Los Angeles Panders to Idiots Who Scream, "Corporations Aren't People!"

Uch.  How disgusting is this?

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to support a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment that would assert that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights, and that money is not the same as free speech.

First off, you can't overrule the US Supreme Court, bitches.

Secondly, if donating money is not free speech, or free expression, what is it?

This is what these idiots on the left always say: "Corporations are not people!!!"  Well, no kidding, but does that mean they're not entitled to protection under the law?  Because that's what this ultimately is about.  Leftist want to gain control of corporations (ie the means of production) and bring them under control of the state.

Let's take a look at how all this happened.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, (1886):

At the California Constitutional Convention of 1878-79, the state legislature drew up a new constitution that denied railroads "the right to deduct the amount of their debts [i.e., mortgages] from the taxable value of their property, a right which was given to individuals."^[1] Southern Pacific Railroad Company refused to pay taxes under these new changes. The taxpaying railroads challenged this law, based on a conflicting federal statute of 1866 which gave them privileges inconsistent with state taxation (14 Stat. 292, §§ 1, 2, 3, 11, 18).

So, basically California was trying to tax corporations at a higher rate than people.  Does it not make sense for them to fight back? 

Does this "corporate personhood" really allow corporations to run rampant?  Let's take a look at the actual rights corporations have.

Wikipedia:

Generally speaking, corporations may invoke rights that groups of individual may invoke, such as the right to petition, to speech, to enter into contracts and to hold property, to sue and to be sued. However, they may not exercise rights that are exclusive to individuals and cannot be exercised by other associations of individuals, including the right to vote and the right against self incrimination.

Oh, so you mean they have weaker rights than individuals?  How interesting.  You would never know that from people who scream "corporate personhood" and "Glass-Steagall" as a solution to everything.

So, what are the actual problems?  Corporations need to be able to form contracts and can still be sued for anything they do wrong.

See, the real reason this issue has heated up is because people are crying about "campaign finance reform."

Folks, the amounts of money donated to political campaigns are really not sky high if you look at it (although it's true they've been increasing.)  However, if you limit how much people can spend, the incumbent will win virtually every time.

From The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform:

As we have seen in national politics, the era since 1970 has seen a steady increase in incumbency advantage.  That period has also seen a steady decrease in the real value of contribution limits in federal elections.  In other words, the federal experience suggests an inverse correlation between contribution limits (they went down) and incumbency advantage (it went up).

Yes, folks, if you decrease campaign contribution limits, you will probably increase incumbency advantage.  That's because the incumbent typically has a broader network of people to draw from.  Unless caps are removed, challengers typically can't raise close to as much money.  And if a challenger is able to raise as much money the incumbency advantage virtually disappears.  Those races are about 50/50%.


Many people also cry about the Citizens United case, which is ridiculous.  Let's take a look at what actually happened in the Citizens United case.


As this Reason video points out, 26 states already have laws allowing corporate donations to candidates. Has there been a collapse of Democracy there?



To get an idea of the types of activities that would have been barred if the government had its way in Citizens United, look here:



Citizens United has already been used to support the gay marriage in NY.  Not exactly the collapse the left predicted.

Oh, and don't forget, corporate designation as "people" allows for the corporate income tax, which I'm sure lefties love.

A-Hole Calls Rand Paul "Orwellian" for Supporting the Constitution

Note: here's a bit of what's being referenced in this article



Don't want to be detained by your government for being accused of being a "terrorist" with no recourse?  That makes you a "libertarian extremist" and "Orwellian" according to this douche bag at the National Review:

For one thing, it will be seen as the policy that vested such dangerously misplaced Tea Party credibility in libertarian extremists such as Senator Paul and Judge Napolitano, who, under the Orwellian guise of “constitutionalism,” seek to vest our wartime enemies with the rights and privileges of American citizens (to the full peacetime extent of those rights and privileges).

The quest to quell Islamists by democratic processes has only empowered them.

What this douche bag fails to realize is the Paul is talking about Americans' rights during "wartime."  That's the whole point.  All of this detention without habeus corpus is now applicable to Americans.  (The douche bag does make the argument that this is nothing new, the President already has this power, blah, blah, blah.  The point is we shouldn't be supporting it.)

Some more choice quotes from this gruelingly long 7-page article:

Democracy fetishists have worn threadbare the public’s patience. 

Yes, folks, if you believe in the Constitution, you are a democracy "fetishist."  I wonder what kind of things this pervert does in the privacy of his own bedroom.

