D.C. Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton made a shocking comment about Associate Justice Clarence Thomas this week, stating that ” We’ve got someone who proposes to be African-American on the court.” It is a shocking insult directed at Thomas and it is unworthy of Norton. It also seems to suggest that someone cannot be a true African-American if they are conservative.
The comment came in response to a question on whether President Obama would select a black nominee to replace Justice Stevens. Norton reportedly responded “We’re not sure this president is ever going to nominate another African-American to the court. [Barack Obama]’s African-American. We’ve got someone who proposes to be African-American on the court.”
One can only imagine the response if a white member said about Stevens that “we got someone who proposes to be white on the court.” There is no question that Thomas is a lightning rod for liberals, but this comment should be roundly condemned by liberals and immediately retracted by Norton. One can certainly disagree with Thomas’ writing, as I do, while preserving civility and, yes, respect in the debate. Thomas is a person with an amazing personal story. Clarence Thomas was raised in Pin Point, Georgia — a poor black town without a sewage system or paved roads. His father was a farm worker and his mother was a domestic worker who spoke Gullah as a first language. While liberals were quick to celebrate the life of Justice Sotomayor for growing up in the projects and achieving so much in her life, they appear unwilling to credit Thomas with his own amazing and difficult life, including being left homeless as a child.
It is particularly disappointing from a former Georgetown law professor. I have great respect for Delegate Norton, though we were on different sides in the D.C. Vote controversy. However, this is only the latest personal attack on Thomas that is entirely out of line.
For the story, click here
“I can’t help the general public isn’t very bright and can easily be persuaded to buy something they know they can’t afford.”
You cannot put the onus on the consumer only. Who would be in a better position to know whether a consumer could afford a product or not? The bank. Therefore, the banks persuaded those people to buy something the banks knew they couldn’t afford.
I wouldn’t jump on the “I’m bright but your not” pedestal yet, James. You, after all, believe that Jesus rising from the dead is fact.
Gyges:
Actually they are facts. Why would anyone go to a bank that doesn’t like banks. I guess because it is for their convenience. This is exactly what banks have done to people by taking advantage of them. I can’t help the general public isn’t very bright and can easily be persuaded to buy something they know they can’t afford.
James,
Actually those aren’t facts, that’s advice. Words have meanings you know. You might want to brush up on the meaning of fact, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Everyone else,
I know, I fed the troll (to be fair, I was getting him and Jason in another discussion mixed up), I’m done. Although, I’m still in awe of how good is this guy is.
Gyges:
If one doesn’t like banks then don’t use them. If you don’t like ice cream then don’t go to the ice cream parlor. If you don’t like shopping then don’t go to the mall.
Those are very clear facts.
James,
Because I don’t like forest fires, I shouldn’t grill?
Buddha:
As I stated yesterday, Jefferson was not a good president. His views on economics can’t be said to be better than that of Hamilton. All who do not like banks should never use them. That means if you work, then you should expect to be paid in cash. If you use the bank, then by your own actions you state banks can be good. Remember, it is the people in the banks that become corrupt. It is no different than saying guns kill when we all know it was the one who pulled the trigger that killed.
What is that cookie made by Nabisco called…….?
BTW, we are talking about regulating corporations, not individuals. A single owner corporation would still be disallowed from lobby activities although the owner would be allowed to petition as a citizen but on a level playing field – i.e. no money would ever be allowed to change hands. No gifts, no donations, no graft whatsoever. The corporations their legally personable fictitious selves should be silence politically. It is their meddling, single owner or publicly traded, that has brought us to the state of fascism currently existing in Washington.
Byron,
Corporations operate by GOVERNMENTAL CHARTER.
This means the government can (and would if not bought off) make corporations do any damn thing they want as corporations only exist at the whim of the state. And your “individual owners” argument is specious. The government regulates property rights every day. I know you don’t believe that or think that’s right but you can go try to buy VX nerve gas and get back to us in 15-20 years about how well that purchase went. You can end K St. without impairing the Right to Petition. How many times do I have to say the Right to Petition could (and should) be a form one – as in one individual citizen – gets at the USPS which your representatives have a time certain for responding to once filed before that sinks in? The representatives should have to explain why they are not addressing your legislative concerns or what they are doing to help and nonresponsive behavior should be rewarded at the ballot box with unemployment. But lobbying as it currently exists could be done away with in a heartbeat just like any other inherently dangerous enterprise. All it takes is the guts to walk away from the corporate cash teat. Guts everyone in Washington seems to lack. And that is the courage they will continue to lack until citizens rise up and eat them alive in the French method. Greed is stupid. Doubly so in a politician.
bUDDHA:
that proves it, lawyers are everywhere. 🙂
Actually I wasn’t passing the buck. That stint with the Trade Association is what made me think that lobbying to the extent of writing laws for congress should be illegal. But since that isn’t going to happen it needs to stop altogether. Abolish K St. but I don’t know you can legally do that. Not all big companies are publicly held, those are owned by individuals directly. But then share holders are “owners” as well.
