NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Mon, 21 Jun 2004
On corporate personhood
William Rivers Pitt has an extraordinarily good editorial
today. It concerns the history of corporations and how we got into this mess. This has long been an interest of mine; you might go over to
Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy site and have a look around if you are interested.
It continues to amaze me that one small sentence in
an obscure Supreme Court ruling from 1886 so profoundly affects our lives. And it is a sentence of omission at that.
Read the paragraph that contained your destiny:
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WAITE said: The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
The immediate repeal of "Corporate Personhood" is probably the single most important thing that we could do
to regain our country as citizens.
Posted at 11:39 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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A 500 year drought, right now.
The Associated Press reports that the drought in the Western United States, specifically the Colorado river basin,
has been determined to be the worst in 500 years.
Some excerpts:
The report said the drought has produced the lowest flow in the Colorado River on record,
with an adjusted annual average flow of only 5.4 million acre-feet at Lees Ferry, Arizona,
during the period 2001-2003. By comparison, during the Dust Bowl years, between 1930 and 1937,
the annual flow averaged about 10.2 million acre-feet, the report said.
[...]
Scientists use tree-ring reconstructions of Colorado River flows to estimate what
conditions were like before record-keeping began in 1895. Using that method, the lowest
five-year average of water flow was 8.84 million acre-feet in the years 1590-1594. From
1999 through last year, water flow has been 7.11 million acre-feet.
Posted at 11:19 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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How odd can it get?
From a Salon article by John Gorenfeld:
You probably imagine your congressman hard at work in the Capitol debating legislation, making laws
-- you know, governing. But your newspaper probably didn't tell you that one night in March, members
of Congress hosted a crowning ritual for an ex-convict and multibillionaire who dressed up in maroon
robes and declared himself the Second Coming.
On March 23, the Dirksen Senate Office Building was the scene of a coronation ceremony for Rev.
Sun Myung Moon, owner of the conservative Washington Times newspaper and UPI wire service, who was
given a bejeweled crown by Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill. Afterward, Moon told his bipartisan audience
of Washington power players he would save everyone on Earth as he had saved the souls of Hitler and
Stalin -- the murderous dictators had been born again through him, he said. In a vision, Moon said
the reformed Hitler and Stalin vouched for him, calling him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah,
Returning Lord and True Parent."
There's an excellent, more detailed followup on this available at
Politics1.com. The attendance list is a long string of familiar names of both parties.
The Dirksen Senate Office Building. Your tax dollars at work.
Posted at 10:49 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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The Republican Party of Texas
I'll likely be commenting soon in depth, but the preamble to this year's Texas GOP platform is
here, and a pdf of the whole of the thing is
available here.
Can you say "Unrestricted Capitalistic Coercive Christian Fundamentalist?"
Drop in some other diety in place of "God" (who appears 13 times) and you have a document that
would have every non-secular person in the state howling in a frothing, screaming outrage.
The religious hypocrisy is most amusing.
There are even some occasional good things in there, too. All in all, it's a pretty rich study of the people who
currently control Texas government, and their ultimate plans for all of us.
Posted at 09:34 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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