TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

A buddy forwarded to me a link to a flash movie he’d received via a chain of forwarded emails headed “A Powerful, Must Watch Video”. 

I started taking a look at the flash movie, then paused and went to check out the host website: http://apathetic-usa.com/mission.

I then finished the flash movie (“The Radical Left’s War on America”, which the reader can find here), and sent back a note to my buddy. I don’t really rant much myself, but a little anger has its time and place, and I do get tired of all of the off-the-handle polarized, partisan BS that too many people are parading around with these days. 

Here’s my note (my pal’s name has been changed).

Frank, there are reasons to be upset, including at the deluded neocon, culture & religious warrior SOBs who made this and supported the Bush/Cheney agenda that ran us off the f’g rails so badly in so many ways that we got stupid, budget-busting Dems in Congress and then the White House. If the GOP itself was not a pack of thieves and had governed responsibly without making enormous profits off of enormous wars and bubbles, we’d never have Dems to keep doing what they think government should do – spend more money.
 
I’m looking for a good Lew Rockwell post to send you, but meanwhile this Carlin-Bill Hicks thing will have to serve.
 
http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2010/06/carlin-and-hicks.html
 
Bottom line? Our blood-sucking elites love to peddle fear, to distract how they are ripping us off. This is a piece of that – “small government” neocons so concerned about our economy & liberties that they want to spend MORE trillions making Muslims around the world hate us, and turning us even more into a police state; demonizing Obama and the Left as the enemy within, all so they they can ignore their own responsibility for what went on they they cheered on whole-heartedly.
 
This is NOT a defense of Obama or Dems; their policies are generally wrong – but they don’t hate America more than the Right does, or have an agenda even slightly more nefarious.
 
Stop falling for this garbage, please.

Yes! I found the Lew Rockwell quotes I was looking for! I excerpted them an earlier post, relating to the banning of Ron Paul followers from the right-wing RedState site.

I note for the record a few of my other posts on our self-deceptive and tribal love of hatred.

I’ve addressed the poor health of the world’s oceans quite recently, in response to a flip comment  by Lew Rockwell about how the “ecosystem” is likely to “survive and thrive” regardless of environmental and/or political debacles. Further reports of an increasingly serious situation continue to appear.

Further to the information I provided there, I’d like to draw readers’s attention to a recent report in Science and to a recent article in The Economist:

1. Science, June 18, 2010

Here’s the blurb (emphasis added)

The Impact of Climate Change on the World’s Marine Ecosystems

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg^1,* and John F. Bruno^1,2

¹ Ocean and Coasts Program, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
² Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: oveh@uq.edu.au

McClatchy has good coverage (Les Blumenthal, Julky 4, 2010)(emphasis added)

A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a “fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation” not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.

The report, in Science magazine, brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.

“This is further evidence we are well on our way to the next great extinction event,” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the report.

John Bruno, an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the report’s other co-author, isn’t quite as alarmist, but he’s equally concerned.

“We are becoming increasingly certain that the world’s marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points,” Bruno said, adding, “We really have no power or model to foresee” the impact.

The oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, have played a dominant role in regulating the planet’s climate. However, even as the understanding of what’s happening to terrestrial ecosystems as a result of climate change has grown, studies of marine ecosystems have lagged, the report says. The oceans are acting as a heat sink for rising temperatures and have absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities.

Among other things, the report notes:

 

• The average temperature of the upper level of the oceans has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, and global ocean surface temperatures in January were the second warmest ever recorded for that month.

 

• Though the increase in acidity is slight, it represents a “major departure” from the geochemical conditions that have existed in the oceans for hundred of thousands if not millions of years.

 

• Nutrient-poor “ocean deserts” in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans grew by 15 percent, or roughly 2.5 million square miles, from 1998 to 2006.

 

• Oxygen concentrations have been dropping off the Northwest U.S. coast and the coast of southern Africa, where dead zones are appearing regularly. There is paleontological evidence that declining oxygen levels in the oceans played a major role in at least four or five mass extinctions.

 

• Since the early 1980s, the production of phytoplankton, a crucial creature at the lower end of the food chain, has declined 6 percent, with 70 percent of the decline found in the northern parts of the oceans. Scientists also have found that phytoplankton are becoming smaller.

Volcanic activity and large meteorite strikes in the past have “resulted in hostile conditions that have increased extinction rates and driven ecosystem collapse,” the report says. “There is now overwhelming evidence human activities are driving rapid changes on a scale similar to these past events.

“Many of these changes are already occurring within the world’s oceans with serious consequences likely over the coming years.”