Slarti,
As always, one lives to be of service.
Buddha,
Re: ‘War, Famine, Pestilence and Dopey’ – good one!
And because of you I’m going to have nightmares about ‘the financial reform bill – brought to you by Goldman-Sachs’.
Byron,
Ok, Dick the Butcher.
You just want to keep passing that buck as far from the corporate table as possible when it comes to responsibility.
And take a wild guess as to how many corporate officers happen to be attorneys or have law degrees? It’s a percentage certainly on par with Congress. But you keep deflecting.
It gives me something to gnaw on.
Slarti,
I’m all about harmonics and feedback mechanisms.
And while I am persuasive, no matter how I structure my Celtic guile, I fear that I may lack the charm required to convince that soulless simulacrum that is Scalia. He’s most certainly part of the problem. Of the Four Horsemen currently on the Court, he is surely War. Roberts is Famine and Ailito is Pestilence (at least that’s what Mrs. Ailito says). I just didn’t know they had a Horseman named Dopey until Thomas, but hopefully one learns something new every day.
Buddha:
“Laws being written by lobbyists is a problem right now.”
No, it has been a problem for many decades. I used to work for a trade association in the late 80’s. They were writing code back then and the lawyers made a big career out of it. My wife’s uncle worked for a trade association starting in the 1930’s he was also a lawyer.
And the association he worked for did the same thing.
The reason it isn’t going to go away is that it benefits lawyers directly. Most politicians are lawyers as are most of the people who write code for their trade associations.
Seems to me we do away with lawyers in politics and we fix the problem.
Buddha:
he also decidely changed his mind about manufacture in the US.
The Growing Importance of Manufacturing
“All the world is becoming commercial. [Were] it practicable to keep our new empire separated from them, we might indulge ourselves in speculating whether commerce contributes to the happiness of mankind. But we cannot separate ourselves from them. Our citizens have had too full a taste of the comforts furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them. We must, then, in our defense endeavor to share as large a portion as we can of this modern source of wealth and power.” –Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1784. Papers 7:26
“The spirit of manufacture has taken deep root among us, and its foundations are laid in too great expense to be abandoned.” –Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1809. ME 12:294
“Too little reliance is to be had on a steady and certain course of commerce with the countries of Europe to permit us to depend more on that than we cannot avoid. Our best interest would be to employ our principal labor in agriculture, because to the profits of labor, which is dear, this adds the profits of our lands, which are cheap. But the risk of hanging our prosperity on the fluctuating counsels and caprices of others renders it wise in us to turn seriously to manufactures, and if Europe will not let us carry our provisions to their manufactures, we must endeavor to bring their manufactures to our provision.” –Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, 1791. FE 5:344
“An equilibrium of agriculture, manufactures and commerce is certainly become essential to our independence. Manufactures sufficient for our own consumption of what we raise the raw materials (and no more). Commerce sufficient to carry the surplus produce of agriculture beyond our own consumption to a market for exchanging it for articles we cannot raise (and no more). These are the true limits of manufactures and commerce. To go beyond them is to increase our dependence on foreign nations and our liability to war. These three important branches of human industry will then grow together and be really handmaids to each other.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Jay, 1809. ME 12:271
“As yet our manufacturers are as much at their ease, as independent and moral as our agricultural inhabitants, and they will continue so as long as there are vacant lands for them to resort to; because whenever it shall be attempted by the other classes to reduce them to the minimum of subsistence, they will quit their trades and go to laboring the earth.” –Thomas Jefferson to Mr. J. Lithgow, 1805. ME 11:55
Buddha,
You’re preaching to the choir (although I do appreciate the fine sermon). My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek although I do feel strongly that most of our governmental problems have come from the severance of feedback mechanisms like rights/responsibilities, profit/cost, risk/reward. In the scientific world, it is clear that when freedback mechanisms are disabled systems can no longer respond properly to stimuli. Even worse, when feedback mechanisms are reversed (creating positive feedback) then systems oscillate out of control. I assume that the economic/political/legal worlds work the same way (I certainly haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary). You’ll find that although I probably have a very different way of looking at these issues than you do, that fundamentally we agree 100%. So while you certainly gave a fine answer to my second question, what I would really like is for you to convince Justice Scalia that what you just said is completely correct.
Byron,
It’s called argument by analogy and extrapolation. Citizens United did nothing more than turn corporations into the default “lender” for politicians. Also your assertion that Jefferson was anything but anti-corporate influence in government is almost as laughable as that time you refused to admit Nazis are fascists. He had seen the abuses of the guild systems and corporations in Europe. That’s why he said what he did. Cause and effect.
