HoltesThoughts: Personhood

Showing posts with label Personhood. Show all posts

Sunday, May 3, 2020

The Right To Own Ones Self

The Core of all Natural Rights theory

The core of all basic rights theory is the "right to own one's self."

“Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” [see: Full Quote from John Locke Two Treatises on Government]

Yet many of us are wage slaves, our country still allows people to sell themselves into various kinds of literal and figurative bondage. And all that directly contradicts the principles we claim to base ourselves on.

“there is something important at stake in the choice of terminology when discussions and interpretation of “self-ownership” obscure the political implications of “ownership.”

The Ultimate Inalienable Natural Right

To me this is the ultimate illustration of an inalienable right. We humans can be oppressed, suppressed, enslaved, yet we "cry for freedom" even from the depths of despair. Nothing displays the human spirit more graphically than the soul of the wrongfully imprisoned person, who's inward freedom remains. It fits the definition of a Natural law:

“they cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws”

And it fits the definition of inalienable used by Hegel:

“The right to what is in essence inalienable is imprescriptible, since the act whereby I take possession of my personality, of my substantive essence, and make myself a responsible being, capable of possessing rights and with a moral and religious life, takes away from these characteristics of mine just that externality which alone made them capable of passing into the possession of someone else. When I have thus annulled their externality, I cannot lose them through lapse of time or from any other reason drawn from my prior consent or willingness to alienate them.” [Hegel's Philosophy of Right]

Rights can be alienable or inalienable. Not all rights are inalienable. However, alienable rights, derive from more fundamental inalienable ones. The difference between an alienable right and an inalienable one is that "alienating" an inalienable right damages the person for whom a part of their person is being detached. One can claim that the "right to own ones self" is alienable but the effort to alienate part of the self destroys the self. Can one really sell oneself? What remains if one does? One can gift from ones self. But that only makes the self stronger and the soul stronger. One can share from oneself, but the self remains. No matter how much we give away of ourselves, we remain ourselves. Losing ourselves in love or agony is something figurative. The self remains. Even in death. When we die or lose integrity, it is then that we are alienated from our selves. But that is death. Only when the person perishes does the right even quit. And for some people the ownership of their ideas is nearly eternal.

Misrepresenting Rights

Concepts like rights, can be (and often are) deliberately misrepresented. When rights that ought to be subordinate to even higher priorities (higher rights) get cast as "inalienable", the rights they are subordinate to often get infringed. When rights that are clearly inalienable are cast as alienable and an effort is made to deny, abridge, infringe or simply put, alienate them -- the result is oppression and dysfunction. Because infringing an inalienable right is like cutting off a hand or foot. The person who it is cut off from is harmed. If a right can be separated from its possessor with no real harm to the former possessor, it is an alienable right. If it is subordinate to, necessary to, some other right, then the boundaries of that alienation reflect the boundaries where that parental right applies.

Examples with the Right to Happiness & Others

The Right to happiness might not exist, but the right to pursue happiness is inalienably part of human needs. Alienate that right and a person is simply no longer autonomous. The right to defend one's home, live autonomously, are related to the right to own one's own self. The right to own ones self is the fundamental right. The right to "pursue happiness" may seem too abstract to measure, but attributes of misery are all too measurable. The Right to "own oneself" is not in any way an abstraction for those who have experienced all the myriad ways that people degrade and dehumanize each other. Alienation isn't simply some Marxist term for some historical development in the formation of classes. Alienation is the severing of what makes a person whole. If one cannot own the components of one's own life, then one is not autonomous. One doesn't own oneself. It is possible to alienate people from owning themselves. But it is oppression.

Alienable Rights Versus Inalienable

A lot of confusion starts when alienable rights are treated as inalienable or vice versa. When laws infringe on inalienable rights, without rational cause, they are oppressive and absurd. When people are enabled to "pursue happiness" and live as "Nature's God" intended, they do better.

It is our human task to lay out the outlines of what is actually right and wrong. Whatever may be commanded from God, can be affirmed in His creation. If it is not echoed in the real world, does it really come from God? Alienating a right that is inalienable destroys the connection of that thing to the thing that the right protects, and degrades or destroys the thing protected by that right. Once one sees that a right is inalienable, then one sees that taking that right away is a major wrong except when that infringement serves an even higher principle of right.

Infringement on Inalienable Rights Is Oppression and Violence

Thus Infringing on inalienable rights is by definition oppression and violence. A Person without freedom or liberty is a prisoner. People denied the right to property in oneself finds themselves enslaved and dispossessed. This is analogous to when the guilty are found innocent and the innocent found guilty. These truths are illustrated by their infringement.

Alienating an Inalienable right destroys the Person

When an inalienable right is denied or infringed, the result is suffering and failure. The very effort to infringe, deny, or sell inalienable rights just creates "evil", harm and even death. It damages the person, so harmed.

Denial Illustrates inalienability

Thus Denial illustrates why those rights are inalienable. The denial of the right to property in one's own self produced the obvious miseries of slavery. In prior ages denial for the right to property in one's own conscience produced the absurdity of people forced to lie in order to survive. As illustrated in the previous posts (Justice, Injustice and Legal Fraud", and The Fraud of Renting Labor) denying inalienable rights result in legal fraud and absurdities. That is why this is an important subject.

Harmonizing Deontology and Teleology

The Real Core of All Natural rights theory is the epistemology of where practical reality meets moral imperative. It is where deontology meets teleology.*

The Deontological viewpoint

Natural Rights theory sounds deontological; (duty-based), where the moral duties of natural rights are self-evident, having intrinsic value in and of themselves and needing no further justification.

“deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty") is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules. It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty".”

Deontology also premises that duties are commanded from above. They don't have to have a logical basis. One has to do them because they are commandments. From a Deontological perspective Rights are inalienable because Natures God commands them to be. However, the deontological perspective requires justification from a teleological perspective, and in the case of inalienable rights, earns it.

The Teleological Perspective

In contrast Teleological perspectives often posit that the ends justify the means they posit theories of morality that:

“derives duty or moral obligation from what is good or desirable as an end to be achieved.”

Teleological morality expresses in "Utilitarianism", "pragmatism" at its best and in Machiavellian and ruthless "moral" systems at worst. From a Teleological perspective, rights are inalienable because damaging them destroys the utility of the person damaged, and by inference of the social and economic systems the person lives in.

Mapping the Abstract to the Practical

The abstract has to map to practical realities, to measurable attributes, or it remains purely abstract. Without a grounding in experimental, experiential, consequential reality idealized beliefs become unhinged. Or worse, as happened with Marxism, they become attached to idealistic and unrealistic objectives.

Ends and Means are inextricably linked

But the reality is that ends and means are inextricably linked. A child is taught Deontological rules, commandments; "Don't touch the fire! You'll get burned" because he/she is not ready yet to perceive the causality of a stove. The argument that the rightness or wrongness (teleological perspective) of actions is based solely on the goodness or badness of their consequences is in some kind of conflict with the deontological view, is a false choice. Likewise, there is a reason for commandments. At worst, one follows rules because rules order ones individual and collective behavior and make it easier to function in a society with other beings, conflicts and limits. Humans need their rituals and routine. The more chaotic the world, the more they pine for them. One might accept such rules on an approach of "this is my duty", but one keeps them when one realizes that those rules enable integrity, set boundaries or link one socially with others. Moral theory has to map back to cause and effect to become something effective. And at some point moral theory has to involve commandments to do something or it is mere abstraction. [Deontological/Teleological]

The Absurdity of Alienation

Professor Ellerman's table illustrates both justice and injustice. wrote some things that really, really impressed me and I want to summarize some of what he's saying that is relative to me. Starting with the Following Table, which expresses the truth table on the subject of justice and injustice:

This post discusses basic principles of human rights, "alienable", "contract" & "inalienable rights." Libertarians and so-called conservatives, are big on some of these arguments but they often misrepresent them and conveniently so.

