Many on this list will find this of interest.--Tom

Today we resume with our 7th installment in the series body slamming
the Supreme Court decision declaring our country the United
Trans-Global Corporations of America.

But first, the new Independent Voters movement is growing quickly.
The Facebook page (which anyone can read, even without a Facebook
account) has over 3,000 fans already, in just the first week. Most of
all we need MAXIMUM participation from our progressive political
friends on Facebook so our voices will be heard here. So especially
if you are on Facebook already please go there and become a fan.

[Facebook] Independent Voters page:
http://www.facebook.com/Independent.Voters

We have also set up a fabulous new inter-navigation resource and we
need you to submit ALL your activist links on ANY site anywhere,
independent candidate sites, issue advocacy sites, existing third
party sites, bring it all. Just click on the Hub tab on the page
above, and get the code for the linking button and you will
automatically get a listing on the new hub. If you want to associate
a special description for your link submit the simple form on that
page.

And we are now also streaming the posts (at least the first 140
chars) from the new Independent Voters page to Twitter as well.
Follow this Twitter account and we will AUTOMATICALLY follow you back
to boost your own followers, and you can participate in the
discussion this way:

@iVoters

As we mobilize long term against the Supreme Court outrage, we are
focused on distributing as many of the "Corporations Are NOT The
People" bumper stickers as possible, with over 15,000 out the door so
far (mostly entirely for free), and we have shipped all the bulk
packs requested too.

To get a free bumper sticker (if you haven't requested yours yet)
just submit this page. If you can make a donation of course this is
what makes it possible for us to send free bumper stickers to those
who cannot make a donation right now.

Free Supreme Court Bumper Sticker:
http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers.php

For those who want to organize locally, packs of 25, 50 and 100 are
available for a modest price (just enough to keep the initiative
going) at

Bulk Supreme Court Bumper Stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers_bulk.php

OK, so here we go again. A Supreme Court decision is supposed to be
the words straight from the horse's mouth. But the one in the
Corporations United case calls into question which end of the horse
it came from.

Where we last left our villains on the Supreme Court we were talking
about how Kennedy, besides his own fact finding errors, had built his
entire decision on misreading the actual holdings of the cases he was
citing, relying instead on dissents (often his own) and dicta (stray
language) which are NOT supposed to take precedence.

Central to Kennedy's specious analysis is his quotation OUT of
context (opinion at p. 30) of this language from the Belloti decision
putatively rejecting

"the proposition that speech that OTHERWISE would be within the
protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply
because its source is a corporation."

Here WE emphasize the word "otherwise" in this passage because it is
pivotal and the only one that really matters. Kennedy would read this
rejection, of the hypothetical proposition stated, as a declaration
that corporations have unlimited and ABSOLUTE First Amendment free
speech rights. The Belloti decision held NO such thing. It says here
only that corporations have SOME free speech rights, subject to other
limitations provided elsewhere.

And indeed elsewhere in the Belloti decision it in fact expressly
limited itself to the issue of whether corporations can participate
in a debate on POLICY issues in public discourse. The issue of
whether corporations can without any regulation or restriction
participate in CANDIDATE advocacy, in particular within 30 days of an
election, as per the statute overturned by Kennedy's outlaw decision,
by Kennedy's own admission (opinion p. 31) the Belloti decision did
NOT "address".

Here's what Belloti actually says about the intended scope of its
holding.

"... our consideration of a corporation's right to speak on issue of
general public interest implies no comparable right in the quite
different context of participation in a political campaign for
election to public office." [435 US at 788, n. 26.]

Whoop, there it is, as they say in the legal biz. The Belloti
decision concerned only whether a corporation could weigh in on the
merits of a referendum on a public policy issue. To explode that into
a destruction of all reasonable restraints on untoward corporate
influence on candidate elections is for Kennedy to play terrorist
with our entire infrastructure of jurisprudence.

All this may have escaped Kennedy's horse blindered attention in
arriving at his perverse result, but it sure did not escape Justice
Stevens, who precisely pointed all this out in his dissent at p. 52.
Nobody disputes that corporations have at least some First Amendment
rights. Otherwise corporate advertising in ALL forms would be banned.
But here Kennedy engages in a unilateral refusal to read the words in
the Belloti decision for what they actually say.

In short, Belloti EXPRESSLY precluded the interpretation Kennedy
would give it. This is beyond reckless, it is beyond irresponsible,
it is beyond dishonest, it is Orwellian, and coming from the mouth of
a Supreme Court justice ... it is criminal.

Likewise, in his deliberate misapplication of the Buckley case
Kennedy's citation of vague language disapproving of restricting "the
speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the
relative voice of others" is no more availing (opinion p. 33) to
decide an issue he HIMSELF admits Buckley did not "consider" (opinion
p. 29).

This is not about seeking to "enhance" the voice of citizens
vis-a-vis corporations. It is exactly because corporations have
overwhelmingly so much more financial power RELATIVE to individual
citizens that Congress has passed reasonable regulations on them. And
over the decades the Courts have affirmed these regulations over and
over, to keep the voice of actual citizens from being drowned out,
which regulations Kennedy now so unrighteously overturns.

Seven parts in this series already, and are we done yet ripping this
heinous decision to legal shreds? Not even close. Next up in this
series, the drop kick hypocrisy of Kennedy's First Amendment
absolutism as applied on behalf of corporations only.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

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