WSJ: Split Personality?

The vast divide between the even-handed reporting in the Wall Street Journal's news pages and the unalloyed reactionism of its editorials was never more evident than in yesterday's edition in which columnist Ashley Jones wrote – in the WSJ Law Blog – a straightforward and balanced pre-election piece on the effect of the SCOTUS Citizens United
v. FEC ruling on incumbent senate candidate Russ Feingold (who subsequently lost).

At the end of the column, "for a different take", Jones links us to a WSJ editorial on the subject, a piece of writing so unremittingly snarky it makes the queen of snark, Rachel Maddow, look like the Dalai Lama.

It starts out by charging "good-government liberals" (or 'goo-goos', in Journal-speak) with wanting to regulate "political speech" (code for unrestricted anonymous campaign funding) and goes downhill from there. We are asked to "celebrate…the death of campaign finance reform" (pace, John McCain) and to agree with the editors that every Democrat ("from President to dogcatcher") will be shifting the blame for their mid-term shellacking onto the Supreme Court (NB: I hasten to concede that some undoubtedly will).

While the Citizen's United decision may or may not be sound law, it certainly flies in the face of any republican concept about government's obligation to provide a level political playing-field. In fact, the Court itself held, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, that political speech may be banned based on the speaker's corporate identity. That ruling was intended to "prevent the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of [corporate] wealth...that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas." 'Nuf said.

My purpose here today is not, however, to wallow in the detritus of Citizens United, but to ponder the dichotomy of style and substance between the WSJ's news coverage and its editorial pages. One might ascribe it to Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function", or we might, more churlishly, put it down to schizophrenia.

Corporate Personhood: Fact or Fantasy?

One of the delights associated with newspaper reading is the random encounter with an article whose headline might not have drawn you to it online, but which, with idle page-turning, happens to catch your attention for no reason other than pure serendipity.

Religion sections having become an exotic species in newspapers of late, my curiosity was piqued by a headline in the Cape Cod Times: Do Corporations Have Souls? The author (The Rev. Edmund Robinson) starts out with a Halloween peg about the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain, during which "the veil between this world and the other world was said to be at its thinnest, allowing the fairy folk to escape the sidhe, or fairy hill, and wander about in human villages."

It was but a short narrative leap from those shades and spirits to the incorporeal entities now frighteningly empowered to fund election campaigns anonymously, courtesy of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, a case which infamously declared corporations to be persons under the law, and therefore entitled to all of the free speech protections of the 1^st Amendment.

Robinson then proceeds to demolish the premise of corporate personhood as a theological absurdity, a compelling perspective not previously encountered in my readings on the subject.

We may of course choose to accept or reject his doctrinal arguments according to our own religious convictions, but there is no getting around his essentially humanistic contention that corporations are not people because they are not mortal, and, consequently, neither die nor harbor fear of death, a uniquely human imperative that existentially influences our behavior, hopefully for the better.

I commend the complete article to your attention.

Promises, promises

So amazed was I to encounter on the front page of our local newspaper a headline stating that one of our congressional candidates has an actual "plan" to offer, rather than the usual mix of glittering generalities and ad hominem calumny, that I hastened to read the article.

Alas, t'was not to be. It seems that the candidate's plan relies heavily for implementation upon passing two Constitutional Amendments, despite the fact that in the 222 years since the Bill of Rights was ratified, over 10,000 Amendments have been offered and only 17 have passed (the ERA having been on life support since 1923).

One must therefore reluctantly conclude that we are, as usual, being offered only what those of us old enough to still be reading newspapers call "pie in the sky".

We is Sarah

Without becoming unduly obsessive about the essential witlessness of Sarah Palin, her most irritating trait may well be her insistence on referring to herself in the 1st person plural.

Acceptable use of the imperial we is pretty much restricted to sovereigns and heads of state, and, even then, is generally derided in democracies as an affectation; especially when utilized by someone holding no public office whatsoever.

Journo Knocks Jock Pols

Robert Lipsyte, the justly-celebrated veteran sportswriter, writes (on Huffpost) that ex-athletes make lousy politicians. He sets up his premise thus:

Keep in mind that the sports-industrial complex tends to produce narrow-minded, self-centered, ethically-challenged mercenaries who are deeply submissive to established authority while being fiercely dedicated to winning by any means possible.  Or as one of my old political advisers, Sam Hall Kaplan, a former New York Times and Los Angeles Times reporter, puts it: "A pol who learned as an athlete just who ultimately butters his bread can be counted on to continue to wave to the crowds while doing the bidding of the owners." And the owners these days, thanks to the umpires (... er, Supreme Court) are likely to be unnamed billionaire warlords donating to right-wing candidates through dummy organizations that have no requirement to open their books to the voters.

Read the entire article here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beware of Greeks

As skeptics have long suspected, "ancient Greek civilization" — and its attendant cultural baggage — has been exposed as a fabrication artfully constructed by renegade historians. Coming as it does just before mid-terms, the news elicited a collective sigh of relief from overstressed Ph.D candidates, nationwide.

Read about this astonishing hoax here.

Intel Insider

Carrying a Beijing dateline, the influential Borowitz Report noted yesterday that China will soon begin dismantling its widely envied domestic intelligence network in favor of Facebook.

Contacted by this column for corroboration, a high-level PRC government spokesman revealed that the Ministry of Public Security's elaborate intelligence-gathering apparatus has become a "runaway monster", diverting revenue that could be more productively used to buy U.S. Treasury bonds.

"It's astonishing to us that people will voluntarily put their most private thoughts and activities up for public scrutiny in order to be perceived as being 'with it'", noted the spokesman. He went on to say that "the amount of personal information available on Facebook staggers the imagination. As long as self-involvement remains the 21^st Century's most defining human trait, our office need only sit back and mine the data."

There are unconfirmed reports that other intelligence agencies around the world, including our own NSA, CIA and FBI, are closely following developments, lest the Chinese run away with advanced Western technology, yet again.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was unavailable for comment, according to a publicist newly hired to cope with recent Zuckerberg-connected media excesses.

Queries to the Xinhua news agency and the Chinese search engine Baidu seeking further corroboration met only with the usual oriental inscrutability, an irritating cultural artifact rapidly being undermined by the internet. But, coupling the ministry's frank statement with Borowitz .com's usual reliability, we've decided to run with the story anyway.

See http://www.borowitzreport.com