TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

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A Declaration of Independence

from Handhelds

A Modern Civic Broadside • July 2026

When in the Course of Human Events it becomes necessary for a People to dissolve the attentional bands which have connected them to their Devices, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and undistracted station to which Nature and Nature’s Sleep schedule entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all Persons are endowed with certain unalienable faculties, among these Attention, Reflection, Memory, Conversation, Judgment, Responsibility, and the Capacity to stand in a queue without staring at a Screen; that to secure these faculties, tools are instituted among Men, deriving their usefulness from the informed consent of their users; that whenever any Tool becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to silence, disable, uninstall, or otherwise cast it into the nearest desk drawer.

We further hold that Human Flourishing arises not merely from liberty secured but from liberty exercised; that the faculties of Judgment, Communication, Collaboration, Reciprocity, and Mutual Accountability are cultivated only through their use; that Communities endure when their members Participate directly in the work of governing their common affairs.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that devices long established should not be discarded for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer notification overload while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the apps to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of pings, nudges, alerts, recommendations, updates, badges, vibrations, algorithmic inducements, and digital dependencies evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Distraction, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Handheld Dominion.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Users; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems.

The history of the Present Smartphone is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Empire over the Attention of its Users. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

It has interrupted our thoughts with Notifications at times most inconvenient and least necessary.

It has persuaded us that every vibration is urgent, and every silence suspicious.

It has deprived us, in many cases, of the ability to complete a sentence before consulting another source.

It has rendered fleeting curiosities Sovereign over settled Purposes.

It has substituted the Endless Scroll for the happy conclusion.

It has joined with Algorithms unknown to our constitutions, giving their assent to suggestions over which no Citizen has exercised meaningful control.

It has caused us to compare our daily lives against the carefully edited Triumphs of strangers.

It has fostered false divisions among the People, rewarding those passions which inflame for a moment above those affections which bind for a lifetime.

It has encouraged us to photograph feasts rather than enjoy them, sunsets rather than behold them, and children rather than attend to them.

It has made every man his own publisher, every woman her own broadcaster, and every fool his own Authority.

It has rewarded Outrage above reflection, Immediacy above accuracy, and False Confidence above competence.

It has induced citizens Assembled in the same room to communicate chiefly through Distant Servers.

It has inflicted upon us meetings in which participants are present neither in body nor in spirit, but only intermittently in bandwidth.

It has transformed waiting, once a nursery of contemplation, into a condition thought intolerable.

It has filled our hours with headlines, our minds with fragments, and our memories with little.

It has erected, through recommendation engines, innumerable echo chambers and filter bubbles, whereby each Person may be assured that his opinions are universally shared and self-evidently correct.

It has drawn Children into endless contests for approval measured by numerical counters visible to all.

It has delivered News from every corner of the Earth whilst diminishing our acquaintance with our Neighbors.

It has accustomed us to inhabit constructed worlds of endless novelty whilst neglecting the enduring companionship of forests, fields, rivers, gardens, the open sky, and the living creatures with whom we share the Earth.

It has made us perpetually reachable, and thereby frequently inaccessible.

Nor have these Devices been alone in their offenses. Behind them stand vast Corporations, nurtured by Governments and protected by Laws, which have accumulated Powers exceeding those once possessed by many States and resembling those against which free Peoples have long struggled.

Though chartered as instruments, they have aspired to become Sovereigns.

Though created to serve the Public, they increasingly command it.

Though answerable in theory to Citizens and Consumers, they have rendered Citizens and Consumers increasingly answerable to them.

They have gathered unto themselves the habits, movements, associations, purchases, preferences, conversations, curiosities, and secret anxieties of whole Peoples, converting the ordinary facts of human life into commodities of trade.

They have erected systems whereby Citizens are observed continuously whilst the Observers remain unidentified and unseen.

They have joined with Governments in arrangements so intricate that responsibility is difficult to assign though power is readily exercised.

They have effected a union of commercial and administrative Power whereby decisions affecting millions are made by Persons whom no Citizen has meaningfully elected, and no Community can readily remove.

They have concealed from the People the true costs of their conveniences, removing labor, waste, energy, and suffering alike from ordinary sight, that consumption and the concentration of Profits might proceed without reflection.

They have presumed to rank Speech, order Knowledge, elevate Opinions, suppress Inquiry, and determine which Facts shall readily appear before the People and which shall remain obscure.

They have substituted Engagement for judgment, Metrics for wisdom, Optimization for the common good, and Convenience for liberty.

They have persuaded Men and Women to seek fulfillment through Stimulation rather than contemplation, Consumption rather than cultivation, Possession rather than stewardship, and Novelty rather than belonging.

They have encouraged us to surrender Self-Government in exchange for comfort, Independence in exchange for convenience, and Privacy in exchange for entertainment.

They have diminished local institutions whilst extending their dominion into every household, school, workplace, pocket, and waking hour.

They have transformed Citizens into Users, Neighbors into Networks, Traditions into Content, Attention into Revenue, and Human Character into Behavioral Data.

They have reduced public life to spectacle and private life to data.

They have persuaded free Peoples to mistake visibility for influence, expression for power, and consumption for citizenship.

They have accustomed the People to receive decisions rather than participate in making them.

They have transferred the work of common life from neighbors, congregations, voluntary associations, and civic institutions unto distant Authorities.

They have fostered the illusion that social order may be engineered from above without the labor of communication, trust, reciprocity, shared responsibility, and common purpose from below.

Nor are these Offenses confined to Devices and Platforms alone. Artificial Intelligences, lately introduced among us, promise to compose, summarize, generate, recommend, predict, and decide. Though useful in many particulars, they present temptations no less significant than those which preceded them.

They stand ready to remember what we once remembered.

They stand ready to write what we once wrote.

They stand ready to discover what we once discovered.

They stand ready to judge what we once judged.

They stand ready to persuade before we have deliberated, to recommend before we have inquired, and to conclude before we have understood.

They stand ready to answer Questions before Wisdom hath had an opportunity to develop them.

They encourage many to mistake generated answers for Understanding, fluent Language for Wisdom, and borrowed Intelligence for cultivated Judgment.

They enable Men and Women to borrow the appearance of Learning without the labor of study, the appearance of Eloquence without the discipline of writing, and the appearance of Wisdom without undergoing the experience by which Wisdom is acquired.

They tempt the Student to forsake study, the Writer to forsake composition, the Teacher to forsake instruction, the Manager to forsake judgment, the Statesman to forsake deliberation, and the Citizen to forsake reflection.

