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At this point it is essential to insert a point concerning the issue of a corporation's personhood. Many are wont to suggest the matter was settled in the favor of corporations in 1886 in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pac[ific] R[ailroad] Co. While currently moot, all who so argue err.
In the constitutional convention of 1878-79, California rewrote its constitution. In doing so it 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." After Southern Pacific refused to pay the taxes provoked under the new constitution, bay area counties, including Santa Clara county, sued the railroad for the lost taxes. Eventually the case found its way to the US Supreme Court.
Subsequent confusion has infiltrated the unanimous decision because J. C. Bancroft Davis, a court reporter, wrote the headnote (SCUS decisions reach the legal community through United States Reports. The cases are preceded by Headnotes, brief summaries written a court reporter that outlines the case and the decision.) What Davis erroneously wrote in his headnote was, "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 the opinion that it does." The court's opinion makes no such allusion.
Prior to publication, Davis asked Chief Justice Morrison Waite whether his headnote was correct. The response that Davis received from Justice Waite is, "I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision."
Unfortunately, for whatever reason(s), Justice William O. Douglas gave weight to the erroneously concluded corporate personhood issue when in 1949 he wrote, "the Santa Clara case becomes one of the most momentous of all our decisions.. Corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives." The liberal justice's misplaced anger over a precedent that did not in fact arm corporations "with constitutional prerogatives" ironically only served supposedly to thereafter arm corporations "with constitutional prerogatives."
Thus it is that what was never, ever intended to be a constitutionally held right(s) by natural persons, nor was ever decided by the Supreme Court to be so, has been presumed by the Court to be established law. And all by a court reporter!
Three exigencies war against revisiting corporate personhood, as a characteristic derived first from Santa Clara. Today's far right, corporatist orientation of the Court will not prompt a corrective revisiting. While neither intimating nor adjudging the sophistication or incuriousness of today's electorate, it simply is too much to anticipate a concerted demand that it be revisited in any scholarly manner. Third, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC . . . and give me a break. Which is as good a segue to Challenge 4 as may present itself.
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Every one of our founders saw newspapers, magazines, and pamphleteers as absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. So consequent in their role of informing the electorate to the shenanigans afoot by those with power and influence that Jefferson opined, ". . . were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
The 4th Challenge is to control the public's access to information that might contradict corporate interests.
And again, from Jefferson, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Our third president, although enamored both of math and science, was not referring to either. Rather it was to an informed electorate.
From the time of the Church's adamant resistance to the Gutenberg printing press and the Bible that flowed to the masses from it, all the way to today's attempts by the Chinese government to block unfettered access to the Internet, the urge by the powerful and power hungry has been to bridle to the greatest extent possible the information that is available to the people.
Control the information and one can exert considerable control of a population. In a democratic republic that ostensibly functions under a constitution that guarantees the people's right to freedom of speech and of the press, outright dictatorial measures are doomed to failure. However, there are three alternatives to blatant censorship that are much more effective. One borrows unabashedly from Rome: so long as they are fed, entertain the masses, and they'll not trouble themselves with the hard tasks of governing. That method; done. Another method is via merger and acquisition of the primary information outlets. As with the previous; done. Finally,
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