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here Tex, read this guy, there is no short version
“Giant corporations govern. In the Constitution of the United States they are delegated no authority to make our laws and define our culture. Corporations have no constitutions, no bills of rights. So when corporations govern, democracy flies out the door.”
posted
Another good example is in some of the famous corporate speech cases over the last fifteen years. There have been a number of cases where the Supreme Court has expanded the privileges of free speech to corporations. One of them came out of a case in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a law saying that in referendum elections corporations don’t have the right to spend money to sway the vote one way or the other. Corporations took that to court and went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in the Commonwealth. It approved the law. The corporations then took it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sort of changed the question and said, When is democracy the most helped? When all voices are heard. These corporate voices need to be heard. Therefore this law is unconstitutional. They refused to acknowledge the finding of the Massachusetts legislature and courts that in fact great concentrations of wealth and power that were not constitutionalized, that are considered private in our society, are a menace to the functioning of democracy and therefore the state has the total right to say, We’re going to keep our elections pure and only persons, corporate leaders as individuals, of course, can participate, but that corporations could use shareholder money to sway votes without having even polled the shareholders they thought was inappropriate. What the Supreme Court did was totally throw out the logic and say, Democracy means all voices, and since corporations are persons, they have voices. Let them be heard, even if they’re going to outspend humans a billion to one.
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Image Doctors Who Even Deliver News Reports
By WALTER GOODMAN Published: August 19, 1998
Such exertions are meant in part to repair the image of big-scale price-fixing, for which Archer Daniels was fined $100 million in 1996, an embarrassment that was recalled this month by the Chicago trial of three former Archer Daniels executives.
The prosecution played a videotape that it says showed the executives and their confreres from a major competitor, the Ajinimoto Company of Japan, haggling over controlling the world market of a feed additive called lysine. The executives having pleaded not guilty, one must withhold judgment as to their culpability, but readers of Kurt Eichenwald's report in The Times may have been struck by a comment (caught on tape) to the Japanese executives by James Randall, at the time the president of Archer Daniels: ''Our competitors are our friends and our customers are our enemies.'' A zippy line, worthy of the people who came up with ''supermarket to the world.''
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Former Archer Daniels Executives Are Found Guilty of Price Fixing
By KURT EICHENWALD Published: September 18, 1988
Three former executives with the Archer Daniels Midland Company -- including the son of its powerful chairman, Dwayne Andreas -- were found guilty yesterday of engaging in an international conspiracy to fix the prices of a widely used additive for animal feed.
The investigation and trial have already been declared hallmarks by the Government, which said it upended a conspiracy that controlled the prices of $1 billion in commerce worldwide.
In July 1999, Mr. Andreas and Mr. Wilson received their prison sentences and each was fined $350,000. They began serving their sentences in October 1999 after they were convicted in September 1998.
Archer Daniels, one of the world's largest grain and oilseed processors, pleaded guilty in October 1996 to fixing the price of lysine and citric acid, which is used in soft drinks and other products.
It paid a $100 million fine, which was then a record.
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Clues to Sentencing Mystery In the Archer Daniels Case
By KURT EICHENWALD Published: July 13, 1999
When a Federal district judge in Chicago handed down prison terms last week for three former executives of the Archer Daniels Midland Company who were convicted of fixing prices, she added a final twist to a bizarre case: the stiffest sentence went to the informant who first alerted the Government to the crime.
How could that be?
In part, the outcome stems from the intricate workings of the Federal sentencing guidelines, which use a complex formula for determining ranges for prison terms for each defendant. And in this case, the formula did not work to the best interest of the informant, Mark E. Whitacre.
But it is also partly a result of one finding by Judge Blanche M. Manning during the sentencing hearing that has left legal experts perplexed. She determined that Mr. Whitacre was a manager of the conspiracy -- and thus liable for heavier penalties -- even though he was outranked by at least one of his co-defendants, whom she found to have no managerial role.
But Mr. Whitacre brought many of his troubles on himself. Soon after raids on Archer Daniels in 1995, Mr. Whitacre was discredited as a witness and eventually lost his immunity from prosecution when it was disclosed that he had been illegally taking millions of dollars from the company, even while working as an informant.
i guess the criminals are just everywhere..
does it matter if you use a gun to steal? it's still "just" stealing as long as nobody gets "hurt"
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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