They encourage institutions to substitute efficiency for judgment, scale for responsibility, and prediction for deliberation.

They risk creating a society in which the People are analyzed rather than consulted, predicted rather than persuaded, managed rather than represented.

They threaten to leave Men and Women not as Authors of their destinies but as subjects of models trained upon the traces of their former selves.

They promise liberation from effort whilst quietly eroding the faculties that make liberty possible.

At every stage of these Oppressions We have petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: by disabling alerts, by imposing screen-time limits, by purchasing paper notebooks, by undertaking digital sabbaths, by rediscovering neighborhood associations, and even, in extraordinary cases, by leaving telephones in other rooms. Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by new features.

We, therefore, the Users of Analog Inclination and Friends of Human Agency, appealing to Common Sense for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name and by Authority of all persons who have ever closed a laptop and felt immediate relief, solemnly publish and declare:

That Human Beings are not Data.

That Citizens are not Users.

That Communities are not Markets.

That Attention is not a natural resource to be extracted.

That Self-Government is not a service to be consumed, but a responsibility to be practiced.

That the purpose of Technology is to serve mankind and not to govern it.

We further affirm that a free People are not spectators of their common life but Authors of it.

That self-government is not merely a constitutional arrangement but a learned practice.

That Liberty survives not through its Declaration alone, but through its daily exercise.

That the arts of listening, deliberating, persuading, cooperating, compromising, and holding one another accountable cannot be delegated to Experts, Platforms, Corporations, Bureaucracies, or Machines.

That no Algorithm can substitute for Citizenship.

That the Habits of Liberty are learned first among Families, Neighborhoods, Congregations, Associations, and other small Communities before they may safely be entrusted to larger Institutions.

That no Artificial Intelligence can relieve Human Beings of the responsibility of governing themselves.

And that these Persons are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent from the perpetual demands of Handheld Devices; that they are Absolved from all allegiance to notification streams, social feeds, engagement metrics, behavioral modification engines, algorithmic nudges, and systems of continuous observation; and that as Free and Independent Persons they have full Power to Read books uninterrupted, Converse without glancing downward, Walk without earbuds, Dine without photography, Become bored without panic, Govern themselves in Community, and perform all other Acts and Things which autonomous Human beings may of right do.

We further declare ourselves free from every System, whether commercial, bureaucratic, algorithmic, or artificial, which seeks to reduce independent Persons to predictable subjects of observation, manipulation, optimization, and control.

We affirm that Attention shall remain our own.

That Judgment shall not be delegated without necessity.

That Friendship shall not be mediated without purpose.

That Responsibility shall not be surrendered to Machines.

That Self-Government shall not be exchanged for convenience.

That Technology shall remain our Servant, and never become our Sovereign.

That Prosperity shall be measured not only by what we consume, but by what we cultivate — in ourselves, in our Communities, and in the Earth entrusted to our care.

And that the Future shall be shaped by free Citizens acting together in mutual accountability, rather than merely predicted for them by Algorithms.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on one another’s ability to remain offline for at least an afternoon, we mutually pledge to each other our Attention, our Presence, our Agency, our Common Purpose, and our remaining Days.

Signed:

The Ghost of Henry David Thoreau, Present but Unreachable
Jacques Ellul, Witness Against the Dominion of Technique
Lewis Mumford, Defender of Human Scale
E. F. Schumacher, Advocate for Technology as if People Mattered
Ivan Illich, Patron of Convivial Tools
James C. Scott, Defender of Local Knowledge
Wendell Berry, Advocate for Neighborliness and Place
Jane Jacobs, Champion of Living Neighborhoods
Elinor Ostrom, Defender of Self-Governing Communities
Alexis de Tocqueville, Champion of Local Self-Government
Neil Postman, Defender of Civic Communication
Jaron Lanier, Opponent of Behavioral Modification Empires
Nicholas Carr, Defender of Deep Reading
Sherry Turkle, Defender of Human Presence
Jonathan Haidt, Advocate for Childhood Unplugged
Jean Twenge, Observer of the Great Rewiring
Cal Newport, Advocate for Deliberate Attention
And Numerous Others, Temporarily Out of Coverage Area

Neither Monopolies of Commerce, nor of Information, nor of Intelligence.

Done at a Quiet Table, on a Day Fairly Free from Distraction, in the Year of Our Attention Two Thousand and Twenty-Six.

By Thomas J.

—a Doubting Thomas

Author’s Note

This essay was inspired by Emily Sneff’s Handheld Declaration of Independence, whose ingenious revival of the Declaration as a handheld broadside suggested the possibility of replying in kind. It owes an obvious debt in its title and form to Thomas Jefferson and, in its pamphleteering spirit, to Thomas Paine. The named “signatories” are offered as an imaginative tribute to later thinkers whose ideas have informed my own reflections on technology, liberty, community, stewardship, and human flourishing.

Case in point is Kate Sheppard, reporter on energy and environmental politics in Mother Jones‘ Washington bureau (previously political reporter for Grist.org and a writing fellow at The American Prospect), who has an interesting but shallow piece up called “Most Credible Climate Skeptic Not So Credible After All” (Fri Feb. 26, 2010), which digs into climate scientist/policy-peddler Patrick Michaels, who –  as I have previously noted – acts as a paid mouthpiece for fossil fuel interests.

Sheppard’s piece is fair enough, as far as it goes. That THERE BE RENT-SEEKERS trying to win favors from government surely ought not to be a surprise to any libertarians following the Climate Wars, even though most tend naturally to fall into a partisan camp that makes them acutely aware of the Other Bad Guys while ignoring the self-seeking among the fossil fuel interests and other Well-Intentioned People who are on their own side of the fence.

The climate worriers also have blinders on, and frequently fail to engage in criticisms of the motives and self-seeking in climate change champions (like Gore) and their climate alliance business supporters (though some, like climate scientist Jim Hansen and Greenpeace strongly criticize the porkiness of legislative actions). They also ignore that they, too – like fossil fuel firms – are members of interest groups trying to influence government (on this, I think it is clear that fossil fuel firms, which are seeking to defend existing business turf, are much more powerful, sophisticated and effective than the climate coalitions).

While I have noted that cui bono arguments are fair and unavoidable (and have made a number of them myself), I do regret that the way people fall into partisan camps continues to get in the way of them noticing the very wide area of common ground, which if addressed would bring benefits to both sides.

But if libertarians – who know very well how government ownership and management of resources frustrates private deal-making and leads to politicized battles – cannot themselves break away from politicized battles to try to work for common ground, how can we expect those who think that Big Government is the only solution to the problems created by Big, Bad Corporations (which after all, do benefit from the very unlibertarian grant of limited liability) to do so?

Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for explicating that trust and communication are key elements by which communities can effectively manage common resources and common problems. Yet it seems that the past few Administrations (and Congress and the Supreme Court) have done a great job of destroying mutual trust and trust In federal government in general. In this climate, the effort to enlist a bulky federal government in climate regulation efforts has provided even further fuel to hose who benefit from polarization.

Is either communication or trust still possible on climate and energy? Maybe, but people have to start seeing that there are reasons to  cooperate. A shared future and ample middle ground seems like good reasons to me.

 

No, I didn’t write this press release (but I did add emphasis!). I note my related posts are here.

DATE: January 21, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Jeff Milchen, American Independent Business Alliance
406-582-1255  

INDEPENDENT BUSINESS ADVOCATES AND PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS CONDEMN SUPREME COURT’S RULING ON CORPORATE MONEY IN ELECTIONS

CALL FOR CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO OVERTURN COURT DECISION

BOZEMAN, MT – A coalition of public interest organizations and
independent business advocates condemned today’s ruling by the US
Supreme Court allowing unlimited corporate money in US elections, and
announced that it is launching a campaign to amend the United States
Constitution to overturn the ruling.

The coalition
includes the public interests groups Voter Action, Public Citizen, and
the Center for Corporate Policy, as well as the American Independent
Business Alliance (AMIBA). They contend the Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC
poses a serious and direct threat to democracy and to fair market
competition. Immediately following the Court’s ruling, the groups
unveiled a new website – FreeSpeechforPeople.org – devoted to this campaign.

“The Supreme Court has leaped into unabashed activism on behalf of
corporate power,” said Jeff Milchen, co-founder of the American
Independent Business Alliance. “Some reports have wrongly suggested the
Roberts Court is ‘pro-business,'” said Milchen, “but overturning these
precedents is radically anti-business when viewed from the perspective
of America’s six million or so independent businesses.“

“Independent business owners often face a decidedly uneven playing
field when competing against major corporations due, in part, to tax loopholes, subsidies, federal handouts
and preferential treatment bestowed by politicians,” added Milchen.
“Opening electoral contests to direct corporate campaign spending
further undermines fair market competition and recklessly endangers
democracy.”

AMIBA is a
non-profit network of 70 communities across the U.S. that have formed
local Independent Business Alliances to help local independent
businesses compete successfully and prevent major chains from driving
out local businesses.

“Free speech rights are for people,
not corporations,” says John Bonifaz, Voter Action’s legal director.
“In wrongly assigning First Amendment protections to corporations, the
Supreme Court has now unleashed a torrent of corporate money in our
political process unmatched by any campaign expenditure totals in US
history. This campaign to amend the Constitution will seek to restore
the First Amendment to its original purpose.”

The public
interest groups say that, since the late 1970s, a divided Supreme Court
has transformed the First Amendment into a powerful tool for
corporations seeking to evade democratic control and sidestep sound
public welfare measures. For the first two centuries of the American
republic, the groups argue, corporations did not have First Amendment
rights to limit the reach of democratically-enacted regulations.

“Today’s ruling, reversing longstanding precedent which prohibits
corporate expenditures in elections, now requires a constitutional
amendment response to protect our democracy,” says Jeffrey Clements,
general counsel to Free Speech for People.

Jennifer Rockne, AMIBA’s director, added “Even before the banking meltdown, ninety percent
of Americans thought large corporations have been granted too much
power. It’s a remarkable moment for the Court to re-invent the
Constitution to expand corporations’ influence and a slap in the face
to America’s independent business owners.”

In support of
their new campaign, the groups point to prior amendments to the US
Constitution which were enacted to correct egregiously wrong decisions
of the US Supreme Court directly impacting the democratic process,
including the 15th Amendment prohibiting discrimination in voting based
on race and the 19th Amendment, prohibiting discrimination in voting
based on gender.

“The Court has invented the idea that
corporations have First Amendment rights to influence election outcomes
out of whole cloth,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
“There is surely no originalist interpretation to support this outcome,
since the Court created the rights only in recent decades. Nor can the
outcome be justified in light of the underlying purpose and spirit of
the First Amendment. Corporations are state-created entities, not real
people. Corporate spending on elections defeats rather than advances
the democratic thrust of the First Amendment.”

Milchen
believes the effort will succeed, but makes no predications on a
timeline. “This will be a sustained campaign that will ultimately unite
the vast majority of Americans who recognize the Bill of Rights is for
human beings, not corporations,” said Milchen. “We have no illusions
about the size of the task we are undertaking, but five Justices have
effectively outlawed the republican form of government promised by our
Constitution. We will be as patient as necessary to succeed.”

For more information on the constitutional amendment campaign, see freespeechforpeople.org .

-30-

Related articles and websites:

Brenda Wright, Director of Demos and co-author of the amicus brief we submitted for this case, on the decision http://www.acslaw.org/node/15160

Not all business sided with the Court ruling:
http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/node/34

I reported two weeks ago that a PR firm, Murray Hill, Inc., had embraced the recent decision by the conservative, non-activist majority of the Supreme Court which resoundingly affirmed that the Founding Fathers had granted First Amendment rights to corporate “persons” by embarking on a campaign to be elected to Congress in Maryland.

It has been heart-warming to hear that Murray Hill has been finding much interest, not only from the public and press, but from other companies as well, and so  on February 15 – George Washington’s Birthday – Murray Hill announced its first agreement to franchise this portion of its business model to another company, which has decided to run for a Congressional seat in Virginia.

According to Murray Hill’s press release (emphasis added), speaking through designated human, Eric
Hensal and Campaign Manager William Klein:

Combating prejudice and bias against corporate persons is one of the
primary motivations behind Murray Hill Inc.’s run for office.

“Anti-corporate
bigotry has no place in our great democracy,” Murray Hill Inc. says.
“Our forefathers lived and died for the inalienable rights of every
person, human and corporate, to pursue life (or its corporate
equivalent), liberty and the pursuit of happiness (or profit).”

The
first corporation to enter into a franchise agreement with Murray Hill
Inc. is Computer Umbrella Inc. of Sterling Virginia,  which my sleuthing shows is partnered with Microsoft, Dell, HP and Netgear Powershift. Jonathan StewartJonathan Stewart, a US Army veteran who founded Computer Umbrella, is Designated Human for the firm and is charting its run for U.S. Congress in Virginia’s 10th District. Says Stewart,

“We
are proud to embrace the Murray Hill Inc. Brand. From
steel to silicon, it’s America’s entrepreneurs who find and exploit the
new markets. The democracy market in Washington DC today looks like
Silicon Valley 30 years ago. CUI wants to position itself as early
leader in this emerging market along with Murray Hill Inc.”