They now lend an open ear to anti-constitutional claims by the likes of Paul and Napolitano — and convince themselves that these characters are scoring points because respondents like McCain are inept. 

McCain is inept?  McCain would chew your ear off with his gums if he heard that, buddy. McCain isn't anymore inept than anyone else.  It's that the position makes no sense.

[A]fter almost 3,000 of us were slaughtered on 9/11, the public broadly demanded that the enemy be subdued.

No, freaks like you demanded that the "enemy" be subdued.  As people have pointed out, our enemy is now "terror," and is not finite.  That makes anyone who "supports terror" a potential suspect to be locked up in Guantanamo forever.  Who decides if someone is "supporting terror?"  The government of course, and they've decided that people donating to the wrong charities are supporting terror.

Paul is fond of pointing to Lincoln’s unilateral suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. What he never gets around to mentioning, however, is that (a) the constitutional prerequisite for suspension of the writ, rebellion, had clearly occurred, and therefore the only legal question concerned which political branch, the president or Congress, had the authority to order suspension;

Bullshit.  The cognitive dissonance isn't interrupted by what he says just a sentence or two later:

(c) after the war, the Supreme Court rejected the executive’s unilateral suspension,

Oh, I guess the prerequisites hadn't been met yet.  But maybe I'm just being a 'democracy fetishist' by insisting that the Judiciary have some roll in the balance of powers.

And back to his point about Lincoln, Lincoln locked up people who published things he didn't like, like a douche bag, during the war, so I don't think it was all wine and roses.

Gitmo, the most scrutinized prison on the planet, is a model of humane treatment, solicitous to a fault in providing for our enemies’ eccentric dietary, spiritual, recreational, and litigation needs. 

Maybe we should put this guy in Gitmo and see how he feels?  Here are a few comments on US detention policy by Glenn Greenwald:

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least.  While some of those deaths were the result of ”rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others.  Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be “torture” when used by others— because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people.

I mean, people have been murdered at Gitmo.  Bottom line.  People have also been forced to wear diapers, all that shit.

Oh yeah, most of the people who were in Gitmo were found innocent.  So much for the worst of the worst claim.

Also, McCain's claim about Gitmo detainees' recidivism isn't even close to being true.

And, one final point:

This gives rise to the contention — advanced not by Senator Paul but by Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens in the 2004 Hamdi case — that American citizens may not be detained in wartime, even if they are suspected of fighting for the enemy, absent a formal congressional suspension of habeas corpus.

 You're farther right on wartime powers than Scalia: an indication you might need a reality check.

Obama Buddy Advocates Socialism

I was just going to write WSJ publishes op-ed advocating socialism, but then I realized who the guy was.

The author of this piece is Andy Stern.  According to Wikipedia:

Andrew L. "Andy" Stern (born November 22, 1950), is the former president ^{[7] [8]} of the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

[...]The union spent another $85 million on Democratic candidates in 2008; $60 million going toward the election of President Barack Obama,^[29] with a significant chunk of that money funding door-to-door canvassing and other GOTV efforts,^[30] as well as voter registration.

[...]Stern has been a frequent visitor to the White House since Obama's election.^[32][33] Between Inauguration Day and February 23, 2011, Stern visited the White House 53 times.^[34]

I believe he was actually the number one visitor at that time.

Anyway, here's part of what he wrote in the WSJ:

For me, the tension resulting from the chorus of American criticism paled in significance compared to reading the emerging outline of China's 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development.

[...]Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5% annual growth and 49% growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10% a year.

Ahhh, yes, a "five year plan." What could go wrong with that?

Anyway, Mr. Stern's complete ignorance of history aside (he's teaching at Columbia now: stay away,) let's take a look at China's actual economy.

Firstly, Stern talks about China's gdp. 

Folks, if China's gdp numbers were a Thanksgiving turkey, it'd be done. They cook those numbers beyond belief.  Here's the thing: Chinese stimulus spending is counted as part of their gdp.

Let's take a look at what they're actually spending their money on:



Now, if gdp were really growing at the rate they state, wouldn't demand be matching up?

Well, it's not:

Private consumption growth has slumped to 0.3 per cent in Q1 from 2.6 per cent in Q4 of last fiscal. Growth in investments has plummeted to 3.7 per cent. Government consumption growth is negative. The data is at odds with strong anecdotal evidence of consumer demand.

Now lets take a look at China's actual debt.  They manage to hide a lot of it.

