I’m pitching to FSRN a story about the busloads of people scheduled to follow Kasich to Steubenville for his State of the State on Tues. If it’s OK, when we talk tomorrow, could you please also explain Kasich’s malfeasance, as specifically and concisely as feasible ?
After we talk tomorrow, I will then use that info to finish writing my pitch to Catherin Komp of FSRN. If she and her staff decide to commission the story, we may use an audio clip from you, given your activism experience, plus the fact that you ran against Kasich some time ago.
FSRN features typically are 3-5 mins in length. So a clip from you about how Kasich’s policies affect ‘working people’ and the integrity of our political system probably would be about 20-30 secs. However, if FSRN commissions a headline or a min-feature (about 1-2 mins in length), your clip could be shorter or not included, depending on how FSRN tweaks the story’s focus.
Re-doing the city charter seems a worthwhile subject for reporting too. Maybe you could talk about that a little also if you wouldn’t mind
————–Your counterpoints to the following points in defense of Citizens United and corporate personhood:
(1) Ron Paul has a surprisingly well-funded political campaign (probably second only to Mitt Romney), and almost all of it is from individual contributions. He has very few corporate backers.
That fact should tell you something about whether a higher proportion of individual contributors actually implies a superior candidate.
(2) We do not vote with our dollars. Money does not buy elections. Ron Paul could give me $100,000 and I would still not vote for him. Do you think Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich would be instant locks for the presidency if someone just handed them $1 billion each?
(3) We believe that individuals do not sacrifice their rights when they contribute their money to a common enterprise (i.e., a corporation). Corporations do not have voting rights, for example, because there are human beings behind them and controlling them; to give corporations voting rights would be to give a natural person or persons multiple votes. However, to deny them free speech rights necessarily involves suppressing the speech of a human being (or more than one).
(4) We believe that any suppression of expression is antithetical to democracy; the fact that the expression is funded by a corporate bank account instead of an individual one is immaterial.
(5) Allegiance to the profit motive is a red herring…. We support free speech rights for unions, universities, not-for-profit corporations, and all other corporate entities that often are not staunch defenders of free enterprise, to put it mildly. Don’t get me wrong, most of us who defend Citizens United believe that strong protection of free expression is economically advantageous, but it is also consistent with higher, more fundamental principles of basic liberty.
(6) Waxing rhetorical about “corporate personhood” is the hallmark of someone who simply does not understand the issue. Corporate personhood is an essentially immutable fact of our legal system. Legal personhood simply means existence as an entity at law.
(7) Ending corporate personhood wouldn’t just stop corporations from contributing to political causes, it would end their existence entirely. To say that this would prompt a significant amount of overseas relocations for American enterprises is an understatement.
(8) The issue is which constitutional rights corporate persons enjoy. It is essentially unquestioned that they have Fourth Amendment rights (you need a search warrant to search their property).
They have Fifth Amendment rights (they have the right to due process, and they also have the right to compensation if their property is taken via eminent domain). They have Seventh Amendment rights (the right to a jury in civil cases, as preserved by that amendment). Heck, they presumably have Third Amendment rights (the U.S. Army cannot force Starwood Hotels to act as a barracks). They have First Amendment right to freedom of the press (or if they don’t, that’s news to the New York Times).
(9) Yet somehow progressives seem to think that these rights stop at the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. The self-serving cynicism of such a position is more than a little off-putting … denying fundamental rights in order to secure a financial advantage in election campaigns.
(10) Perhaps rank-in-file conservatives who support the rights of corporations do so not because they are duped into defeating their own self-interest, but instead because they don’t want to hamstring their employers.
(11) Power is dispersed across 300 million hands in this country (less those too young to vote). All men are equal at the ballot box. The way you get to the “concentrated power” meme is to assume that vast numbers people are just so dumb or gullible that they’ll just do whatever someone with a lot of money tells them via an expensive advertising campaign.
(12) Again, the cynicism is galling. It takes money and a good message (or at least a better one than one’s opponent) to win an election campaign.
This material came from the following post on Columbus Underground on the thread entitled Should Corporations Be Considered People Under the Law? http://www.columbusunderground.com/forums/topic/should-corporations-be-considered-people-under-the-law/page/2#post-416185
—–here is a little more————
(13) If you are willing to ban people from using their own money for political advocacy, that creates a whole host of obvious line-drawing problems. And personally, that’s not a country I’d like to live in, where you can spend a billion dollars on anything you want except a candidate you really believe in or cause you really support.
This came from : http://www.columbusunderground.com/forums/topic/should-corporations-be-considered-people-under-the-law/page/2#post-416185
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