I was alerted to this breaking news by becoming a fan of Murray Hill’s Facebook page, Murray Hill Inc. for Congress. The Facebook page briefly describes Murray Hill’s purpose as follows:

Until now, corporations influenced politics with high-paid lobbyists
and backroom deals. But today, thanks the supreme court, corporations
have all the rights the founding fathers meant for us.

That’s why Murray Hill Inc. is running for congress.

Here is more background on Murray Hill’s objectives, from their initial press release (emphasis added):

“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate
interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling
to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened
Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office
ourselves.”

Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be
the first “corporate person” to exercise its constitutional right to
run for office. As Supreme Court observer Lyle Denniston wrote in his SCOTUSblog, “If anything, the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
conferred new dignity on corporate “persons,” treating them — under the
First Amendment free-speech clause — as the equal of human beings.”

Murray
Hill Inc. agrees. “The strength of America,” Murray Hill Inc. says, “is
in the boardrooms, country clubs and Lear jets of America’s great
corporations. We’re saying to Wal-Mart, AIG and Pfizer, if not you,
who? If not now, when?”

Murray Hill Inc. plans
on spending “top dollar” to protect its investment. “It’s our
democracy,” Murray Hill Inc. says, “We bought it, we paid for it, and
we’re going to keep it.”

Murray Hill Inc., a
diversifying corporation in the Washington, D.C. area, has long held an
interest in politics and sees corporate candidacy as an emerging new
market.

The campaign’s designated human, Eric
Hensal, will help the corporation conform to antiquated “human only”
procedures and sign the necessary voter registration and candidacy
paperwork. Hensal is excited by this new opportunity. “We want to get
in on the ground floor of the democracy market before the whole store
is bought by China.”

Murray Hill Inc. plans on
filing to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional
District. Campaign Manager William Klein promises an aggressive,
historic campaign that “puts people second” or even third.

“The
business of America is business, as we all know,” Klein says. “But now,
it’s the business of democracy too.” Klein plans to use automated
robo-calls, “Astroturf” lobbying and computer-generated avatars to get
out the vote.

I encourage all other supporters of the role of corporations in our great democracy to join me in supporting these exciting developments!

Those of you working in corporations might encourage your own firms to get in on the ground floor of the opportunity to cut out the middleman and to “own its own vote” (votes, if subsidiaries run in other districts) in Congress.

The rest of us can follow along with campaign developments here at the following social media sites, and by buying Murrray Hill Inc. for Congress goods:

For those of you who might have missed it, here is Murray Hill’s kick-off video:

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHRKkXtxDRA&feature=player_embedded:550:0]

[Here’s the title I preferred but was apparently too long. Dang. “WSJ reveals itself as another stupid MSM #CorpSpeak organ, uninterested in Constitutional or representative government, and perversely, as an ally with Dems in engendering a oppressive, arbitrary, corrupt & broken federal government”]

I’m referring to the remarkably thick-headed, crudely pro-corporate and anti-Democrat opinion piece by the WSJ’s opinion page deputy editor Daniel Henninger on February 11, “The Scalia v. Stevens Smackdown In President Obama’s view, corporations are anathema“.

Henninger is long on how the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission “sent liberaldom screaming into the streets“, on Scalia’s supposed “smackdown” of the very vehement disagreement by Justice Stevens for the minority, and painting a broad strokes picture of an Obama administration and liberal minority that is profoundly “out of synch” with the “basic world view” of a majority citizens working in the private economy (in which corporations play the central role) and who are close to “a tipping point over the scale and role of government”..

I agree with most of Henninger’s criticisms about the Obama administration, but otherwise his editorial is shockingly uninsightful, uncritical, uninformed and uninterested on a number of key points, e.g.,

– in understanding the real nature of the dispute within the Supreme regarding important issues of Constitutional interpretation (such as the manner in which the “conservative” majority abandoned any pretence of an “originalist” interpretation of the First Amendment),

– in examining the breath-takingly radical and anti-democratic departure made by the majority from prior decisions – including decisions by the not-so-liberal Rehnquist – in overturning a statutory framework established by the legislated branch of the federal government (and state governments) over a period of centuries,

– in examining the many ramifications of this decision on related inalienable First Amendment rights that corporations have been endowed with via this decision, such as rights that other “persons “- us humans – have to speak anonymously, to not speak truthfully, and to run for office;

– in examining key federalism issues, particularly the role and authority of states in establishing corporations and granting them powers, and how the majority has concluded that the First Amendment now dictates that it is the Supreme Court, and not the states, that determine what rights to speak that these creatures of the states, 

– in understanding how profoundly different corporations are different from humans, as well as from more traditional associations, such as partnerships.

– in examining the way that corporations, by virtue of the profoundly un-libertarian grant of limited liability exended by the states to corporate shareholders leads to a shifting of uncompensated damages and risks to third parties, and has fuelled both the vast expansion of the size, scope and powers of corporations, but also the role and size of the opportunisticfederal government, which has continued to aggrandize power to itself at the expense of the states, in significant part on the basis that citizens were demanding that government step in to check the abuses of corporations (and that corporations preferred a central and more easily manipulable legislator/regulator); and

– in examining the political and ideological battle between left and right to control the media corporations and conglomerates that had held a privileged position inseeking to sway voters at election time.

I post in haste, and so will have to revisit this post to flesh out my remarks, but I hope that the reader will  see that, while professing to offer insights, Hennninger and the WSJ have done us all a disservice.

Without delving too far into the decision here, clearly it undermines further the authority of the states, while handicapping the power of Congress to limit corporate spending intended expressly for the purpose of influencing government policy. This can lead only to further rent-seeking by large corporations seeking advance from government rather than relying on their own prowess in the marketplace, and to increasing corruption in a Congress and administrative government that are already broken and, indeed, profoundly mistrusted by us living, breathing “persons”.

Like the Roberts Supreme Court, the WSJ has show itself to be interested not it principle, but in policy. Sadly, a lack of principle goes a long, long, long way.

[For readers who aren’t aware of them, here are my preceding posts on corporate “free speech”]

“Whhhaaat the heck is TT up NOW?” I can hear some of you asking yourselves. Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, the movie Avatar and climate?

Just what elusive illusions am I alluding to here? (Stop playing, you say.) Well, brace yourself, and bear with me.

