Citizens United Case

South Florida Conservative Talk Show Host Joyce Kaufman And Congressman Elect Allen West: Two “Wingnuts” That Will Make News! :(

Ronald 1 Comment

One of the most notable Tea Party Movement favorites who won election to the House of Representatives last week was Allen West, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, who was forced to leave the military after inappropriate treatment of a prisoner In Iraq in 2003, and who has been associated with right wing, pro gun groups!

With large amounts of money, including support from Karl Rove associated groups, West defeated Congressman Ron Klein of Boca Raton, in one of the most confrontational campaigns in the country! 🙁

West is a “wing nut” who will make lots of news with his comments and actions, seen by many as an African American male counterpart of Michele Bachmann, Congresswoman from Minnesota, who is constantly making outrageous statements and calling for extremist actions against the opposition party, and confrontation in foreign policy!

It is bad enough that West will be a “nightmare” in Congress, but he has now appointed right wing “nut job” talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who is a South Florida “wannabe” replica of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the local level! 🙁

Kaufman has been an outrageous talk show host on WFTL in Fort Lauderdale, spewing poison, hate, and nastiness, calling for violent actions against illegal immigrants, war against Islam, and ridiculing Democrats in despicable language, such as calling Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Debbie Wasserman Schmutz (dirt in Yiddish)! She has used similar assaulting language against other Democrats, including former Congressman Robert Wexler, and other Democrats on the national scene, and has been totally negative in every way toward President Barack Obama!

She will now gain national attention, which she craves, as the Chief of Staff to Congressman West, and she is sure to be a “lightning rod”, drawing controversy by her statements and actions, instead of being a quiet, behind the scenes figure as Chief of Staff!

It is odd for a political figure to pick a media personality to be the leader of his staff! It is also weird that Kaufman, who constantly promotes states rights and hatred of the federal government, will now be a federal government employee and be paid by taxpayers for her work!

Interesting example of total hypocrisy on her part, and it also brings to mind that she somehow expects to be a “correspondent” for her radio station while working for West, which is seen by people on Capitol Hill as a conflict of interest, and totally inappropriate, and possibly illegal to boot!

But then conservatives like to rail against government, and then feed at the public trough as they pursue their agenda to make this country a land of the elite doing everything they can to make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class slipping constantly down in the direction of poverty!

The voters of the 22nd Congressional District of Florida will eventually realize the blunder they have made, brought about by large amounts of corporate cash without limit, thanks to the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case in January of this year! 🙁

The Suspension Of Keith Olbermann By MSNBC: Is It Appropriate? NO! :(

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Progressive talk show host Keith Olbermann of MSNBC has been suspended because he gave political donations to Democrats who ran for office in Arizona and Kentucky, working against the candidacies of Governor Jan Brewer and Senate candidate Rand Paul.

MSNBC felt that a talk show host should not be permitted to contribute to candidates, as it compromises them on their show.

Does this make sense? NO, as is there anyone who does not know by watching Keith Olbermann, that he is a progressive voice, and that he favors the Democratic Party?

Does being on a talk show mean that one loses his freedom of speech, which contributing to a political campaign is, according to the Supreme Court in the January 2010 Citizens United case, that has allowed unlimited contributions by corporations?

Is not MSNBC a corporation which can contribute to campaigns, as Fox News Channel has done to the Republican Party? Why is it that employees of a corporation don’t have the same right to contribute that their employer has?

Is there anyone who does not know how Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and others feel about the Republican party?

The only people in news media who should be discreet about politics are those who simply report the news, but Fox News Channel and MSNBC are stations that promote an agenda, so what is good for one should be the same for the other!

MSNBC has made a mistake in suspending Olbermann, and should reverse its decision, and bring back to the airwaves one of the most insightful and principled progressives who are engaged in the fight against the Right Wing, corporate takeover of this country, which the Supreme Court has, regretfully, encouraged!

Corporate Threats On Employees And Politics: 1896 And 2010! Back To The 19th Century! :(

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More than a century ago, corporations were dominating our politics and corrupting it in what was called “The Gilded Age”!

Many corporations pressured employees to vote for the Republican party as the party of big business and its belief in laissez faire capitalism. So when William Jennings Bryan was nominated by the Democrats in 1896, corporations became intimately involved in working to defeat him, depicting him as a socialist, a Marxist, a radical, and an extremist. Many corporations warned their workers that if Bryan was elected, the companies would be firing workers and eventually shutting down!

The tactic worked, and conservative William McKinley won the Presidency, continuing GOP and big business dominance of American politics. Only with his tragic assassination in 1901 did the nation gain Theodore Roosevelt, who represented the beginning of progressive change, including some of the ideas and visions of William Jennings Bryan!

Now, more than a century later, and thanks to the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case in January of this year, corporations are again running amuck in their determination to defeat the Democrats, and reverse the reforms brought about by President Barack Obama! They are spending inordinate amounts of money, and promoting distorted commercials to scare and intimidate voters, either not to vote, or to vote out of fear and trepidation of what Barack Obama represents, a very typical depiction similar to that used against William Jennings Bryan more than a century ago!

But even more outrageous is what one franchise owner of a McDonald’s in Ohio has done–to warn workers that if the Republicans do not win the political races in the state, that their measly pay will be lowered and benefits will be lost! 🙁

This is just one example of how corporations are intimidating their employees and trying to fix the election results, and it is evidence of how labor rights hard won over the past century are now endangered by newly gained corporate powers that make us realize that the Supreme Court is setting the nation backward, before the reforms of the Progressive Era, to the traditional corporate dominance and abuses of the Gilded Age!