This post follows on material discussed in:

Justice, Injustice and Legal Fraud"

The Fraud of Renting Labor

Self Ownership vs Right to Property in One's self

Pateman argues against what she calls “contractism” in her paper on "Self ownership" noting that:

“If rights are seen in proprietary terms – the standard view of rights, Ingram argues – then it follows that rights can be alienated. ” [Self-Ownership]

Alienable Versus Inalienable

If a right can be alienated then it is conditional or can be separated from the person enjoying it. “It can be subject to "contract"” exchanges or it's applicability limited in other ways. Rights can be alienable or inalienable. An alienable right is contingent on some related right. One has an alienable right to own arms for self defense. For example Samuel Adams called the right to “have and use arms”

“ Auxiliary and Subordinate to the rights to personal security, liberty and property.”

The right to have and use arms is alienable. A lot of people don't understand this.

One has an inalienable right to pursue happiness. One doesn't have an right to use those arms to rob a bank to achieve happiness. The right to pursue happiness is inalienable. The right to keep and use arms to defend oneself is inalienable. The right to keep and use arms to carry out a robbery is not. But even more as she explains: She explains:

“ ” [Pateman]

http://www.ellerman.org/the-case-against-the-employment-system-based-on-the-norms-of-ordinary-jurisprudence/

The Law is only just when the person who is held responsible is actually in fact responsible. That ought to be tautological, but in our corrupted times, both type one and type two injustice are common, sometimes due to failures in the discovery process for seeking the truth, but also because modern governments employ oppressive and/or Fruadulent legal theories. David explains the table as:

“analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics”

Those advocating Inequality claimed it was Consensual

And notes that:

"Historically, the sophisticated arguments for slavery and autocratic government were consent-based in terms of implicit or explicit contracts. And the legalized oppression of married women was based on the coverture marriage contract."

Modern Liberalism fought:

“sophisticated arguments for slavery and for non-democratic forms of government based on consent. The advances in anti-slavery arguments and democratic arguments based on the inalienable rights arguments of the Reformation and Enlightenment were made against those liberal defenses of slavery and autocracy based on consent.”

John Locke Stated very plainly:

“Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” [Pateman]

However, Locke also treated this "property in one's own person" as alienable;

“The grass my horse has bit; the turf my servant has cut; become my property. The labour that was mine ... hath fixed my property in them.” [Pateman]

The property in their labor is the masters property. Because he owns the servant and the horse. He owns their labor. The notion of the inalienability of labor from the person would require further delineation. Locke was making a political argument. Regardless of who morally owns the fruit of his or her labor, that property belonged to the owner of the labor.

Language, and interpretation of language has been a tool in this fight from the beginning. Historians misrepresent the difficulty of advancing rights for all people when they downplay this. Carole Patemen notes that:

“there is something important at stake in the choice of terminology when discussions and interpretation of “self-ownership” obscure the political implications of “ownership.”

Inalienable Rights Versus Oppressive Consent

David explains that:

“the critiques developed in the abolitionist, democratic, and feminist movements were not simply arguments for consent as opposed to coercion, but arguments against certain voluntary contracts, e.g., in the form of inalienable rights arguments.”

These inalienable rights arguments focused on the fact that labor cannot be divorced from either personhood or capital. The abolitionists argued successfully that labor cannot be alienated from personhood but is inseparable from it. Thus Alienating a persons labor from his personhood degrades the person and is oppression, infringing on the very basic rights of the persons enslaved. Moreover, this is true even if the person agreed to the sale.

Legal Fiction of Consent = Fraud

Unfortunately:

“under the intellectual hegemony of classical liberalism, the historical arguments tend to be simplified”

The doctrine of the inalienability of a person and his labor was replaced with the “legal fiction” of selling (or renting) labor, replacing the rights argument with the patently fraudulent argument that a voluntary sale of a persons labor to the master, is a voluntary "sale" with "consent. Reducing the rights argument to an argument about:

“consent versus coercion.”

This argument, being slippery justifies alienating labor from capital and labor from personhood. Just so long as a contract exist and the infringing party ("the employer") has a contract that presumably is voluntary. The result is that:

“The older arguments against certain contracts, even if perfectly voluntary, have been largely overlooked, ignored, or lost—perhaps for an obvious reason. When these older arguments are recovered and restated in terms of the underlying norms of ordinary jurisprudence, then the arguments clearly apply against the human rental or employment contract that is the basis for our present economic system.”

Historical Illustration

The history of abolition and post abolition forms of wage slavery, company store oppression, share-cropping and virtual slavery of wage laborers illustrates that the "legal fiction" of renting labor is a fraud.

The Tory thinker, Lord Eustace Percy, put the fundamental task as follows:

“Here is the most urgent challenge to political invention ever offered to the jurist and the statesman. The human association which in fact produces and distributes wealth, the association of workmen, managers, technicians and directors, is not an association recognized by the law.”[Ellerman]

“The association which the law does recognise—the association of shareholders, creditors and directors—is incapable of production and is not expected by the law to perform these functions. We have to give law to the real association, and to withdraw meaningless privilege from the imaginary one. [1944]”[Ellerman]

“With the renting of persons abolished, each firm would be “the association of workmen, managers, technicians and directors”. Labor would be hiring capital, instead of the owners of capital renting the people working in “their” firm to appropriate the (positive and negative) fruits of their labor.”[Ellerman]

“Each firm would be democratic community of work, an industrial republic, with the industrial cooperatives in the Mondragon system in the Spanish Basque country being an existing example.”[Ellerman]

“The vision of abolishing the wage system in favor of a commonwealth of cooperatives was a goal of the 19th century Labor Movement.”[Ellerman]

There is a lot more to this argument. But I wanted to cover this particular topic as well as I could.

John Locke

For more information on John Locke and his relationship to other people read any of these posts:: Spencer Versus Locke and Henry George; Edmund Burke Versus John Locke; Locke Talked of the Importance of the Collective; The Concept of Commonwealth as Antidote to Tyranny; Commonwealth According to Locke; The Real Right to Property is Contingent on Reason; Common Property and the Commons; Rights Come from Below; Ayn Rand Argues against the Enlightenment; John Locke on the Virtues of Liberty; Tyranny Definition - John Locke
Hegel:: "George W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 (1821), section 66"; http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Hegel%20Phil%20of%20Right.pdf; ₽; Written in January 2019. For some reason not posted then. Sorry

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The Fraud of "Renting Labor."

Some currently "legal" tropes are in-fact logically unjust. With things like exploiting labor, "renting" labor, and binding laborers to abusive contracts, most folks recognize their innate injustice. Unfortunately, as displayed in the corrupt SCOTUS decision announced just 12 days after I first drafted this post (5/21/2018), stealing wages is perfectly legal under the sophist arguments of "right to contract" having primacy over a right to own oneself, the fraud of "renting labor" is a perfectly legal fraud.

See:Supreme Court upholds Employers Right to Require Arbitration

David Ellerman and related historians and economists offers better arguments than the raw emotional ones offered by many activists. His arguments, founded in the arguments of the enlightenment and the abolitionist movement apply the logic of inalienable human rights. Listening to them could drive a paradigm shift in understanding the legal rights and wrongs of our system; and a framework for righting them. But of course only if we can upend the corruption in our electoral and legal system.

