
No track friction with a Maglev base: check. No air resistance in a vacuum-sealed tube: check. Theoretical speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour, allowing travel from New York to LA in under an hour: check. Power from the existing electric grid, allowing it to become progressively greener as plants integrate renewable sources: check. Greatly reduced wait times, lessened security concerns, and optimally located transport hubs in the heart of major cities: check.
So why are we propping up an airline industry that is environmentally unsound, unpleasant and inefficient to travel with, financially unstable, and showing the effects of tightened budgets in its safety record? Or, for that matter, allowing the pathetically antiquated Amtrak to operate a monopoly on the rails?
How about a stimulus for vactrain innovation, an infrastructure project to rival and even trump the construction of the interstate system? A project that would address many of the Obama goals by creating “shovel-ready” construction projects across the nation, make gigantic strides in the efforts to stem global warming by reducing automobile and jet fuel usage, and simplify foreign policy by helping to wean us off of foreign oil dependence. Furthermore, I’m sure someone smarter than me could conceive of a system of municipal and federal bonds that would help stabilize the overall economy, perhaps by tying them to higher taxes on the ultra-rich as a special class of deduction.
But what would I know…I was just a nine-year old dreaming of a utopia, and we’re all well aware that thing are never so simple in real life.
This is the underpinning of every political theory I’ve ever embraced, and the most important lesson any history student can ever learn (with “nothing is inevitable” as a close #2). Radical Marxism, Ayn Rand objectivism, progressive socialism, and libertarian simplicity - I’ve given them all a long look to get to where I stand now, politically (and ethically), and it all comes back to this very simple concept.
Taken further, there’s the old cliche that power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. This logical conclusion is my primary instinct, and in my opinion, that of any other sane human. It’s why I don’t decry conservatives, liberals, or anything in between as being entirely wrong. Everything is about perspective, and the two sides on any political issue have much more in common than they’d ever admit. Modern Republicans believe that the power of the government is to be feared, while Democrats point the finger at the power of big business to subjugate the helpless citizen.
Me? At the moment I’ve swung farther “left” in the belief that I have more to fear from conglomerate corporations than I do from government. My instincts are libertarian, though the path I follow and positions I espouse may seem contradictory. I lean towards a classic fiscal conservatism and social liberalism that both demand the government to stay out of my affairs, but I believe that our society has been hijacked by an oligarchy that suppresses competition and innovation. While most libertarians these days tend to side with business on the regulatory battles, I would encourage them to rethink their positions. A cabal of ultra-rich and all-powerful individuals controls most of the boards in this country and globally, bribes and harries Congress and regulatory agencies into policies that hurt competition and the regular citizen, skews compensation structures in a system that does more to protect the status quo than to reward innovation and long-term growth, and reaches a point where companies are “too big to fail” and are capitalizing on the taxpayer in a vicious cycle where they take all the reward on the way up and none of the risk when they’ve run the company into the ground.
No, I don’t want government telling me how to live my life - but at this point, broad government regulation is the only tool we have short of a Fight Club-style populist rebellion against the corporate structure…something I hope we never see.