One of the consequences could be a disruption of major ocean currents, particularly those flowing north and south, circulating warm water from the equator to polar regions and cold water from the poles back to the equator. Higher temperatures in polar regions and a decrease in the salinity of surface water due to melting ice sheets could interrupt such circulation, the report says.

The change in currents could further affect such climate phenomena as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Scientists just now are starting to understand how these phenomena affect global weather patterns.

“Although our comprehension of how this variability will change over the coming decades remains uncertain, the steady increase in heat content in the ocean and atmosphere are likely to have profound influences on the strength, direction and behavior of the world’s major current systems,” the report says.

Kelp forests such as those off the Northwest U.S. coast, along with corals, sea grasses, mangroves and salt marsh grasses, are threatened by the changes the oceans are undergoing, the report says. All of them provide habitat for thousands of species.

The polar bear isn’t the only polar mammal that faces an escalating risk of extinction, the report says; penguin and seal populations also are declining.

“It’s a lot worse than the public thinks,” said Nate Mantua, an associate research professor at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group.

Mantua, who’s read the report, said it was clear what was causing the oceans’ problems: greenhouse gases. “It is not a mystery,” he said.

There’s growing concern about low-oxygen or no-oxygen zones appearing more and more regularly off the Northwest coast, Mantua said. Scientists are studying the California Current along the West Coast to determine whether it could be affected, he added.

Richard Feely, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said the report in Science seemed so direct because one of the authors was Australian.

“Australians come at you full-bore and lay it on the line,” Feely said.

Even so, he said, the condition of the oceans is indeed deteriorating.

“The combination of these impacts are tending to show they are additive,” he said. “They combine to make things worse.”

Asked what the oceans will be like in 50 years if trends aren’t reversed, Bruno, the UNC professor, said that all the problems would have accelerated and there’d be new ones. For instance, he said tens of thousands of species found only in the Pacific might migrate across the top of North America as the sea ice melts and enter the Atlantic, where they’ve never been.

Bruno said a 50-year time frame to consider changes in the ocean was way too short, however.

“I am a lot more worried about 200 to 300 years out,” he said

I’ve just run across two pieces of commentary on the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decisions by Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club, that I agree with almost completely as a matter of history, Constitutional analysis and review of repercussions.

Readers who have perused my earlier comments on the Citizens United decision will be aware that I think the “corporations are persons too” jurisprudence to be both wrong and profoundly important, so I am happy to share Pope’s analysis with readers here. Let me note that I am a lawyer (and studied under conservative legal scholars) and don’t think Pope’s analysis is in the least “liberal”.

Without further ado, here are extensive quotes from Pope’s second piece, dated February 3, 2010, The End of the Corporate Zombie? (emphasis added):

There are two clear impacts from the Supreme Court decision to treat corporations as American citizens — regardless of how controlled or where domiciled — for purposes of political spending (if not yet direct cash contributions to candidates). The obvious impact will be a flood of campaign spending by corporations, one that further undermines the substance of a free press and of elections where each citizen’s influence is, approximately, equal. But the second impact will cut the other way. The Citizens United decision was such a naked power grab, such a nihilistic violation of conservative jurisprudence, and it came at such a fractured time, that it might just spawn a counter movement so powerful that the decision’s alleged beneficiaries, major multinational corporations, may come to view it as a disastrously Pyrrhic victory.

Let’s begin with the legal theory. Here’s the majority’s reasoning: We found in 1886 (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad) that “corporations are people.” And we later found, in 1st National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, that “money is speech, unless delivered directly to a candidate.” Therefore, corporate money cannot be constrained at election time.

The five justices who ruled this way include a number who have professed a judicial philosophy based on the original intent of the language of the Constitution. For the document itself, that means the intent of the Founding Fathers. For amendments to the document, that means the intent of the legislators who drafted and ratified the amendments.

All five justices refer to themselves as advocates of “judicial restraint.” But in spite of the best efforts of Justice Scalia, the majority was unable to cloak its opinion in any garb but naked obeisance to corporate power. They went to great lengths to show that the Founding Fathers, and the drafters of the 14th Amendment, thought highly of corporations as a mechanism for citizens to cooperate. Well and good. But a mechanism is not a person. They claimed that they weren’t being judicial activists — but they picked and chose among previous court decisions — using some, overturning others, and tweaking a third set. And repeatedly they used language that blurred, rather than elucidated, the distinction between a person and a corporation.

Their core finding is expressed as a self-obvious proposition. “Distinguishing wealthy individuals from corporations based on the latter’s special advantages of, e.g., limited liability, does not suffice to allow laws prohibiting speech.” Why not?