This post is intended to be a follow on to the post: “Justice, Injustice And "Legal Fictions" = Fraud” Ellerman explains why the "rental of labor" is a legal fraud and a tool for wage slavery and inequality.

Justice, Injustice And "Legal Fictions" = Fraud

Professor David Ellerman wrote some things that really, really impressed me and I want to summarize some of what he's saying that is relative to me. Starting with the Following Table, which expresses the truth table of what constitutes justice and injustice:

http://www.ellerman.org/the-case-against-the-employment-system-based-on-the-norms-of-ordinary-jurisprudence/

In talking about slavery, Ellerman points out how slaves were held legally liable as persons for their individual acts, even if coerced, while were denied personhood in all the ways that a human deserves to be treated as a human. When seeking freedom or rights they were not persons. When they violated any law, they were suddenly persons. Slaves were in a Catch 22 situation.

The Catch 22 of Unjust Legal Systems

In the book "Catch 22", Joseph Heller, built his story around a plausible provision in the General Orders for the Air Force stationed in Southern Italy and bombing the Germans from there. This provision was known as the "Catch 22".

“by applying for exemption from highly dangerous bombing missions on the grounds of insanity, the applicant proved himself to be sane”

Joseph Heller was setting up a situation where the insanity of war was no bar to being sent out on bombing runs. He went on the book to describe a whole series of "Catch 22" situations that soldiers were put into while fighting in Europe.

The Truth Table of Catch 22 Situations

The term has become a regular expression in modern English. A Catch 22, generally, is any provision of law or policy that sets up no-win situation for those trying to comply with them. No win Situations are by definition unjust.

Any Law is only just when the person who is held responsible is actually in fact responsible. Catch 22's are by definition unjust and therefore an instrument of oppression and repression. That ought to be tautological, but in our corrupted times, both type one and type two injustice are common, sometimes due to failures in the discovery process for seeking the truth, but also because modern governments employ oppressive and/or Fraudulent legal theories.

If a decision is coerced, the claim that it is truly consensual is a fraud

David explains the table as:

“analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics”

But it really is also a logical truth table. Injustice is also illogical. Sophisticated arguments may give the arguments a patina of truthiness, but sophism is merely an ancient greek word for making a con. If a person is blackmailed into doing something, only a sophist of a lawyer would insist that his decision was not coerced or was truly consensual.

Ellerson Notes that:

“Historically, the sophisticated arguments for slavery and autocratic government were consent-based in terms of implicit or explicit contracts. And the legalized oppression of married women was based on the coverture marriage contract.” [Ellerson-Case]

Natural Rights Arguments on behalf of Genuine Liberty

Moderns forget that the cases against Abolition of Slavery, worker rights, even women's rights, all were framed on the argument that somehow those forms of oppression were actually (despite the facts) oppressive.

“the critiques developed in the abolitionist, democratic, and feminist movements were not simply arguments for consent as opposed to coercion, but arguments against certain voluntary contracts, e.g., in the form of inalienable rights arguments.”

Legal Fiction of Consent = Fraud

These inalienable rights arguments focus on the fact that labor cannot be divorced from either personhood or capital. The abolitionists argued successfully that labor cannot be alienated from personhood but is inseparable from it. Thus Alienating a persons labor from his personhood degrades the person and is oppression, infringing on the very basic rights of the persons enslaved. Moreover, this is true even if the person agreed to the sale. The basis of that argument starts with recognizing the fraud of catch 22s, no-win contracts and of holding innocent parties guilty where they are not and guilty parties innocent were they are in fact guilty.

The Fraud continues

As illustrated by the spread of terms like "newspeak", "catch 22" and modern legal frauds, the job of the enlightenment isn't over. After Racist Permanent Bondage slavery was abolished. Other legal frauds were invented to justify "renting labor" wage slavery and other forms of legalized theft, oppression and injustice. All of which start with "legal fictions" which are in fact legalized Frauds. To stop such frauds from propagating we need lawyers and politicians to understand and adamantly argue that they are frauds. They've had, some of them, hundreds of years of normalization so they've gone from outright lies, to myths that are actually lies.

I have a lot more to say, but for the sake of clarity I cut this post down to a shorter version. And am writing out the case in separate posts.

The Type I and Type II Frauds of Corporate Personhood

Corporate Personhood legalizes both type I injustice by shifting fictional liability from guilty parties to a fictional entity, the Corporation, and type II injustice by (usually) letting the corporation get a criminal law pass when the people within a corporation kill, defraud or commit felonies. As Ellerman says:

“In the case at hand, both errors occur. The factually responsible party or association, the people working within a firm, do not get the legal responsibility for the whole product (the Type I injustice with X = whole product), and the party or association that does get the legal responsibility, such as the corporate shareholders in the employing corporation, do not have the factual responsibility (the Type II injustice with X = whole product). ”

By reviewing the arguments of the Abolitionists and pre-Marxist activists we can correct the mistakes of 150 years of sophism and neo-liberal arguments.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Abusive Contracts and Privateering

Incomplete Contracts And Large Scale Swindles

I've been using the theme of piracy and privateering to describe our current economic system This is because at the heart of modern dysfunction is elitism and a "privateering spirit." There are people who actually normalize the swindling but it is a sick ideology whether you call it "neoliberalism", "conservatism" or "libertarianism." At heart these people are pirates. But they are a special kind of pirate. They use privilege to Grift, make themselves oligarchs and legalize theft and contract abuse, privateering.

I started this post back last September but I wanted to examine a bit of history and read the Nobel prize winning research on contract theory, and digest what I was reading.

Restoring the First Amendment means restoring a Free Press

Restoring Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression

We need to restore a Free Press!

It seems that when the constitution prohibited the Congress and Federal Government from establishing a Religion or infringing on Freedom of the Press, speech, or assembly, they neglected to prohibit private corporate governments from doing so. Thus the courts have been letting businesses usurp those rights, while denying them to employees and stakeholders. Corrupt courts have been letting them do this since the Santa Clara Decision by privileging Corporate "personhood" over the personhood of the chattel persons working for them. Unconstitutional Government policies in the name of "free[booting] enterprise" have led to the disappearance of local newspapers, local news coverage and the consolidation of local radio, Cable and TV under concentrated ownership. This has led to a press that is controlled in much of the country, especially in rural areas and small towns.

To fix this we need to re-establish a Free Press as envisioned by Benjamin Franklin and the authors of the Constitution. A Free press is part of democracy. A controlled press is part of oppression.

Establishing the Second Bill of Rights

The Democratic agenda is unfinished. One reason is that the GOP is explicitly against the Second Bill of Rights.

Democrats Believe:	To the GOP:
	No right to a Job, No right to an Adequate wage. No right to Shelter, home, even a place to sleep! Health Care is a "privilege"; No right to help during sickness, injury, old age or unemployment No right to acquire a decent education at a reasonable cost.

To your average right winger, we don't have any rights to any of those things. Even if we earned them or pay for them. Buried in their fearful amygdala is a compulsion to hierarchy, a fear that one person's gain threatens the privilege of another. To the "conservative" mind -- only those with hierarchy have such rights. The rest of us need to know our place.

We have to disabuse them of those notions!

Based on the past 80 years of disappointments it is clear that we still need that "Second Bill of Rights" that FDR Talked about. We've fought to implement it, but have been stymied at every turn, to a degree that some claimed our own leaders seemed to have abandoned the project. And as a result the deplorable right wing has decided to attack the very notions the Second Bill of Rights sought to establish. The effort to repeal ACA, disestablish minimum wages, de-regulate employers and cut access to health care are all based on a very explicit assertion that we the people have no rights to:

Some History of our Corrupt Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)

I suppose some Lawyers in training, have to memorize the names of all the SCOTUS Chief Justices who have ever served. If a Professor were to require people to do that I'm sure even the most brilliant lawyer would fail the test unless he had a facility for arcania. On the other hand it is important, to understanding the court, to know that these Justices have never been Saints. Some have been memorable for awful decisions, some for execreable decisions and a few for brilliant ones. In some cases, partisans of arbitrary reasoning have celebrated those decisions for a period of time, only for society to realize years later they were dreck.

