By Irving Leemon, Contributing Columnist
The Supreme Court in their zeal to protect freedom of speech feels that anything can be said or shown. The legal zealots in this country want to turn the clock back to the comparative simple days of over 200 hundred years ago. Communication between individuals took weeks to travel a few hundred miles and was mostly one on one.
Transportation from point A to point B took weeks to months when more then a few miles. Today communication goes out to masses of people at the same time and is almost instantaneous. The population and geographic size of this country was much smaller. The population lived on farms, and in towns, and cities that were much smaller then today. As a result individuals were much more responsible for their behavior and neighbors watched out for each other, and punished those who did things they did not like.
They also knew and watched out for each other’s children and their behavior. Those days are long gone. The supreme court keeps ruling in favor of the big companies, many of whom are international in scope are not not ‘citizens’ of the U.S., and they have a lot of money. One example is the ruling that large corporations can spend as much as they want on politicians’ political races. It’s as if the corporations are people, which they are not.
However, they have more money to spend on individual elections then 90% or more of the population makes in a lifetime. In addition, they have limited the political spending of unions. At the same time, it’s also been a long standing tradition to limit the amount that individual humans can spend. They’ve recently ruled that individuals cannot ban together to sue corporations by class actions. Most individuals do not have the know-how, or the resources to sue large corporations.
Therefore, the corporations can do, or not do things to large numbers of people with relative impunity. The Court has also ruled that states can ban unions. Last year the Court ruled that giving large amounts of money to specific candidates’ campaigns does not necessarily make the politicians corrupt. With the access those contributions give the donors how is it that they don’t have a certain amount of influence over those politicians? What about the threat that during the next election season the money would go to a rival politician instead?
Agree/ Disagree? Email: ileemon@socal.rr.com