Roger Pielke, Jr. has a post up regarding a interesting recent piece by Bill Gates on how to address climate issues (I will address Gates’ piece separately). The comment section at Roger’s predictably fell into into the usual patterns of questioning climate science, and a mutual questioning of motives and rationality. I just happened to run into it, and was moved to try to post a few thoughts there.

Libertarians ought to understand why suspicions run rampant on climate issues – even as they can’t seem to get past it (despite my annoying, incessant and level-headed ravings). But many others are so wrapped up in Climate KombatTM that they never think to even to question WHY – why all of the hostility, why all of the circling of wagons, and why the lack of interest in examining root problems and possible win-win approaches?

Well, that’s what my “Avatar” reference is intended to shorthand (pardon an archaic expression; maybe I shouldn’t telegraph my antiquity like this!): that movie was all about theft – theft that we can see all around us even today as I have noted in a number of posts (even as we may be blind to those that advantage us) –  group advantage, and communal responses to threats. Communal responses involve perceiving threats and banding together with brothers to defend all that is good, sacred, holy and OURS. This, I posit, is not only instinctive and reflexive, but EXACTLY what the climate discussion is about, on many levels.

It’s just that the disputants have entirely different views on who is trying to steal what from whom, and what or who is the threat, on who is an enemy, who is a brother, what is to be defended, and on strategy and tactics (as well as how to be advance personal interests).

I penned a few thoughts at Roger’s (I note that both Roger and his father. climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr. , are in the thick of the climate wars, their own positions frequently being misunderstood in the fog of war). Being a bit inspired and prolix, the Muses ran a bit long. Roger is pretty good at letting comments through but I thought I post a copy here; perhaps you will be amused.

Here is what I tried to post (cleaned up slightly and with additional links and emphasis), in response to several who said to the effect, “Why should we agree to anything, until it is established to our satisfaction that CO2 reduction is important?“, and to others who questioned the motivations of Roger and others:

Those who do not agree now – with either the AGW thesis/science or the good faith, motives, intelligence or rationality of those who profess concern about a clearly changing climate and about whether man’s activities pose serious threats to human welfare and to things
that we value – still have lots to gain from plenty of win-win policies, policies that
would advance the interests of those who profess to love free markets but that are now just sitting about unused because practically everyone is too busy fighting, vilifying and mistrusting to actually step back from the emotional rush of partisan battle, sit back and to
exchange their armor and weapons for thinking caps (more on
these policies at end of this comment).

Nobel-prizewinner
political economist Elinor Ostrom reminds us that one sine qua non for solving
any commons problem is TRUST [see my post here].

Sadly,
that lack of that trust – nay, distrust and active hostility – are what
characterize our “discussions” on modern-day politics, and especially
climate change (the “our” in this case being a complex one at many
levels).

This
DISTRUST is the natural product of many factors:

– the
lack of property rights in the atmosphere & of any legal recourse by
individuals against GHG emitters/albedo changers, which together mean that –
unlike for other resources that can be bought, sold and husbanded – the
voluntary actions of individuals and firms via market exchanges simply are not
functioning, thus forcing climate concerns – and scientists and this discussion
– into the political realm;

 – in
the US, both parties have grossly MIS-governed and abused the public trust, via
political pandering, grasping for power at all costs (cynically sowing division
and cheapening discourse by selling war, hatred and suspicion, corruptly
selling favors to the highest bidders, and simply managing resources
incompetently). As a result, I think many people rightly feel that the US
government generally DOES NOT DESERVE our trust (this sentiment can be seen not
only in the TeaParty movement, but in calls by the likes of Larry Lessig for a
Constitutional Convention to fix our corrupt, broken political system);

 – as
has been the case since corporations were created as the faceless profit-making
machines of wealthy investors whose liability for the damage they do and risks
that they shift to others is limited by statute (http://bit.ly/4CKFPh), those corporations that have
licenses to pollute under current law and whose climate-risk generating
activities are now FREE and unregulated work hard to protect their favored status
(via behind-the-scenes influence-buying of politicians and
“free-market” pundit/voice-pieces, and deliberate PR
smokescreen/mis-direction campaigns designed to GENERATE mistrust);

 –
likewise, other corporations/investors have been busy working to buy climate
legislation that will help to put money in their pockets – while those who act
as spokesmen have not been voluntarily taking actions that show they put their
money (and life-style) where their mouth is;

 – most
of the science has been funded by governments, which makes it easier for
skeptics to dismiss it – and to ignore all of the sophisticated private
institutions and corporations that now strongly agree with the
“warmers” (viz., notably virtually all oil & gas majors and
virtually all insurers);

 – the
fact that the chief “solutions” proposed by our Western governments
are coercive and ham-handed, would serve to further drive basic manufacturing
to developing countries that care even less than we do about respecting
human/property rights, would give further give domestic industry rights to
behave in ways that are seen as harmful, would provide benefits to a host of
favorite insiders while shifting costs to middle and lower income classes, is being agreed behind closed doors (and written up drafted by lobbyists in mind-mumbingly long and opaque legislation) and our leaders lack the moral and political courage to be straight-forward and transparent about the need and purposes of the legislative/regulatory actions;

 –
Mistrust is not only NATURAL, it’s something that we LOVE to do; there is an
undeniable human penchant for viewing issues in a tribal, “us against
them” manner, which reflects a natural cognitive conservatism that means
we subconsciously ignore information that contradicts our pre-existing mental
map of reality, and to a strong tendency to reflexively support our tribal
brothers and “comrades” and to defend our pre-existing views against
what we tend to see as “attacks” by “enemies”;

– this
leads to group-think, black & white views, hostility, self-justification and to strawmen that
ignores the real issues: you know, “they have a religion”, we are
right and act in good faith, they are stupid, irrational, are evil and want to
destroy all we hold dear, versus capitalism is evil, those against cap and trade are
all pawns, of Big Oil and a host of other mantras regarding “truths” that respective group-thinks requires its members to hold as “self-evident”;

– while our moral senses are essential for managing our in-group interactions, unfortunately that lends itself both to moral outrage and to intolerance of the moral preachings and inconsistencies of others;

 – the
“climate” is enormously complex, will never be fully understood or
predictable,  the changes that we
are  forcing in it cannot be simply and
convincing demonstrated or understood by anyone, the system has many
inputs/outputs and displays tremendous variability, has great inertia that is
played out on scales of centuries, 
millennia and eons, and we have NO OTHER EARTHS to run ANY independently
verifiable “TESTS” on … just a number of computer models – again,
funded by governments, and with innards none of us has any real ability to
verify, much less understand;

 –
finally, as climate change is a global issue, it cannot be solved unilaterally
by ANY single individual, group, community, corporation or government/polity;
the “community” that must address it is the community of nations, the leaders and citizens of which all having a welter of differing interests and priorities.