Establishing a Timeline Helps sort the dreck from the jewels

I was trying to figure out how SCOTUS could be all over the place, and so in a systematic matter I started fashioning a timeline. Sometimes the court changes when the majority of judges changes, but the SCOTUS always reflects the life and times of it's chief Justice no matter how it's constitution changes who is on it.

The Common plank

I like Hillary. I like Bernie Sanders. I like Elizabeth Warren. I really don't give a hoot who is at the top of the ticket as long as there is an army of supporters, a movement, behind them. We have a list of priorities we need to fight for. The GOP have declared war on us. Their war to make Obama seem ineffectual is being effective because we've let ourselves delude ourselves that this is a war against Obama, against Black people, against some of us, and not a war against all of us. The GOP is warring on working people in this country and for the sake of domination by a narrow class of oligarchs. Yes we can delude ourselves that the issues are abortion, or gays getting married, or any of the other fake issues that have many Salt of the Earth folks worked up. But the Right Wing is after them too. But what I like the most are that we have a list of proposals! I especially like this version of the list because it is a list of concrete steps:

This is a follow on to the post Fielding Candidates: [http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/04/fielding-candidates.html] and A Unified Plank: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-unified-plank.html

Corrupt Court and Undue Influence and access according to Founders

Citizens United hinged on a Huge Error in Judgment

The problem with the Citizens United case, as I noted in my post from October last year, titled "A corrupt decision blind to corrupt access and influence" is that the most eggregious error of that decision wasn't the "corporate personhood" mistake. Corporate personhood is just a legal fiction that the courts have used to exempt companies from laws and responsibilities at State or County level. The huge error was their defenestreing of corruption/bribery laws through their failure to recognize "undue influence" and "improper access" as corruption despite 200 years of legal jurisprudence establishing these as the heart of corruption.

Independent Expenditures as Ingratiation, Access and Extortion

In that decision Kennedy had written:

"there is only scant evidence that independent expenditures even ingratiate. … Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption."

But ingratiation and separate access provide opportunities for undue influence and undue influence is at the heart of Bribery definitions and corruption, and our more progressive leaders have known that since the Federalists talked of this while writing the Federalist papers. Undue influence is at the heart of the evils of plutocracy, bureaucracy, and all forms of tyranny (Locke: "Power...exercised...for private, separate advantage". Denying the potentially undue influence exerted by money expenditures and independent expenditures, simply expresses the corruption that the Supreme Court has suffered due to the undue influence of wealth and power expressed through pressure groups like Americans For Prosperity and the Federalist Societies patrons that has created such a corrupt supreme court.

Wikipedia defines it as:

"In jurisprudence, undue influence is an equitable doctrine that involves one person taking advantage of a position of power over another person."

Undue Influence includes Extortion and Slander

Our founders understood the dangers of "Undue Influence". Robert Yates wrote in the Federalist:

Image of page 657 "The Federalist and Other Constitutional Papers by Hamilton, Jay ..., Volume 1"

Partisanship Fueled by Separate Interest

Text of 657 to beginning of 658 follows and could almost be describing our own times:

"In respect to the first it may be necessary to observe that under the colonial government there existed violent parties now known by the name of whig or tory republicans and aristocrats Those who were in the employments of government or the ins [who] were for extending the prerogative of the crown while the outs were checks to it. Many of the leaders on both sides were under strong expectations that sooner or later that branch of colonial government called the king's council would be erected into a hereditary house of lords. The ins being nearest to the disposition of the offices of honor and profit and in the way of obtaining patents for vacant lands and being from time to time joined by other crown officers and dependents who flocked to and settled in this colony since the year 1763 had the means of making use of undue influence to retain their situations which made the outs at last despair of ever having a turn unless the elections were by ballot. [punctuation added]

Source:The Federalist and Other Constitutional Papers by Hamilton, Jay ..., Volume 1 edited by Erastus Howard Scott

Revolution fought to resist Undue Influence from $ Power

Undue Influence was part of the unfair power (and wealth) distribution that was the real reason for the first revolt that created the United States. Fear of foreign undue influence was one of the reasons we formed a General Federated Republic rather than remaining separate (and warring) colonies. And undue Influence has reared it's ugly head throughout our history in our country in much the same fashion. Only instead of hereditary land-lords with power by way of land titles, we now have hereditary Corporate-barons with power by way of Corporations. And we have those barons exerting undue influence on the Supreme Court as expressed in the Citizens United Decision and the efforts of the newspeak (bizaaroland) named Tea Parties. Where we resisted the undue influence of the East India company during our 1775-1889 revolt, it's modern analogues exert flagrant influence on us now.

Resisting the East India Company

In the Federalist Papers James Winthrop "Agrippa" referenced the power of the East India company in the following passage (on page 548)

"In most countries of Europe trade has been more confined by exclusive charters Exclusive companies are in trade pretty much like an aristocracy in government and produce nearly as bad effects An instance of it we have ourselves experienced Before the Revolution we carried on no direct trade to India. In most countries of Europe trade has been more confined by exclusive charters Exclusive companies are in trade pretty much like an aristocracy in government and produce nearly as bad effects An instance of it we have ourselves experienced Before the Revolution we carried on no direct trade to India " [page 548-549]

The USA was founded on a tension between legitimate business and privateering under charters. Our own chartered privateers were labeled as pirates by the British during our revolution [I visited a museum dedicated to that "notorious Pirate John Paul Jones" during my visit to Britain two years ago]. Pirates had an imperative to share the loot with crews while privateers and chartered trade companies ran their business as absolute dictatorships solely for the benefit of the owners. Our business people learned acute lessons from being considered second class businessmen. Many of them were officially branded as smugglers or even pirates. Part of the motive of the revolution was to protect their own trade from dumping by the East India Company which enjoyed tax free status on it's tea, while our businessmen had to buy the tea with a tax stamp from Britain, from the East India company!

Agrippa continues:

"In a republick we ought to guard as much as possible against the predominance of any particular interest It is the object of government to protect them all When commerce is left to take its own course the advantage of every class will be nearly equal But when exclusive privileges are given to any class it will operate to the weakening of some other class connected with them "

The founders sought to accomplish that by dividing the government into divisions and forcing them to both work together and to have to work out competing interests. They also were thinking of Business, but as we didn't have businesses like the East India Company in our country yet, they left working out that separation of power to later generations.

Indirect Bribery and Extortion = Undue Influence

So undue influence is connected to our founding principles, and the power of direct bribery and the indirect bribery labeled as "undue influence" was identified as a major ill way back during our founding days. This illustrates all the more graphically the mendacious and perverse faux principles of the "Federalist Movement" and it's corrupt avatars on the Supreme Court.

