The Right to Evade Regulation: How corporations hijacked the First Amendment

[Lakhota]

Aw, another Nazi analogy. How nice...

 

[TemplarKormac]

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

This thread is about the First Amendment, is it not? So I see no reason not to bring such an issue up. It is, of course, my First Amendment right.

Here you are defending a troll, who in his escapades, trolls dozens of conservative threads daily. Why won't you call him down for that? Oh right, selective outrage. Carry on.

You are obviously one of the people that see money as speech, corporations as people and don't see a problem with private interests writing legislation that effects a vast amount of people and benefits a few.

Personally? I have a problem with wealth driven legislation. I think it corrupts the political process is very meaningful ways.

When you donate to your favorite candidate in an election, is that not saying "I support you"? In a sense it is speech now that you mention it. You are in addition to your vote, indicating, making known your support of said candidate. In essence, an opinion, covered by the First Amendment.

Be careful that you liberals don't let this backfire on you.

 

[TemplarKormac]

Because this really matters right now with the widespread tyranny of the federal government...

What tyranny?

The tyranny Obama told you to reject, remember?

 

[Lakhota]

Obama is keeping us safe. He's whacking all the evildoers - including the homegrown nuts. Go Obama!

 

[whitehall]

What hijacking? The assumption that the radical left always relies on is that all money and property belongs to the government. I would offer a suggestion that the government is hijacking everybody's money including corporations to pay for ridiculous stuff like the IRS star wars movie.

 

[Avatar4321]

Aw, another Nazi analogy. How nice...

Then stop acting like nazis

 

[Avatar4321]

Obama is keeping us safe. He's whacking all the evildoers - including the homegrown nuts. Go Obama!

Yeah... tell that to Ambassador Stevens

 

[Lakhota]

Aw, another Nazi analogy. How nice...

Then stop acting like nazis

Please give us your comparisons. Oh, and don't forget that several Obama policies began under previous presidents.

 

[Avatar4321]

Aw, another Nazi analogy. How nice...

Then stop acting like nazis

Please give us your comparisons.

Spying on people
Wanting to control business
Targetting political enemies
Denying people their rights
Propaganda designed to keep the ignorant placated.
Dislike for jews.

 

[OriginalShroom]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

How are they circumventing the Constitution?

 

[Yurt]

Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.

Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.

For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”

It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.

Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.

Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.

What people think of as the American free speech tradition, is, like civil rights and the Super Bowl, a tradition that turns out to date back only a half-century. As late as the 1950s, cities or states could ban motion pictures they found distasteful, arrest a man for calling the local sheriff a fascist, and lock up declared members of the Communist Party, all without violating the Constitution.

The shift toward free speech as we now understand it can be attributed in part to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1935, the school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, instituted a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in its classrooms. Lillian and William Gobitas, children from a local Witness family, refused to participate, following church teaching that holds that seeking salvation from an “earthly emblem” is a sin. The Gobitas siblings were expelled. For good measure, a Catholic parish in the predominantly Catholic town announced a boycott of their parents’ store, wrecking its business. Yet when the Supreme Court took up the case, it voted eight to one against the family. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that to overturn the expulsion would be to make the Court a “school board for the country.”

In the months following, the publicity the case generated turned Jehovah’s Witnesses nationwide into targets.

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

ignorant liberals like you are a pox on this country

CU didn't just defend corps, they defended unions

 

[whitehall]

Why do corporations hire CPA's and tax lawyers? To get around the often contradictory and badly written stack of tax laws. Every pension, public and private, is invested in corporate wealth. If retirees depend on government Social Security they would be in the poor house. Corporations ..r..us, they make the goods we need and they sell the stuff we want. Government does not earn a dime and what they confiscate is often spent on stuff like "star wars" movies starring IRS executives.

 

[Avatar4321]

Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.

Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.

For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”

It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.

Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.

Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.

What people think of as the American free speech tradition, is, like civil rights and the Super Bowl, a tradition that turns out to date back only a half-century. As late as the 1950s, cities or states could ban motion pictures they found distasteful, arrest a man for calling the local sheriff a fascist, and lock up declared members of the Communist Party, all without violating the Constitution.

The shift toward free speech as we now understand it can be attributed in part to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1935, the school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, instituted a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in its classrooms. Lillian and William Gobitas, children from a local Witness family, refused to participate, following church teaching that holds that seeking salvation from an “earthly emblem” is a sin. The Gobitas siblings were expelled. For good measure, a Catholic parish in the predominantly Catholic town announced a boycott of their parents’ store, wrecking its business. Yet when the Supreme Court took up the case, it voted eight to one against the family. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that to overturn the expulsion would be to make the Court a “school board for the country.”

In the months following, the publicity the case generated turned Jehovah’s Witnesses nationwide into targets.

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

ignorant liberals like you are a pox on this country

CU didn't just defend corps, they defended unions

And anyone else who has the audacity to say something critical about a politician 60 days before an election.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Obama is keeping us safe. He's whacking all the evildoers - including the homegrown nuts. Go Obama!

he is or the Military and Police are?....

 

[Harry Dresden]

Aw, another Nazi analogy. How nice...

Then stop acting like nazis

Please give us your comparisons. Oh, and don't forget that several Obama policies began under previous presidents.

and if they are naziish....why is he not stopping them?....

 

[Lakhota]

Obama is keeping us safe. He's whacking all the evildoers - including the homegrown nuts. Go Obama!

he is or the Military and Police are?....

So, you blame Obama for everything you don't like and praise the military and police for everything you do like? Convenient...

 

[Harry Dresden]

Obama is keeping us safe. He's whacking all the evildoers - including the homegrown nuts. Go Obama!

he is or the Military and Police are?....

So, you blame Obama for everything you don't like and praise the military and police for everything you do like? Convenient...

is that what i do?.....learn English Lakota....when you say Obama is whacking all the evil local homegrown nuts...thats saying he is out there doing it.....now did he do it?.....or did the Local Authorities get those guys?....whether you want to believe it or not.....the Boston Police did not have to wait for an order from the President to pursue those guys.....they acted on their own......contrary to what some people think.....the President does not direct every fucking thing that happens in the Country......some things he is like the rest of us.....he has to wait to be told what is going on too....

 

[boilermaker55]

Don't you see the infantile attitude of someone like him/her. They have no real rebuttal except to call names. So to try and make themselves seem like they are defending their position, which in reality they have none. they resort to their basic rudimentary comments that are insults.
Typical of the tea party group.

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

 

[Lakhota]

Here is a sobering quote by Abe Lincoln:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

—U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)​

More: What Lincoln Forsaw: Corporations "Enthroned" and Re-Writing the Laws Defining Their Existence