Slarti,
A corporation, like any organization, is a construct – a control mechanism for the production of products and/or delivery of services used in commerce to be specific. As part of their charter (government granted authority to operate), corporations have five distinguishing features.
1) Transferable shares usually in the form of stock either publicly or privately traded.
2) Shared ownership distributed among the various stockholders according to the quality of their stock.
3) Centralized management using a board of directors structure.
4) Limited Liability
5) Legal Personality
The key issues limited liability and legal personality.
Legal personality is a fiction that allows a construct to “act as a person” for certain limited functions, namely contracting, lawsuits, owning property and taxation. This does not mean a corporation is a human or was ever intended to have civil rights analogous to a human. It is this fiction that Citizens United expands to the breaking point in that corporate rights are in practice now of a superior quality of the rights of individual citizens who (aside from the exceptions like a Bill Gates) don’t have nearly unlimited capital to throw at candidates like a corporation like Exxon does.
The most worrisome expansion of this fiction is that the “rights” of this legal construct have expanded from the practical concerns of ownership and contracting required to do business and access to the courts to resolve disputes and now gives them the “right” to influence politics by essentially purchasing outright political campaigns. Corporations – as they are not really humans or citizens – should have ZERO say in politics. Our Constitution says “We the People”, not “We the Corporate”. Corporations now have taken the already suspect institutionalized graft of K St. campaign finance scheme and gotten SCOTUS to formalize their ability to buy candidates outright that will work solely for the interests of the corporation (an amoral profit motive) and not We the People (to whom candidates and representatives owe a Constitutional obligation and are ultimately responsible to – ask the French about that last part). Laws being written by lobbyists is a problem right now. That is the nature of de-regulation. Wait until we see laws written by corporations directly. We’ll be left with not a single individual right but only the “duty to consume” with no recourse against criminals hiding behind a fiction who would poison and steal from us all if it makes them money.
Closely related to this legal personality is the concept of limited liability. Limited liability is the idea that investors are protected from creditors or lawsuit damages against the corporation with their liability being generally limited to the amount of their investment in the corporation. This is because in a suit, the corporation proper – the legal fiction, stands as defendant and is responsible primarily for the damages. This does not mean shareholders cannot be held liable for their individual actions relating to the company. For example, you see this kind of suit when someone is convicted for insider trading – using special or proprietary knowledge gained from their corporate position to profit personally against rules laid down by the SEC. That these individuals are shareholders is part and parcel of that crime but such acts of “piercing the corporate veil” can theoretically happen for other crimes as well (such as fraud or other torts). In practice, this rarely happens though. Judges are reluctant to hold shareholders and officers responsible and usually only pierce the veil on insolvent companies. This is due to the fact that corporations, despite being a fatally flawed tool, do encourage investment in that free market economy the capitalist swine so love to wallow in. Usually the corporation eats the costs or takes it out of potential dividends. Or worse. They’ve done a calculation and decide that paying out lawsuits is less than the price of a product recall. Ford’s board didn’t eat the damages personally for their negligently designed Pinto’s nor did they face personal criminal charges for negligent homicide (both of which should have happened in a just world). They tried to buy their way out of their negligence. When the jury found out what Ford had done, it ended up costing them much more than a recall. Normal people don’t like it when some corporate dipstick reduces a human life to a simple transactional cost of doing business. The problem is some corporations are so large no fine of any size will impact them enough to get them to change their illegal and semi-legal ways. Too big to regulate? No such thing. So big they need to be put down before they can trash the global economy again? You bet there is such a thing. Exxon, Goldman Sachs, ad nauseaum are all perfect examples of where limited liability translates to no liability due to size and now the ability to literally purchase campaigns for “pliant” politicians. The difficulty in piercing the corporate veil keeps corporate officers out of prison for acts an individual would do hard time for but because they “followed the formalities”, these criminals walk free to kill and steal again without so much as a dime coming out of their personal ill-gotten fortunes. All in the name of a P/L statement.
Piercing the corporate veil isn’t an issue when a corporate officer commits a tort while conducting business on behalf of the corporation. In that instance, they are jointly liable. This is why Halliburton should have been dismantled for Cheney’s treason before they conveniently fled from prosecution by relocating to Dubai. But with Holder and Obama giving Cheney a walk, Halliburton is still free to screw up the world for everyone else instead of being shuttered.
Does that answer your questions?
“I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” –Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816. FE 10:69
he is not per se against corporations he is against them defying the laws of our country. He is against the power of certain corporations not the concept of corporations. He specifically says “moneyed corporations”. I take this to mean ones that are extremely large and are challenging the government.
He might even have been talking about foreign corporations. I would need to know the basis for that quote before I could conclude Jefferson was anti-corporation.
“Aristocrats… fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.” –Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 1825. ME 16:96