OT:The Corporate Supreme Court; Time For Impeachment
- From: LakersX <news@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:50:47 +0000 (UTC)
The Corporate Supreme Court; Time For Impeachment
By Ralph Nader
http://bit.ly/qdlMhL
Five Supreme Court Justices--Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy
are entrenching, in a whirlwind of judicial dictates, judicial
legislating and sheer ideological judgments, a mega-corporate supremacy
over the rights and remedies of individuals.
The artificial entity called "the corporation" has no mention in our
Constitution whose preamble starts with "We the People," not "We the
Corporation."
Taken together the decisions are brazenly over-riding sensible
precedents, tearing apart the state common law of torts and blocking
class actions, shoving aside jury verdicts, limiting people's "standing
to sue", pre-empting state jurisdictions--anything that serves to
centralize power and hand it over to the corporate conquistadores.
Here are some examples. (For more see thecorporatecourt.com). Remember
the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound
twenty two years ago? It destroyed marine life and the livelihoods of
many landowners, fishermen and native Alaskans. Its toxic effects
continue to this day.
Well, after years of litigation by Alaskan fishermen, the Supreme Court
took the case to review a $5 billion award the trial court had assessed
in punitive damages. A 5 to 3 decision lowered the sum to $507.5 million
which is less than what Exxon made in interest by delaying the case for
twenty years. Moreover, the drunken Exxon captain's oil tanker calamity
raised the price of gasoline at the pump for awhile. Exxon actually made
a profit despite its discharge of 50 million gallons.
The unelected, life-tenured corporate court was just getting started and
every year they tighten the noose of corporatism around the American
people.
In Bush v. Gore (5-4 decision), the Court picked the more corporate
president of the United States in 2000, leaving constitutional scholars
thunderstruck at this breathtaking seizure of the electoral process,
stopping the Florida Supreme Court's ongoing state-wide recount. The five
Republican Justices behaved as political hacks conducting a judicial coup
d'état.
But then what do you expect from justices like Thomas and Scalia who
participate in a Koch brothers' political retreat or engage in
extrajudicial activities that shake the public confidence in the highest
court of the land.
Last year came the Citizens United v. FEC case where the Republican
majority went out of its way to decide a question that the parties to the
appeal never asked. In a predatory "frolic and detour," the 5 justices
declared that corporations (including foreign companies) no longer have
to obey the prohibitory federal law and their own court's precedents.
Corporations like Pfizer, Aetna, Chevron, GM, Citigroup, Monsanto can
spend unlimited funds (without asking their shareholders) in independent
expenditures to oppose or support candidates for public office from a
local city council election to federal Congressional and Presidential
elections.
Once again our judicial dictatorship has spoken for corporate privilege
and power overriding the rights of individual voters.
Eighty percent of the American people, reported a Washington Post poll,
reject the Court's view that a business corporation is entitled to the
same free speech rights as citizens.
Chances are very high that in cases between workers and companies,
consumers and companies, communities and corporations, tax payers and
military contractors--big business wins.
Inanimate corporations created by state government charters have risen as
Frankensteins to control the people through one judicial activist
decision after another. It was the Supreme Court in 1886 that started
treating a corporation as a "person" for purposes of the equal protection
right in the fourteenth amendment. Actually the scribe manufactured that
conclusion in the headnotes even though the Court's opinion did not go
that far. But then it was off to the races. These inanimate giants,
astride the globe, have privileges and immunities that "We the People"
can only dream about, yet they have equal constitutional rights with us
(except for the right against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment) and
more limited privacy rights.)
What is behind these five corporate Justices' decisions is a commercial
philosophy that big business knows best for you and your children. These
Justices intend to drive this political jurisprudence to further
extremes, so long as they are in command, to twist our founders clear
writings that the Constitution was for the supremacy of human beings.
To see how extreme the five corporate justices are, consider the strong
contrary view of one of their conservative heroes, the late Chief Justice
William Rehnquist in a case where a plurality of justices threw out a
California regulation requiring an insert in utility bills inviting
residential ratepayers to band together to advance their interests
against Pacific Gas and Electric. The prevailing justices said--get
this--that it violated the electric company monopoly's first amendment
right to remain silent and not respond to the insert's message.
Conservative Justice Rehnquist's dissent contained these words--so
totally rejected by the present-day usurpers: "Extension of the
individual freedom of conscience decisions to business corporations
strains the rationale of those cases beyond the breaking point. To
ascribe to such artificial entities an "intellect" or "mind" for freedom
of conscience purposes is to confuse metaphor with reality."
It was left to another conservative jurist, the late Justice Byron White,
dissenting in the corporatist decision First Nat'l Bank v. Bellotti
(1978) to recognize the essential principle.
Corporations, Justice White wrote, are "in a position to control vast
amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only
the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral
process." The state, he continued, has a compelling interest in
"preventing institutions which have been permitted to amass wealth as a
result of special advantages extended by the State for certain economic
purposes from using that wealth to acquire an unfair advantage in the
political process". The state need not permit its own creation to consume
it." (emphasis added)
Never have I urged impeachment of Supreme Court justices. I do so now,
for the sake of ending the Supreme Court's corporate-judicial
dictatorship that is not accountable under our system of checks and
balance in any other way.
iReader
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