Telegraph:

Chinese provinces are, in some cases, equivalent in size to major European countries and run with a degree of fiscal autonomy. The southern province of Guangdong, for example, has the same population size as Germany.

However, provincial budgets have been classified as state secrets until now and this is the first time that China has disclosed the level of local government debt.

Mr Liu said the ratio of debt to disposable revenues at some local governments was over 100pc and in the highest case it was 365pc.

He said the audited debts of 18 of China's 22 provinces, together with 16 cities and 36 counties amounted to 2.79 trillion yuan (£279bn) in 2009.

Several observers believe the situation is far worse. The China Daily newspaper, which is run by the government, suggested that the total sum could add up to between 6 trillion and 11 trillion yuan (£590bn-£1.08 trillion).

Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States, believes the sum in 2009 was 11.4 trillion yuan, equivalent to 71pc of China's nominal GDP.

Their government-run corporations are also laden with debt.

Op-ed News:

[L]ocal-government investment companies had a total of $1.7 trillion in outstanding debt at the end of 2009, or about 35% of China's GDP. Banks have extended $1.9 trillion in credit lines to local investment companies on top of that. Collectively, the debt plus the credit lines come to $3.8 trillion. That is about 75% of China's GDP, which is proportionately quite a bit smaller than U.S. GDP. None of this is included in the IMF's calculation of a gross-debt-to-GDP figure of 22%, says Shih. If it were, the number would be closer to 100% of GDP.

Sorry Mr. Stern, the facts don't bear out your wishful thinking, although I'm sure you'd love socialism so you and your all-knowing bureaucrat buddies could be in charge of the economy.

Just for good measure, let's take a look at a handful of other problems in China:

Inflation is ramping up.

Lead poisoning is a major problem.

They keep secret files on all their citizens

You want to talk about 99% vs. 1%?: "About 90 per cent of China's billionaires are the children of high-ranking officials."

Their urban/rural income gap is at a 32 year high.

They kill girls.

They rank 95th in per capita gdp.

How is their banking system?: "Analysts said that their working assumption had been that a minimum of 30 per cent of the total Rmb7,700bn ($1,100bn, €875m, £732m) bank lending to Chinese local governments was unlikely to be repaid."

What about the black market economy their overbearing state creates?: "China's households hide as much as 9.3 trillion yuan ($1.5 trillion) of income that is not reported in official figures, with 80% accrued by the wealthiest people, a study showed."

And so on and so on.  Mock trials, summary murders, etc., etc.

Unemployment: Not Working

Here's new proof.

Reason:

The survey, which spent two years tracking 675 people who lost their jobs in the Great Recession, found that 62 percent of unemployed respondents who did not receive unemployment benefits thought they were financially worse off, versus 76 percent of those who did receive benefits. Similarly, among those who were able to find jobs after their initial unemployment, only 32 percent of those who didn't receive benefits saw themselves in a worse financial place, versus 50 percent of those who did receive benefits.

[...]Those who did not receive UI [Unemployment Insurance] were more likely to obtain a job within less than a year. Among those who had exhausted their unemployment benefits before getting another, most took more than a year.

Among the reemployed, just over half took a cut in pay. UI recipients were twice as likely to experience lower pay as those who did not receive UI benefits (59 percent versus 32 percent) And 64 percent of exhaustees said they were forced to take a pay cut in order to find new full-time employment.

This, of course, comes after Obama's own economic advisor, Larry Summers, says that unemployment insurance increases the unemployment rate.  (I believe he said about 1% before.)

Additionally:

Economists disagree on how much jobless assistance aggravates the problem it is supposed to ameliorate. But a study this year by the liberal Brookings Institution estimated that without the additional benefits, the unemployment rate would be at least 0.7 percentage points lower than it is—the equivalent of a million jobs.

But here's the biggest kicker. Unemployment insurance was being offered privately before the government got involved.

Downsizinggovernment:

Numerous U.S. labor unions, such as the Cigarmakers' International, already offered their own out-of-work benefits, as did most British labor unions before that country's government system was enacted.4 In 1910, nearly 30 percent of total union expenditures in Britain went toward out-of-work benefits.5 Some U.S. manufacturing companies offered unemployment benefits, and there were a number of plans offered jointly by businesses and unions, such as those in the clothing and garment industries. There was also growing interest among private insurance companies to introduce unemployment plans to the general public.

[...]The Great Depression greatly changed the political environment. With unemployment reaching high levels, federal policymakers began creating programs to lessen the economic hardships.