In this stage of our history the companies are more and more resembling the East India company and less and less resembling Paul Revere's Silver company or even Robert Morris' grand pirate fleet (our first navy). When folks argue for freedom from government they are really talking either about self-government, or the switch becomes rule by greedy corporations like the East India Company. The East India company so botched it's control of Bengal and other parts of SE Asia that the British Navy, Marines and Army had to come in to rescue them. Democracy is not only about individual rights it is also about functional societies where the right people are able to get offices and power for limited times as needed, and not to make their power hereditary and oppressive. That is why these discussions were found in the writings of the Federalists, Republicans and Anti-Federalists.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Seven Reasons Issa Cut Cumming's Mike

Townhall released an article claiming to be Issa's questions to Lois Lerner:

Source: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/03/06/seven-questions-former-irs-head-lois-lerner-refuses-to-answer-n1805145

1. In October 2010, Lerner told a Duke University group: “The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that basically corporations couldn’t give directly to political campaigns. And everyone is up in arms because they don’t like it. The Federal Election Commission can’t do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix the problem.”

I think anyone who thinks that graft and corruption should be illegal should be concerned about the outcome of Citizens United. Not only for it's extension of corporate personhood to companies, but for it's claim that money = privileged (!) speech -- and the court's corrupt denial in that case that undue access or influence is corruption. But Issa took her comments out of context.

Who exactly wanted the IRS to “fix the problem” caused by Citizens United?

Even the Breitbart source [http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/08/06/Lois-Lerner-Discusses-Political-Pressure-on-the-IRS-in-2010] for the leak (not exactly paragons of virtue) answers this question:

"Lerner goes on to outline the fact that 501(c)(4) organizations have the right to do "an ad that says vote for Joe Blow" so long as their primary activity is social welfare. However Lerner again emphasizes the political pressure the IRS was under at the time saying, "So everybody is screaming at us right now 'Fix it now before the election. Can't you see how much these people are spending?'" Lerner concludes by saying she won't know if organizations have gone too far in campaigning until she looks at their "990s next year."

Fact is the entire progressive wing of the Democratic party plus any remaining honest conservatives were screaming that we need to do something about the legalized graft that is the corrupt Citizens United Decision and subsequent rulings eviscerating 200 years of efforts to get graft, bribery, undue influence and extortion under control in our government. It is WE THE PEOPLE (other than corrupt Tea Baggers of course) demanding change.

Issa alleges:

2. In February 2011, Lerner e-mailed her colleagues in the IRS: “Tea Party Matter very dangerous. This could be the vehicle to go to court on the issue of whether Citizens United overturning the ban on corporate spending applies to tax-exempt rules. Counsel and Judy Kindell need to be in on this one please. Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

Issa then mistates her statement:

Why did Lerner think the Tea Party cases were “very dangerous”?

The Tea Party are dangerous because they are litigious, subversive, incendiary, insurrectionist, and because they own at least some of the Supreme Court Justices (Thomas). I think anyone observing their behavior since the judicial coup of 2000 can observe that.

3. In September 2010, Lerner e-mailed subordinates about initiating a “c4 project,” but wrote: “we need to be cautious so it isn’t a per se political project.”

The reason for the project is that 90% of the 501(C)(4) organizations are not primarily promoting social welfare but pushing the agendas of the rich and powerful:

In general. An organization is operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare if it is primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community. An organization embraced within this section is one which is operated primarily for the purpose of bringing about civic betterments and social improvements. A social welfare organization will qualify for exemption as a charitable organization if it falls within the definition of charitable set forth in paragraph (d)(2) of § 1.501(c)(3)-1 and is not an action organization as set forth in paragraph (c)(3) of § 1.501(c)(3)-1. [http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.501(c)(4)-1]

So:

Why was Lerner worried about this being perceived as a political project?

Because any effort to reign in abuses of the 501(c)(4) provisions could easily be interpreted as partisanship, as Issa is doing now.

Subsequent events have pretty much born out her rationale for worrying about this.

4. Michael Seto, manager of EO Technical in Washington, testified that you ordered Tea Party cases to undergo a “multi-tier review.” He testified: “[Lerner] sent me email saying that when these cases need to go through multi-tier review and they will eventually have to go to Miss Kindell and the chief counsel’s office.”

And yet most of these organizations eventually got approved despite their obvious partisan nature. In fact the only cases turned down were progressive organizations.

Why did Lerner order the Tea Party cases to undergo a “multi-tier review”?

It's called due diligence. Something Fire-Bug Grand Theft Auto Issa doesn't feel necessary in his own efforts.

5. In June 2011, Lerner requested that Holly Paz obtain a copy of the tax-exempt application filed by Crossroads GPS so that her senior technical advisor, Judy Kindell, could review it and summarize the issues for Lerner.

Probably because Crossroads GPS's application was so obviously not about an organization promoting the "social welfare" that it's irregularities were obvious even to folks not directly concerned with them.

See these references for some articles on Crossroads GPS and their blatant FEC violations:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/06/21/9168/nonprofit-profile-crossroads-gps?gclid=CM_ghqn3hL0CFQ2hOgodCG8A0Q
http://www.factcheck.org/tag/crossroads-gps/
Third Complaint to FEC

"Crossroads GPS contends that all its ads are “issue ads,” which are “a position statement about, or a discussion of, public issues.” But CREW alleges that the three ads constitute independent expenditures, which are communications “expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate.”

Why did Lerner want to have the Crossroads GPS application?

And of course with our Supreme Court dominated by Grafter Judges legalizing Grafts the entire 501 section of the legal code could be in jeopardy if the issue went before that corrupt court.

Issa then says:

6. In June 2012, Lerner was part of an e-mail exchange about writing new regulations on political speech for 501(c)(4) groups “off-plan” in 2013.

Anyone involved with Government knows that bureaucrats are discussing regulations all the time. It's a non issue that they discussed "about writing new regulations" before they wrote the regulations.

Doesn’t this “off-plan” effort from 2012 contradict Administration assertions that new regulations were written in response to the 2013 TIGTA report?

More than likely those discussions went into writing the TIGTA report. Issa is blowing smoke.

7. In February 2014, President Obama stated that there was not a “smidgeon of corruption” in the IRS targeting.

Considering the IRS also targeted progressive groups doing the same sorts of tactics. Issa's comments are trying to criminalize the invocation of the 5th amendment. She has the right to refuse to testify about things that can and will be deliberately misconstrued and twisted into criminal behavior if they get in socipath Issa's hands.

If this is true, why do House Democrats believe that Lois Lerner has a well-founded fear of criminal prosecution that allows her to claim the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify?

And indeed Lerner stated she was willing to testify if the Committee would guarantee they wouldn't misconstrue her testimony. She could be revealing something illegal that I don't know about yet, but so far I don't see anything coming out that the public hasn't known for the past years. Just the same repeated ad-nauseum talking points.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/lois-lerner-attorney-negotiated-over-testifying-emails-show/: "For her to take the risk inherent in waiver (of her Fifth Amendment privilege), she would need assurance she is resolving her issues with the Committee."; http://www.salon.com/2014/03/05/darrell_issas_newest_irs_scandal_revelation_darrell_issa_is_bad_at_investigating_scandals/

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

A corrupt decision blind to corrupt access and influence

CU was Bad

The Citizens United Case was an incredibly corrupt decision. At first I laid the source of the corruption to it's reservation of the "right of personhood" to corporations, but the reality is simpler.

We are talking about what our founders considered to be bribery!

MCCutcheon is Worse!

On September 30, 2013, in an article by Richard L. Hasen in today's Slate titled "The Next Citizens United?" [http://tinyurl.com/NextCitizensUnited] writing about the upcoming "McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission," which is likely to overthrow most controls over influence pedaling and bribery, Hasen quotes Justice Kennedy's opinion in Citizens Unitd (CU), writing for the majority and saying:

“there is only scant evidence that independent expenditures even ingratiate. … Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.”

Ingratiation and Access ARE OFTEN Corruption

The New York Times further quoted him with this nonsense:

“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

But undue influence and access start with ingratiation, favors, and promises. As the political revolving door demonstrates, sometimes the "quid" isn't simultaneous with the "pro-quo!