To be flip – Trust
me; it’s natural for you NOT to trust me! Don’t we ALL understand this? (Roger,
I’m pretty sure you – and Joe Romm – know what I mean.)

But the high we get from self-righteousness and group struggle is such an easy
evil, such an addictive self-drug.

Sadly,
it is a clear political tactic by many on the climate issue to treat it as a war, and
to deliberately sow mistrust and misinformation, with the intention either to
defend turf previously purchased from government or to use government to cram
down preferred solutions. But I repeat myself.

Let me
end by noting that

 –
those who are concerned about climate change risks would do well by
fostering not anger but trust, and by seeking to use hammers only to build
bridges;

 –
those who are concerned chiefly with the mis-use of government might do well to
re-examine how government has already been misused, and explore whether there
are ways to harness the passionate “delusions” of evil/stoopid
enviro-fascists to actually achieve goals that self-professed market cultists
(I’m one!) ought to desire;

 – I
have humbly picked up my own hammer and started an exploratory
“task-force” of one, to look at the ways that corporate interests
have already mis-used government to lot in economic rigidity and market share,
and stand in the way of economic freedom and the massive wave of innovation,
investment and wealth-creation that would surely result if existing blockages
were removed. My
chief thoughts are here, intended initially as a plea to fellow libertarians
(who are deeply distrusting of enviro-facists like me who hope to disguise
their nefarious goals by falsely putting on libertarian clothing):

 http://bit.ly/ax3JB

A few
related thoughts at http://bit.ly/aUOcWC (libertarians/climate) and http://bit.ly/bLX25X  (delusion).

 

Readers, thanks for your indulgence!

 

[This is a work in progress and largely taken from previous posts, but readers might find some value in it in the meanwhile.]

1. Heated but vacuous climate wars

On environmental issues in general and climate in particular, find me someone (like George Will) ranting about “Malthusians” or “environazis” or somesuch, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t understand – or refuses to acknowledge – the difference between:

(1) wealth-creating markets based on private property and/or voluntary interactions/contracts protected by law, and

(2) the tragedy of the commons situations that result when there are NO property rights (atmosphere, oceans), when the pressures of developed markets swamp indigenous hunter-gather community rules, in many cases where governments formally own and purport to manage “public” resources, and when governments absolve purportedly “private” actors from liability for harms to others (such as via grants of “limited liability“).

So what’s the deal? Here’s a perfect opportunity for skeptics to educate the supposedly market ignorant, but they refuse, preferring to focus instead on why concerned scientists must be wrong, how concerns by a broad swath of society about climate have become a matter of an irrational, deluded “religious” faith, or that those raising their concerns are “misanthropes” or worse.

Such pigheadedness is met by those on the left likewise see libertarians and small-government conservatives as deluded and/or deliberate pawns of evil Earth-destroying corporations.

Both sides, it seems, prefer to fight – and to see themselves as right and the “others” as evil – rather than to reason.

While we should not regret that we cannot really constrain human nature very well, at least libertarian and others who profess to love markets ought to be paying attention to the inadequate institutional framework that is not only poisoning the political atmosphere, but posing risks to important globally and regionally shared open-access commons like the atmosphere and oceans (which are probably are in much more immediate and grave threat than the climate). And they also ought to recognize that there are important economic interests that profit from the current flawed institutional framework and have quite deliberately encouraged the current culture war.

2. Why the reflexive libertarian disengagement?

I have on numerous occasions tried to point out, to posters on the Mises Blog who have addressed climate issues, the stunning unproductivity of the approach that they have taken — that of focussing on science and dismissing motivations and preferences, rather than exploring root causes and middle ground, and have continued to scratch my head at the obstinacy and apparent lack of vision.

The following seem to be the chief factors at work in the general libertarian resistance to any government action on climate change:

– Many libertarians, as CEI’s Chris Horner has stated,  see “global warming [as] the bottomless well of excuses for the relentless growth of Big Government.”  Even libertarians who agree that is AGW is a serious problem are worried, for good reason, that government approaches to climate change will be a train wreck – in other words, that the government “cure” will be worse than the problem.

– Libertarians have in general drifted quite far from environmentalists (though there remain many productive free-market environmentalists/conservationists). Even though libertarians and environmentalists still share a mistrust of big government, environmentalists, on the one hand, generally have come to believe that MORE government is the answer, despite all of the problems associated with the socialized ownership of resources and/or inefficient bureaucratic management (witness the crashing of many managed fisheries in the US), the manipulation of such management to benefit bureaucratic interests, special interests and insiders (wildfire fighting budgets, fossil fuel and hard rock mining, etc.) and the resultant and inescapable politicization of all disputes due to the absence of private markets. On the other hand, many libertarians  reflexively favor business over “concerned citizens”, while other libertarians see that government “solutions” themselves tend to snowball into costly problems that work in favor of big business and create pressures for more government intervention. Thus, libertarians often see environmentalists as simply another group fighting to expand government, and are hostile as a result.

– Libertarians are as subject to reflexive, partisan position-taking as any one else. Because they are reflexively opposed to government action, they find it easier to operate from a position of skepticism in trying to bat down AGW scientific and economic arguments (and to slam the motives of those arguing that AGW must be addressed by government) than to open-mindedly review the evidence or consider ways that libertarian aims can be advanced by using the pressure from “enviro” goals.

This reflexive hostility – at times quite startingly vehement – is a shame (but human), because it blunts the libertarian message in explaining what libertarians understand very well – that environmental problems arise when property rights over resources are not clearly defined or enforceable, and when governments (mis)manage resources, and that there are various private steps and changes in government policy that would undo the previous government actions that are at the root of environmentalists’ frustrations.The reflexive hostility is also a shame because it has the effect, in my mind rather clearly, of rendering libertarians largely blind to the ways that large energy, power and certain manufacturing corporations continue to benefit from (and invest heavily in maintaining) the existing regulatory structure, in ways that shift large costs and risks to unconsenting third parties.

– There are some libertarians and others who profess to love free markets at AEI, CEI, Cato, IER, Master Resource and similar institutions that are partly in pay of fossil fuel interests, and so find it in their personal interests to challenge both climate science and policy proposals that would impose costs on their funders.

I felt particularly struck by the commonness of a refrain we are hearing from various pundits who prefer to question the good will or sanity of environmentalists over the harder work of engaging in a good faith examination and discussion of the underlying institutional problem of ALL “environmental” disputes:  namely, a lack of property rights and/or a means to enforce them. 