Justice Stevens, in dissent, threw back this gem from Chief Justice John Marshall, in the Dartmouth ruling that established the “originalist” doctrine of corporate rights: “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”

A “mere creature of law” possessing “only those properties” conferred by law would seem, in ordinary reading, to make it utterly clear that law may also restrict as well as confer properties, and that one of the properties that can be restricted is the spending of money to influence elections.

Corporate rights, unlike individual rights, are “conferred.” That’s how the drafters of the Constitution and the 14th Amendment understood it. But not this five-justice Junta run amok.

What compelling state interest did the majority come up with to justify their breathtaking break with established legal precedent and the clear intent of the Constitution? This wonderfully flimsy bit from Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, is typical: “Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster.” That might be a perfectly good argument for a member of Congress to make in proposing to confer upon corporations the right to spend money in elections. But it does not even pretend to find a Constitutional basis for arguing that such a right is Constitutionally guaranteed to a “mere creature of law.”

The majority of course, would find these arguments perplexing, since in the 1886 Santa Clara County case an earlier Court announced (it never really found, so it never offered an argument), that for purposes of the 14th Amendment, corporations were “persons.” In the view of the five-justice majority, Citizens United merely has the courage to perfect that finding — a logic that previous Supreme Courts for more than a century have been too squeamish to embrace. But the Court that heard Santa Clara County did not demonstrate how its obiter dictum finding reflected the intent of the drafters of the 14th Amendment — it merely asserted that corporate personhood was well-established. (Since there is no such evidence, the Court had little choice but to make an assertion.) Indeed, the potential undermining of the Santa Clara County dictum has long stood as the biggest unanticipated consequence of a truly authentic judicial doctrine of original intent. Well, since that doctrine’s own advocates have now so spectacularly abandoned it, constraints on corporate power must be sought elsewhere.

It’s helpful here to recall the warnings of former Chief Justice Rehnquist, who carried his judicial restraint over to corporate rights. Rehnquist dissented in Bellotti, warning that corporations were given limited liability and perpetual existence, but that “those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere.  “Furthermore, it might be argued that liberties of political expression are not at all necessary to effectuate the purposes for which States permit commercial corporations to exist” And neither the Bellotti Court nor the Citizens United Court offered any argued response. …

But if Citizens United is the rotten fruit, then Santa Clara County is the toxic tree. Its impact has been felt not only on campaign law but also on the rights of elected officials and the public to regulate land use, pollution, and environmental degradation. The entire battle of regulatory “takings” is rooted in the notion that corporations are persons. The sense of disenfranchisement that has empowered public anger at the banks makes this a poor moment for a judicially sanctioned corporate power grab. After all, while Congress might pass legislation saying that publicly chartered banks can’t spend billions to defend their bonuses, this Court has just shown that it is unlikely to allow such assertions of democratic power to stand against corporate personhood. That’s a powerful argument for amending the Constitution, and not just to reverse Citizens United but also Bellotti and those parts of Santa Clara County that go beyond a corporation’s necessary economic security, as well.

We ought to fix the whole problem. Corporations ought to have only those “properties” conferred by their charters. And the rights of personhood ought not to be among those properties. That doesn’t mean we don’t need corporations — we do. It doesn’t mean that if we want a vibrant economy we ought not to give them the properties to engage in contracts and conduct business. We should. But they are a mechanism for people to cooperate — not independent persons of their own. Their rights come from us, the citizens of the United States, and they should not be able to lord it over us as if they were citizens. They don’t belong in our politics. And while each employee and shareholder should enjoy the rights of speech, association, and political voice, corporations themselves should stick to doing business, not making laws.

We need chartered corporations — “creatures of the law” — not corporate zombies.

As a liberal environmentalist, Pope fails to see how the Santa Clara County decision enabled corporations to escape the control of the states that created them and licensed them to do business. This led to increasing corporate influence, a neutering of common law protections against pollution, and growing problems that fuelled even greater federal power.

I’ve just run across two pieces of commentary on the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decisions by Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club, that I agree with almost completely as a matter of history, Constitutional analysis and review of repercussions.

Readers who have perused my earlier comments on the Citizens United decision will be aware that I think the “corporations are persons too” jurisprudence to be both wrong and profoundly important, so I am happy to share Pope’s analysis with readers here. Let me note that I am a lawyer (and studied under conservative legal scholars) and don’t think Pope’s analysis is in the least “liberal”.

Without further ado, here are extensive quotes from Pope’s September 14, 2009 piece, Did Thomas Jefferson Think Corporations Were People? (emphasis added)

The Supreme Court has just finished hearing oral arguments about whether it should overturn 102 years of precedent and rule that corporations have the same right to spend money to influence elections that citizens possess.