Both at the time and in retrospect, those comments sound absurd. Especially after CU got cited in the dismissal of 100 years of evidence that outside expenditures, and their impact on political behavior, in fact generate ingratiation, access, and flagrant corruption. & that that was the reason Montana passed strict corporate expenditure laws in the first place! The corrupt majority know this in their personal lives, but pretend to not notice in real life.

"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/politics/04bar.html?_r=0"

CU sure caused a lot of people I know to lose faith in our democracy. The decision itself was corrupt.

Preferential Access and Undue Influence

The problem is not mere access, it is "preferential access". And the problem is not "influence" it is undue influence, preferential influence, "private, separate advantage" [Locke,199] and these amount to tyranny.

The New York times article also notes how the CU case contradicted their own earlier decision, noting how in 2003, in McConnell v. F.E.C., the Supreme Court said there was

“no meaningful distinction between the national party committees and the public officials who control them.”

Large contributions to parties:

“are likely to create actual or apparent indebtedness on the part of federal officeholders,”

the court said, and

“are likely to buy donors preferential access to federal officeholders.”

The appearance of corruption is often an indicator of the reality of corruption, and we have judges all over the country being convicted for taking bribes from private companies running jails or other influential people. Often folks they do business with while playing Golf on the Links or getting a rubdown in a country club. Fact is that ingratiation and access, especially private separate access, are at the heart of corruption in the USA, and since the Supreme Court made it's Citizens United, the level of perceived and actual corruption we are witnessing nationwide has gone up exponentially.

Gutting the Definition of Corruption

So the real problem with Citizens United is that Kennedy gutted the definition of corruption. Heather K. Gerken in the Prospect published an article immediately after the decision [http://prospect.org/article/real-problem-citizens-united]:

“For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned. Justice Kennedy didn't say that the Court was overruling these cases. But that's just what it did.”

The problem with "quid pro quo" corruption is that most corruption occurs on the Golf Links or in the locker-room in a country club. You know "locker-room talk."

"If the Court rigidly insists that Congress can regulate only to prevent quid-pro-corruption, narrowly defined, then Citizens United has implications that extend well beyond what corporations can do. Justice Kennedy's own opinion even hints at the possibility, as he notes that the evidence supporting the "soft money" limits – which apply across the board -- rests on evidence about the connection between money and political access. While Justice Kennedy backed off from saying anything definitive, we may find that it was the Court's discussion of corruption, not corporations, that matters most in the long run."

If the Supreme Court applies this rule to the McCutcheon case, which it probably will, then we'll be further down the road to shameless corruption under the protection of the first amendment as "free speech."

Fact is that money buys access which leads to influence which leads to collusion and is corruption. Corrupt court illustrates this at work, when they make decisions that legalize corruption while drawing outside income from teaching, speech making, and become blind to the reality that "access = influence". Judges used to avoid even the appearance of Corruption. Thanks to being exempt from Judicial ethic rules all other judges are supposed to live by some of the court justices on the Supreme Court now display openly their corrupt associations. This is destroying peoples faith and trust in the government and is enabling flagrantly corrupt politicians to get elected by flagrantly venal wealthy individuals. When Justice Scalia hunted with Dick Cheney and then selected his choice to be President, that is corruption. When folks graduate from universities, become lawyers work for a corrupt official, and then take a job at a company as a reward for corrupt decisions as a regulator, and then gets appointed to offices as a result of corrupt decisions in private practice, that is known as the "revolving door" and there is never a Quid Pro Quo that one can identify -- but it is incredibly corrupting. There doesn't have to be direct quid pro quo to run a corrupt enterprise, and US Penal Law represents "influence" as criminal when it is coerced. It's also criminal when it's not -- but thanks to the Supreme Court only morally.

Kennedy's decision was either morally blind, or morally corrupt –or both!

The Swiss define corruption this way:

"Corruption means any abuse of a position of trust in order to gain an undue advantage. This involves the conduct of both sides: that of the person who abuses his position of trust as well as that of the person who seeks to gain an undue advantage by this abuse."

And "private, separate advantage" was the core part of John Locke's definition of tyranny, so corruption, oppression, usurpation and tyranny are always connected. And the Swiss (SECO) go on:

"Corruption can occur in relation to officials as well as between private persons. It is particularly prevalent in certain kinds of transactions (for example, when awarding public contracts), in certain economic sectors (for example, in extractive industries), and in certain countries. Corrupt practices can range from small favours in anticipation of a future advantage to the payment of large sums of money to senior members of governments."

http://www.seco.admin.ch/themen/00645/00657/00659/01387/index.html?lang=en

By those definitions "undue influence" is at the heart of corruption. Kennedy's decision was not just incorrect, it itself was corrupt, because it gives advantage to corruptors and the corrupt by forcing the government to a narrow and hard to prove definition of corruption.

Published: 10/18/2013

Related Posts in series:: A Corrupt Court; The Expected Corrupt Decision by a corrupt court; Seven Reasons Issa Cut Cumming's Mike; Corruption Racketeering and the Supreme Court; Corrupt Court and Undue Influence

Monday, October 7, 2013

Campaign Reform that might pass Supreme Court

I believe that some of the justices on the Supreme Court are corrupt, but there are things we can do to improve our campaign finance laws that will be difficult for them to overturn on "first amendment" and "corporate personhood" grounds without showing just what scoundrels the majority of the Supreme Court are. These modest proposals all draw on past laws and commons sense:

Define certain kinds of donations as de-facto evidence of bribery:

Any donations from a person or other organization doing business with the Federal Government, or an officer of an organization doing business with the Government shall be deemed as an effort to influence the Federal Government favorably to their business and such gifts, donations or loans shall be deemed as evidence of quid pro quo for bribery, or extortion (if given to an opponent), even if there is no direct link between the Federal Contractor and the recipient, or the person or business doesn't get the business or the gifts are returned and the debts paid unless the recipient discloses such gifts, loans or donations and recuses him or herself from any decision involving that business.

All donations, gifts, loans, or other contributions from any person whatsoever shall be disclosed at the time they are received. Failure to disclose such gifts, loans, donations or other contributions by persons or organizations doing business with the Federal Government by elected officials, or their immediate families, at the time they are received shall be deemed as evidence of intent to violate the law and of bribery.

* Note, the only reason for not making this a blanket restriction is the courts are currently corrupt.

Any legislator or other officer of the Government who receives money, gifts, or other emoluments, from anyone doing business with the Federal Government shall recuse him or herself from all legislative votes or decisions related to any matters related to that business or the officer or legislator shall be presumed to have been influenced by a bribe and shall be subject to US bribery laws.

All persons making any kind of donation, gift or loan to any politician or person running for office or re-election, shall disclose those donations to the IRS and these donations shall be listed publicly if they are over $2000.00 individually or $10,000.00 total in 2012 dollars.

Any person having information about campaign irregularities, bribery, influence pedaling, or other violations of the law shall be protected from retaliation, firing, or being targeted for prosecution by those who he has accused and if there is a conviction or a plea the person shall receive a 10% bounty on the amount of money value of the fine or of the amount of money saved to the taxpayer.

* Note: This is a variation of the Lincoln Law.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Using the war against Women to Abolish Liberty Part I

There really is a war against Women. Of course you'll never hear most of the folks prosecuting it admit it. This is because they need women to vote for them.