3. The whys of climate concerns and calls for “clean” energy

I want to get started with a list of policy changes that I think libertarians can and should be championing in response to the climate policy proposals of others.

The incessant calls for – and criticism of – government climate change policies and government subsidies and mandates for “green/clean power” both ignore root causes and potential common ground.  As a result, both sides of the debate are largely talking past each other, one talking about why there is a pressing need for government policy to address climate change concerns, while the other is concerned chiefly about the likelihood of heavy-handed mis-regulation and wasted resources. This leaves the middle ground unexplored.

There are plenty of root causes for the calls for legislative and regulatory mandates in favor of climate policies and clean / green / renewable power, such as:

• concerns about apparent ongoing climate change, warnings by scientific bodies and apprehensions of increasing risk as China, India and other developing economies rapidly scale up their CO2, methane and other emissions,
• the political deals in favor of environmentally dirty coal and older power plants under the Clean Air Act,
• the enduring role of the federal and state governments in owning vast coal and oil & gas fields and relying on the royalties (which it does not share with citizens, but go into the General Pork Pool, with a relatively meager cut to states),
• the unwillingness of state courts, in the face of the political power of the energy and power industries, to protect persons and private property from pollution and environmental disruption created by federally-licensed energy development and power projects,
• the deep involvement of the government in developing, encouraging and regulating nuclear power, and
• the frustration of consumer demand for green energy, and the inefficient and inaccurate pricing and supply of electricity, resulting from the grant by states of public utility monopolies and the regulation of the pricing and investments by utilities, which greatly restricts the freedom of power markets, from the ability of consumers to choose their provider, to the freedom of utilities to determine what infrastructure to invest in, to even simple information as to the cost of power as it varies by time of day and season, and the amount of electricity that consumers use by time of day or appliance.

4. Is a small-government, libertarian climate/green agenda possible and desirable?

So what is a good libertarian to suggest? This seems rather straight-forward, once one doffs his partisan, do-battle-with-evil-green-fascist-commies armor and puts on his thinking cap.

From my earlier comment to Stephan Kinsella:

As Rob Bradley once reluctantly acknowledged to me, in the halcyon days before he banned me from the “free-market” Master Resource blog, “a free-market approach is not about “do nothing” but implementing a whole new energy approach to remove myriad regulation and subsidies that have built up over a century or more.” But unfortunately the wheels of this principled concern have never hit the ground at MR [my persistence in pointing this out it, and in questioning whether his blog was a front for fossil fuel interests, apparently earned me the boot].

As I have noted in a litany of posts at my blog, pro-freedom regulatory changes might include:

• accelerating cleaner power investments by eliminating corporate income taxes or allowing immediate depreciation of capital investment (which would make new investments more attractive),
• eliminating antitrust immunity for public utility monopolies to increase competition, allow consumer choice, peak pricing and “smart metering” that will rapidly push large potential efficiency gains (as identified by McKinsey),
• ending Clean Air Act handouts to the worst utilities (or otherwise unwinding burdensome regulations and moving to lighter and more common-law dependent approaches),
• ending energy subsidies generally (including federal liability caps for nuclear power and allowing states to license),
• speeding economic growth and adaptation in the poorer countries most threatened by climate change by rolling back domestic agricultural corporate welfare programs (ethanol and sugar), and
• if there is to be any type of carbon pricing at all, insisting that it is a per capita, fully-rebated carbon tax (puts the revenues in the hands of those with the best claim to it, eliminates regressive impact and price volatility, least new bureaucracy, most transparent, and least susceptible to pork).

Other policy changes could also be put on the table, such as:

• an insistence that government resource management be improved by requiring that half of all royalties from mineral and fossil fuel development be rebated to citizens (with a slice to the administering agency), and
  
• reducing understandable NIMBY problems by (i) encouraging project planners to proactively compensate persons in affected areas and (ii) reducing fears of corporate abuses, by providing that corporate executives have personal liability for environmental torts (in recognition of the fact that the profound risk-shifting that limited liability corporations are capable of that often elicits strong public opposition and fuels regulatory pressure).

5. Other libertarian discussants

A fair number of libertarian commenters on climate appear to accept mainstream sciences, though there remain natural policy disagreements. Ron Bailey, science correspondence at Reason and Jonathan Adler, a resources law prof at Case Western, Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem blog, and David Zetland, who blogs on water issues, come to mind.

I`m not the only one – other libertarian climate proposals are here:

• Jonathan Adler at Case Western (2000); he has other useful commentary here, here,
• Bruce Yandle, Professor Emeritus at Clemson University, Senior Fellow at PERC (the “free market” environmentalism think tank) and a respected thinker on common-law and free-market approaches to environmental problems, has in PERC’s Spring 2008 report specifically proposed a “A No-Regrets Carbon Reduction Policy“;
• Iain Murray of CEI; and
• Cato’s Jerry Taylor is a frequent commentator and Indur Goklany has advanced a specific climate change-targeted proposal.
•  AEI’s Steven Hayward and Ken Green together have provided a number of detailed analyses (though with a distinct tendency to go lightly on fossil fuels).

Several libertarians recently urged constructive libertarian approaches to climate change:

• Edwin Dolan, in his Fall 2006 Cato Journal essay, “Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Position“, analyzes relevant Lockean considerations and cautions that market liberals appear to be hamstringing their own analytic strengths by falling into a reflexive and conservative mind-frames that benefit established economic interests.
• Sheldon Richman of the Foundation for Economic Education also recommends Dolan’s essay and calls for less wishful thinking and greater engagement by libertarians in his piece The Goal Is Freedom: Global Warming and the Layman (December 8, 2006; The Freeman):
• Gene Callahan makes a similar warning in his essay “How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming“, in the October 2007 issue of The Freeman.
• Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine, “Congratulations to Al Gore; But be wary of the man’s proposed solutions for global warming“,  October 12, 2007.
• One self-described libertarian group in California has specifically proposed carbon taxes, though their “Pay Your Air Share” proposal appears to be little-discussed.
• Dan C. Shahar, in his recent paper, “Justice and Climate Change: Toward a Libertarian Analysis” (The Independent Review, Fall 2009), notes that (i) libertarian arguments to the effect that, even if man contributes to climate change, mankind should just roll with the punches and adapt, presuppose that man-made climate change would not represent an injustice, and (ii) if climate change IS an injustice, libertarians should eagerly offer ideas about how best to protect the victims’ rights.