The Court stunned most observers back in June, when it asked for reargument in what seemed a small and narrow case: Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. At issue was whether the McCain-Feingold legislation, which banned corporate and union electioneering, also precluded a corporation from distributing a movie highly critical of a political candidate (in this case, Hilary Clinton). That’s hardly an earth-shattering question, except to those involved.

But in asking for reargument in that case, the Court invited the publisher of the movie to make the case that Congress did not have the authority to limit corporate political expenditure, even though as far back as 1902, and as recently as 2006, the Court had upheld that authority. …

The appeal being made to Roberts is that in his confirmation hearing he took a strong stand that the Court should not lightly overturn its own precedents. He presented himself as an incrementalist, a justice opposed to big changes in direction. … Thus, in addition to a New York Times editorial urging a narrow ruling, the Times piled on Roberts with an op-ed by Jeffrey Rosen arguing that how Roberts handles this case would determine whether he goes down in history as another Chief Justice Marshall, Roberts’s stated role model, or instead as a new Earl Warren, the chief justice whom conservatives demonize for judicial overreach.

It’s true that judicial restraint ought to lead Roberts to a narrow ruling in this case rather than overturning a century of precedent. But what’s striking is that no one is challenging the three most conservative justices — yet it’s their position on this case that’s most contrary to their self-declared judicial philosophies. For Alito, Scalia, and Thomas are “originalists”  — justices who claim that it is not previous Supreme Court precedent that should govern, but instead the intentions and understanding of those who drafted the Constitution (and its amendments).

But the Citizens United case brings into stark focus the great, huge buzzing fly in the ointment of the originalists: They don’t believe their own doctrine, not even vaguely. And as far as I can tell, this is almost universally true of those who wear the originalist banner.

Here’s the problem: If you want to throw out what the originalists call “judge-made law” (interpretations of the Constitution that its drafters did not intend), then you don’t get to throw out just Roe v. Wade on abortion, Baker vs. Carr on apportioning state legislatures, and Miranda on defendant’s rights. You cannot board originalism like a trolley, ride it through the cases you don’t like, and then get off back in 1953, when Earl Warren joins the Court, or even back in 1935, when the Court begins taking a more expansive view of Congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce.

No, if you want to argue originalism, you must also throw out all the judge-made law of the last half of the 19th century, too. And it is the cases of that era –cases that established that corporations have rights like individuals — that Alito, Scalia, and Thomas are relying on to make their case for throwing out Congressional regulation of corporate political spending.

The key decision came in 1886, in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railway. At the start of the case, the Chief Justice announced that the Court would not even hear arguments about whether the 14th amendment, guaranteed equal rights to all citizens, included corporations — the Court simply declared that it did. In doing to, it ignored the well-established legal doctrine that once a state gave a corporation a privilege it constituted a contract that must be honored but also that the specific privileges granted came with its charter and did not extend beyond it.

Now this was judge-made law with a vengeance. It utterly upset the small-holder character of the original Constitution, with its deeply ingrained mistrust of corporations and other large economic institutions. But even after these cases, the Courts continued to rule that Congress and the states had the right to regulate some corporate political spending. (Indeed, in a 1978 case that restricted the right to limit corporate spending on ballot measures, Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented specifically because he did not feel that corporations were persons for purposes of political speech.)

Now what faces the Court in Citizens United v. the FEC is an effort to complete the judge-made revolution that begin in Santa Clara. Corporations would be granted not only the special privileges of their status (immortality, limited liability, protection from most criminal sanctions) but also the full range of political privileges of American citizens.

And Alito, Scalia, and Thomas don’t acknowledge this enormous incompatibility with their purported judicial doctrine, and few in the media have challenged them on it. (Briefs have been filed with the Supreme Court raising this issue — but they get barely any public notice.)

In the oral arguments, newly arrived Justice Sotomayor raised openly from the bench, for the first time in decades, the question of whether the original corporate personhood cases like Santa Clara were rightly decided. If the Court overreaches in this case, it may find that it has done the thing that Bob Dole used to say was always the worst error you could make in politics — to kick a sleeping dog. Americans have, by and large, forgotten or never heard of the Santa Clara decision. Do Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia really want to remind them?

For those of you who note that Pope didn’t directly address his own question -Did Thomas Jefferson Think Corporations Are People? – let me respond that the answer is clear that Jefferson did NOT think corporations were “people” for Constitutional purposes. I have addressed this in several places, but readers may find this post to be helpful:

#CorpSpeak: “Jefferson Was Right” about the dangers of corporations and of the Supreme Court