This is nothing new ....When the USA first was created, our elites were involved in a struggle to create a republic that would give them power, but were also trying to avoid a return to aristocracy and monarchy. The Right likes to portray our founders as being clear on the subjects they were arguing, but they weren't. They extolled democracy, and lamblasted it, at the same time. What they wanted was a system that would embody rule of law, protect their contracts with the government and each other, and protect themselves against both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of emerging aristocrats. Events in the USA like the Shays revolution terrified them, and the French Revolution sent some of them into fits of apoplexy. They often were pushing back against the people, even as they sought to manipulate people into keeping them in office. This is still true to this very day. They couldn't get elected unless they found a way to link their special interest with their victims own interest.

Thus it was that Southern Slave Holders were able to enlist poor, non-slave owning, whites - who couldn't compete with the wages paid to skilled blacks - to help them protect their "peculiar institution" and then later got the descendents of those same people to help them create a regime of terror and oppression that also was used to oppress working white folks. Folks identify with the wealthy and powerful. In this country they think that "one day they'll be rich and powerful." Folks let the powerful transfer their narrow expertise in conning people and making money into the idea that the folks who have those attributes are also wise and experts on things totally unrelated. Thus demagoguery and business go together in our society whether we are talking about religious politics, business politics or business politics. You can talk about "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" and folks will believe what you are saying even if others think you are nuts. It's called "coded language" and it works like a dog whistle for those whose fears are tuned into the notes being sounded. Fear makes people band together, and our right has been expert at manipulating people for a long time.

So there is a lot of coded language within the right in this day, because the power model hasn't changed... When the right goes after an issue, the goal is power, and the main goal of that power is "private, separate interest" of the private actors who constitute the wannabe aristocrats of the Republican party. They may not be literal teabaggers, but their goals involve teabagging people, including the people they convince to support them.

So the war on women isn't really a war on women. It is just another way to use dog whistles and coded language to keep, project and extend power, for the folks who want to be oligarchs in this country, and at this point, have acquired the kind of power to let them exercise oligarchic powers. But it is a real war nonetheless. When Romney talks about "life starting at conception" he is appealing to people's emotions on behalf of laws aimed at locking down women's rights.

Life begins at conception is part of a "reductio ad absurdum" that has some almost comical implications. For one thing, if a fertilized ovum is a "person" then the life of a sperm or an ovum can be equally "constructed" to be "persons" as well. For literalists this could lead to the felony criminalization of masturbation for men, or miscarriages or even the annual period. In the article: In the Anniston Star, called "When life is legal: The meanings and implications of ‘life begins at conception’ belief" by Jim Vickrey, where he writes:

If a fertilized human egg is “alive,” as many of my Christian friends claim to believe, so are the ovum and spermatozoa constituting it. If the latter be not so, then secular evolutionists must be right: Life can be created from life-less stuff.

So if the religious literalists get their way then:

Accordingly, if a conceptus is a “person,” as many believe, then its constituent parts must be alive or, at the very least, “quasi-persons,” likely deserving of equal protection under the law.

Read more: Anniston Star - When life is legal The meanings and implications of ‘life begins at conception’ belief

And he notes it gets worse. Nothing that Leviticus condemns masturbation, so if life is defined to begin at conception and sperm and eggs are defined as persons, then conceivably masturbation could once again be a criminalized activity. This could lead to a lot of men getting locked up. Hooray for Prison industries! But seriously, life at conception is mainly targeted at women:

"First, we should insist that the proper health and medical authorities investigate the facts of every miscarriage occurring anytime near the now-mystical, medically unjustified, 20th week of an expected 36-week-long pregnancy in order to satisfy ourselves that the miscarriage was not, in fact, induced."

So, witch hunts here we come!

"Second, we should insure that 100 percent of all miscarriages are reported to the Alabama Departments of Health, Records, et cetera, for data maintenance of death statistics; to proper law-enforcement agencies for information purposes; to the newspapers for obituary purposes; and to the funeral homes of choice for the purpose of picking up and delivering the remains prior to the funeral. Moreover, if the fetus is a person, in fact, why are we not now reporting such news routinely? Could it be because most people, in fact, don’t consider miscarriages to “really be the death of a person,” thereby requiring such, preferring to deal with their grief in private ways?"

Oh, yes, and not to mention criminalizing birth control and even efforts to control menstration. Keep the women at home! And it would be a boon to newspapers:

"Third, we should insist that the survivors, those responsible for creating the “person” who’s just died, be issued a birth as well as a death certificate, identifying the “person” by name and the cause of death."

But of course that all shows why even Christian folks with common sense used to have common law ideas about conception and abortion:

"It’s easy to see why the common law, historically, has not tried to identify the moment of conception or fertilization (since there isn’t one), which terms are not even precisely or consistently synonymous in medical dictionaries, and why it opted to define a legally protected fetal interest as arising at viability, the new thinking of our “activist” highest state court to the contrary notwithstanding. It’s just as easy to see why, while reading statutes purportedly based upon identifying when life begins and so when “personhood” arises, the above-stated list of “horrors” now includes as well as new ones born of religious zealotry, such as requirements for “transvaginal” or other sonar examinations before legal abortions."

But of course, as the author notes:

"After all, just as the state once had the legal right to restrain and retain black citizens as slaves, now the very men who usually decry the “intrusive hand of big government” into our lives seek to assert the legal right to intrude literally into the sanctity of a woman’s womb to enslave any zygote found there. Defining a one-celled, virtually invisible to the naked eye, conceptus as a “person” or a “baby” leads one to all sorts of strange places. If you, Dear Reader, are a self-described “pro-life” person, which we all are, why should not what is written above become standard operating procedure?"

Okay, with all that, there is still a war on women going on. And the absurd effort to define life starting at conception is part of it. Think I'm joking? Romney is for it:

http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/elections-politics/press-releases/fact-sheet-mitt-romney-supports-dangerous-personhood-amendments-1155.htm
And Rand Paul,: http://grijalva.house.gov/news-and-press-releases/grijalva-calls-akin-legitimate-rape-comments-cosponsorship-of-forcible-rape-bill-symptoms-of-an-assault-on-womens-status/; "Akin, Ryan and others are original cosponsors of HR 3, which sought – before a public outcry prompted a reversal – to create a legal difference between “rape” and “forcible rape.” The bill still eliminates tax breaks for health insurance premiums on policies that cover abortion-related expenses and prevents women from paying for an abortion from a health savings account. A complete explanation of the bill from the Christian Science Monitor is available at http://bit.ly/Rxg8HN."

Text of HR 3:

And this says nothing about their war on working people's pay:

Wisconsin Senator/liar:"Women paid less because money is more important to men"

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Attacking Democracy itself

I posted a blog post on July 8 2012 about how Frederick Hayek actually despised Democracy, praised Pinochet's dictatorship (and the bloodshed with it) and how libertarians seem to be morphing into Fascists (Neo-Liberalism already is pretty identical to Fascism outside the USA) and today I get this wonderful gift of a horrible dishonest -- but intensely revealing article that confirms my observations; and I guess my fears about where at least some on the far right are trending. The friend who sent this to me, based on past history with his governance style has no problems with this thesis. A mutual friend shared this article from the Capitalism Magazine. He seems to agree with it entirely, including its thesis that democracy is evil.
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2012/07/the-founding-fathers-and-democracy/ Brian Phillips writes:

"Democracy means unlimited majority rule. The majority may do as it pleases simply because it is the majority. Under democracy the individual is subservient to the majority, that is, the collective. Democracy is a form of collectivism."

This article is dishonest, misleading, misdirects people about what democracy is about, and thus shows how Libertarians, probably out of frustration with the fact that most people have trouble seeing the fine quality of the invisible cloth that they spin their ideology from are gradually morphing back to their roots as fascists that we discussed in my last blogpost. For one thing it distorts the subject from the first line to the last.