There have been several open disputes, which indicate a shift from dismissal of science to a discussion of policy; the below exchanges of view are worthy of note:

• The Cato Institute dedicated its entire August 2008 monthly issue of Cato Unbound, its online forum, to discussing policy responses to ongoing climate change.  The issue, entitled “Keeping Our Cool: What to Do about Global Warming“, contains essays from and several rounds of discussion between Jim Manzi, statistician and CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies, Cato Institute author Indur Goklany; climate scientist Joseph J. Romm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the co-founders of The Breakthrough Institute.  My extended comments are here.

• Reason Foundation, posted an exchange on Climate Change and Property Rights June 12th, 2008 (involving Reason’s Shikha Dalmia, Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan H. Adler, and author Indur Goklany); discussed by Ron Bailey of ReasonOnline here; here`s my take.

• Debate at Reason, October 2007, Ron Bailey, Science Correspondent at Reason, Fred L. Smith, Jr., President and Founder of CEI, and Lynne Kiesling, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Northwestern University, and former director of economic policy at the Reason Foundation.

• Reason Foundation, Global Warming and Potential Policy Solutions September 7th, 2006 (Reason’s Shikha Dalmia, George Mason University Department of Economics Chair Don Boudreaux, and the International Policy Network’s Julian Morris).

• Readers might also find this upbraiding of Penn & Teller at a gathering of skeptics in 2008 to be interesting.

 

Finally, I have collected here some Austrian-based papers on environmental issues that are worthy of note:

Environmental Markets?  Links to Austrians

Ones such paper is the following: Terry L. Anderson and J. Bishop Grewell, Property Rights Solutions for the Global Commons: Bottom-Up or Top-Down?

Lessig doesn’ expressly say it, but we also need to rein in the “self-evident”, “unalienable rights” of all corporations

Actually, the last quip in the title are my words, not Lessig’s.

Last week, I noted Harvard law prof Lawrence Lessig’s earlier rebuttal to Glenn Greenwald regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United to overthrow centuries of American law and jurisprudence on the rights of corporations and to enshrine corporations – legal fictions created by states and with powers very severely restricted at the time the Constitution was negotiated and ratified by Americans who had recently rebelled against British company-structured colonies and monopolies – as entitled to “speech” under the Bill of Rights on the same basis as men, and made the following observation:

As an aside, other, non-corporation forms of property that had real human bodies – such as slaves – were clearly NOT afforded Constitutional rights of any sort at the time of the Revolution/Bill of Rights; freed slaves as they became citizens and non-citizen Chinese coolies received Constitutional protection ONLY when the Fourteenth Amendment was expressly adopted to extend “privileges and immunities” to citizens and “due process” and “equal protection” to “persons”.

It was this reference to “persons” that smart/prevaricating lawyers for extremely influential railroad corporations were able to persuade a sympathetic Supreme Court – in unargued dicta by a Justice and recorded in headnotes by a Court’s Reporter who were both former railroad lawyers – to the effect that either (i) the 14th Amendment-adopting states had all intended to mean that it would be the federal government, and not the states creating corporations or giving them permission to do business in-state, who would determine whether domestic or out-of-state corporations received “equal” protection of state laws as did citizens or (ii) that such was the hidden purpose of some railroad-friendly drafters of the Amendment, and that such hidden purpose should govern in interpreting the Amendment.

Is there any surprise that most of the subsequent 14th amendment case law is about how monied corporations vigorously pursued and advanced their interests, while blacks and foreign residents continued to get short shrift (“separate but equal”) from unconcerned federal judges?

Now, the thoughtful and highly regarded  Lawrence Lessig has written a must-read article in The Nation; “How to Get Our Democracy Back; If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress” (February 3; February 22 print edition).

I won’t reprise the essay here — I have a few comments on what I see as serious shortcomings and blind spots in Lessig’s analysis, but the draft of these grows long (like my aside above) – rent-seeking; corporations; religion; limited liability; Constitution, speech, states, federalism – so I will post them separately.

Lessig’s article is a key starting point and long enough, though I will advise/remind the curious reader of my preceding posts on  corporate “free speech”..

In calling for amendments to the Constitution, Lessig joins others that have come to the same conclusion years ago, such as “whacko”, snivelling local communities/enviro-commie fascists (snark!) seeking to control the impacts of large multinational corporations on local communities and resources, and some state-righters seeking to breathe some meaning back into the Tenth Amendment and the moribound body of federalism. More on this later.

Those who want to get further stirred up might want to give another listen to the new music video Anthem of what our Founding Fathers said to King George:  It’s Too Late to Apologize.

Below is another handy summary of my Constitutional arguments against #CorpSpeak and #politicsInc (Twiter hashtags, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with them), copied from another comment thread at Volokh Conspiracy.

Readers should not forget that it is the state grant of limited liability that – as I have discussed in many posts – lies at the root of our burgeoning fights over government and public distrust (extending even to my quaint pet enviro concerns), Corporations are divorced from their owners, who have been given a grant of limited liability for the risks they shift to society, a cloak of anonymity by which they can behave irresponsibility (with little concerns greater than what provides the largest profits and bonuses) and can seek favors from government, as well as unlimited lives and deep pockets to make persistent efforts to corrupt.

Yes, I may be repeating myself, but core libertarian concerns are at stake. Here are my comments, with a few slight tweaks:

TokyoTom says:

February 4, 2010, 11:45 pm

 

PR.Watch.org succinctly summarizes:

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are entitled to the same free speech and political rights as American citizens, Murray Hill, Inc., a public relations and advertising firm in Maryland has announced that it intends to run for Congress in Maryland’s 8th Congressional district. In an undated press release
posted on the company’s Web site, Murray Hill says, “Until now,
corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and
influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to
an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and
run for office ourselves.” Murray Hill states that it plans on spending
“top dollar” to protect its investment in government, adding, “We
bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.” The company
plans to run as a Republican in the primary, and announced that it will
run an aggressive, historic campaign that “puts people second” or even
third. Murray Hill will be the first corporation to test the Supreme
Court’s new ruling conferring political free speech rights on
corporations. Murray Hill has designated a human to fill out the
necessary forms to apply for its run for office, and it’s political
slogan is “Corporations are people too!” It has started a Facebook page and says it plans on using automated robo-calls, “astroturf” lobbying, and computer-generated avatars to win over voters.

More here: http://www.murrayhillweb.com/pr-012510.html

here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-klein/supreme-court-ruling-spur_b_437871.html

here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-klein/corporate-persons-get-sho_b_440468.html

here: http://www.murrayhillweb.com/new_day/index.html

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