Are Americans going to sit back and allow a century of political, social and economic reform to be wiped out by the reactionary desires of corporate America, which caused the Great Depression and the Great Recession? 🙁

Will the Supreme Court be allowed to take us back to the 19th century Gilded Age, and repeal the 20th century? 🙁

One thing is clear: no matter what happens on November 2, the struggle for progressive political, social and economic reform, which many had thought had been won under Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, will have to continue!

We may have to redo old battles for reforms we thought were permanent, and the division that exists in this country may become greater than ever, as progressives cannot allow the return of the 19th century and the Gilded Age without continuing to fight for change!

The Supreme Court And Democracy: Clear And Present Danger! :(

Ronald 4 Comments

The conservative Supreme Court has done an excellent job in the past decade of undermining democracy and a fair playing field, as shown by two specific situations among others!

First, in the year 2000, in Bush V. Gore, the Republican dominated Supreme Court intervened where they had no business interfering, by deciding to settle the contested Presidential Election of 2000 by stopping the vote recount in Florida, and awarding the electoral votes of that state to George W. Bush over Al Gore, despite the fact that Gore had a national popular vote lead of 540,000! For a Court that claimed to believe in limited federal power and strict interpretation of the Constitution, they claimed the right to decide a presidential election, an arrogant and revolutionary grab of power, which by precedent now, could be utilized again in the future if a presidential election is close! 🙁

Then in January of this year, in the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court decided to overcome nearly a century of laws that prevented corporate intervention in national election campaigns, as destroying a level playing field in politics! They decided that special interest groups should have no limit on campaign spending to manipulate elections in their favor!

Both cases helped to promote the Republican cause, instead of the Court acting as a neutral arbiter! And now the news comes that an estimated $400 million will be spent by corporate groups to affect the midterm Congressional elections, as corporations work to prevent regulation and taxation, and bring about a Republican Congress favorable to them! 🙁

If this manipulation of politics, that the Supreme Court has been engaged in promoting, is not somehow overcome by legislation, the likelihood is that Congress, and also the Presidency, may become a permanent GOP majority that will continue to promote the rich and the powerful, and set out to destroy the reform legislation and regulatory laws put into place under Democratic administrations and Congresses since the 1930s!

This country could revert to the Gilded Age and 1920s mentality, and negate the Progressive Era, New Deal, Great Society, and the Obama reforms of the past year and a half! 🙁

This country could potentially become a nation that destroys Social Security, Medicare, and programs that benefit average Americans! As ordinary Americans come to realize that the rich elite are exploiting them and undermining much that has been done to promote equality and opportunity and fairness, the danger of bloodshed and violence and civil war based on economics increases, and destroys the American dream that has sustained us as America has become a better place for all of us! 🙁

Target Stores Should Be Boycotted: Citizens United Case Rears Its Ugly Head! :(

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In January, in the Citizens United Case, the Supreme Court changed a long held legal restriction on corporations spending money on political campaigns!

Now the effects of that decision are coming home to roost! Target Corporation of Minneapolis has decided to spend money and intervene to back an extremist right wing Republican candidate for Governor in that state!

The Republican nominee supports the Arizona immigration law; supports the abolition of the minimum wage; and endorses a group that condoned the execution of gay people!

Target gave $150,000 support to this candidate, state representative Tom Emmer, and has defended its support! Of course, if the minimum wage disappeared, Target could join Walmart in being anti union, and attempting to pay the lowest possible wages to its workforce, with no sense of morality as to what it is doing!

Under these circumstances, all progressives and liberals should cut up their credit cards, and refuse to spend their money at an organization with such despicable views, and such a high level of arrogance!

Senator Al Franken’s Judgment Of The Supreme Court: NOT “Equal Justice Under Law”!

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Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, gave a very important speech last week on the Supreme Court’s right wing turn before a progressive legal organization, the American Constitution Society.

He condemned the Roberts Court for favoring corporations over every day Americans, and blamed conservative legal scholars, and the Federalist Society, for promoting the concept of “originalism”, regularly advocated by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia!

The lives of ordinary people matter, but the conservative legal advocates have made the American Civil Liberties Union seem “unAmerican” for backing the rights of the less fortunate and the less powerful in society, Franken declared!

The senator pointed out that Justice John Paul Stevens has said that every Justice appointed after him thirty five years ago, with the exception of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, has been more to the right than his predecessor in the position. The Supreme Court has NOT exercised judicial restraint in its decisions, and instead has been radical in ignoring one hundred years of judicial decisions that limited corporate rights in campaigns and election in its Citizens United case in January!

The Court has decided, Franken declared, that no individual’s rights come above the rights of a corporation to profit and influence! 🙁

A whole century of decisions that gave meaning to the Constitution for labor, women, minorities, immigrants, the poor, and others seen as not having wealth and power, is now under attack!

Progressives, Franken concluded, must fight to create a level playing field, which many may have thought was settled law, but is now under attack by an activist, conservative Court!

In many ways, constitutionally, we are moving backwards a century, and progressives must not sit on the sidelines as the rich and powerful regain their former dominance! Franken is absolutely correct in his assessment, and this is a speech which needs to gain widespread notice!