First, Democracy does not mean "unlimited majority rule." The word means simply "democracia" -- rule by the "demos" or the people. It has never meant simple majority rule except in the hands of polemicists and demagogues. The ancient Athenians believed that democracy required the people to "step up" (Hoi boulomenos) and volunteer in democratic institutions. Indeed in modern times word democratica in Greece is synonymous with Republic. Democracy: δημοκρατία Republic: δημοκρατία. So when Jefferson is talking about 51% votes and such he is referring to "direct democracy" versus the Republican notion of a Federation or a commonwealth. Even so Jefferson and Madison believed in indirect "Republican Democracy. They saw the danger that democracy can descend into mob rule, where "the individual is subservient to the majority" -- but that is not what democracy is about. They are making a false equivalence between democracy and collectivism. And this is a disturbing development because up until now the majority of libertarians have at least paid lip service to majority rule.

I guess this is illustrative of where the far right is trending. I guess just because the far right can't seem to convince people that they should vote libertarian, (or neo-liberal as their philosophy is known outside the USA), even though it means poverty and desperation for the many and liberty only for the masters they seem to be giving up on the subject and like always with neo-fascists they cannot simply make their case without first hijacking, rustling the word "democracy" and then trying to rebrand it as something ugly. I guess that is why they make the false association between the word "democracy" with "collectivism:" Brian Phillips continues:

"Collectivism holds that individuals exist only as a member of a group—whether a race, an economic class, or the State. Individuals per se do not possess rights, but only in their capacity as a member of a group. Under democracy an individual possesses rights only when he is a member of the majority. Even then those rights are limited and continually threatened, because if the individual finds himself in the minority on any issue, he is required to follow the dictates of the majority. He may be on the winning side on a vote regarding light rail, but be on the losing side on a vote regarding school bonds."

There are two interesting points about this assertion. The first one is that the only place you see the Supreme Court, or anybody, asserting that a group has rights "only as a member of a group" is in the case of corporate law, where the Citizens United Case built this whole megillah about Corporate Personhood, having the privileges of special speech and that money is privileged speech. In their Arizona decision the Court claimed that giving public money to competing groups and individuals "burdened" the speech of the privileged and wealthy. Obviously, for the current court, free speech is a collective right only granted to the privileged and wealthy. The rest of us believe that groups exist to defend our individual rights from other groups or the government itself. We understand that the problem is "faction" versus commonwealth. In a functioning commonwealth if the majority wants school bonds and one is on the winning side one accepts that the majority with which one disagrees is legitimate to want to invest in "light rail." One can't have commonwealth if one's faction dominates whether it is majority or minority. If one's faction wins whatever the issue, that is not a functional republic. Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. quotes Jefferson endorsing the concept of democratic republicanism:

""We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23"

http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco55.htm

The above article examples Federalist 10 in context with Madison's and Jefferson's other writings. And they don't support this next quote from the Demagogue Brian Phillips either. Phillips writes;

"For the most part, the Founders were opposed to democracy. James Madison, for example, wrote “There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.”

This is not true. Maybe some of the founders, but not James Madison or Jefferson, were opposed to democracy, but Jefferson and Madison were opposed to mob rule, not democracy! What the honest writer Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. notes that:

Apparently, Jefferson believed that the enlightened citizenry of a pure republic would not be so inevitably subject to the destructive factions that Madison described in Federalist No. 10 (see above). In fact, Jefferson suggested that a republican form of government without a due degree of popular control was no panacea, and lumped such governments along with monarchies(!) as channels of oppression.
http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco55.htm

And Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. quotes Jefferson:

"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence; as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our States, in a great one. 3. Under governments of force; as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.

Phillips continues quoting Jefferson out of context:

Thomas Jefferson stated that “a democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” And perhaps my favorite is a quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”"

But the fact is that Jefferson was referring to direct democracy not to democratic republicanism. It looks like libertarians are abandoning the principles of republicanism along with their despite for democracy. Jefferson wanted to avoid mob rule, and had definite ideas how to do so, including privileging free education. Jefferson's republican principles dictated:

"Action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves, constitutes the essence of a republic... All governments are more or less republican in proportion as this principle enters more or less into their composition." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.

Thus a lot of the misquotes in this article are taken out of the context of the destinction between direct democracy and democracy as government getting it's authority from the people. Read Federalist 10 for more. Coats goes into more detail and explains the subject pretty darn well:

http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco55.htm

Phillips concludes:

"Democracy forces you to act in accordance with the demands of the “will of the people,” regardless of your own judgment. Democracy compels you to surrender your liberty and your property for the “general welfare.” Democracy forces you to sacrifice your rights."

This is a call to authoritarianism and a pack of lies. Since I know better, I think Jefferson has the right term for it; "dupery.":

"Believing as I do that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816.

I could go into more detail, but that is enough for this post. I agree with this final quote from Jefferson, which is also my operating principle.

"Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816.

And this quote comes from Jefferson's Inaugural address, and also contradicts Phillips lies and spin:

"During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres16.html

Phillips might have the words, but he has none of the spirit of Jefferson in his writings. He's like an assassin who attacks the very spirit of his target. He's like a kidnapper who cuts the words out of a book and rearranges them into an extortion note. This attitude of hate towards democracy, the 99%, and the people has to be stopped. It has to be defeated. Then maybe we can restore the "harmony and affection" that mark a real commonwealth and a democratic republic, and that were the vision and goal of the real founding fathers rather than the twisted and dark shadows that are invented by these neo-liberals who try to rebrand Jefferson's ideas and the concepts of Democratic Republicanism into something dark and authoritarian.

Sunday, May 3, 2020

The Core of all Natural Rights theory

The Ultimate Inalienable Natural Right

Misrepresenting Rights

Examples with the Right to Happiness & Others

Alienable Rights Versus Inalienable

Infringement on Inalienable Rights Is Oppression and Violence

Alienating an Inalienable right destroys the Person

Denial Illustrates inalienability

Harmonizing Deontology and Teleology

The Deontological viewpoint

The Teleological Perspective

Mapping the Abstract to the Practical

Ends and Means are inextricably linked

The Absurdity of Alienation

Self Ownership vs Right to Property in One's self

Alienable Versus Inalienable

Those advocating Inequality claimed it was Consensual

Inalienable Rights Versus Oppressive Consent

Legal Fiction of Consent = Fraud

Historical Illustration

Further Reading

John Locke

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Friday, April 20, 2018

The Catch 22 of Unjust Legal Systems

The Truth Table of Catch 22 Situations

If a decision is coerced, the claim that it is truly consensual is a fraud

Natural Rights Arguments on behalf of Genuine Liberty

Legal Fiction of Consent = Fraud

The Fraud continues

The Type I and Type II Frauds of Corporate Personhood

Further Reading

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Incomplete Contracts And Large Scale Swindles

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Restoring Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

We have to disabuse them of those notions!

Friday, September 4, 2015

Establishing a Timeline Helps sort the dreck from the jewels

Friday, June 5, 2015

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Citizens United hinged on a Huge Error in Judgment

Independent Expenditures as Ingratiation, Access and Extortion

Undue Influence includes Extortion and Slander

Partisanship Fueled by Separate Interest

Revolution fought to resist Undue Influence from $ Power

Resisting the East India Company

Indirect Bribery and Extortion = Undue Influence

Further Reading

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

CU was Bad

MCCutcheon is Worse!

Ingratiation and Access ARE OFTEN Corruption

Preferential Access and Undue Influence

Gutting the Definition of Corruption

Further reading:

Monday, October 7, 2013

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Tuesday, July 10, 2012