“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” — FDR (21-Nov-1933)
Anti-Circumvention Legislation
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the European Union Copyright Directive: Next Steps academic paper.
Citizens United v Supreme Court ruling in favour of plutocracy.
More money, less transparency: A decade under Citizens United on opensecrets.org website.
Citizens United v Federal Election Commission argued: 24-Mar-2009 decided 21-Jan-2010. Opening the floodgates for corporate money in politics (including lobbying, campaign finance, etc) by 5-4 judgment equating corporate spend with First Amendment (free speech) for the first time.
Is it a crime in the UK, potentially increasing sentence, to misgender a trans prisoner? Can a male self-identify as a female in the UK and be placed in a women's prison?
"Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas."
Although the erroneous statement of fact is not worthy of constitutional protection, it is nevertheless inevitable in free debate. As James Madison pointed out in the Report on the Virginia Resolutions of 1798: "Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press." A rule of strict liability that compels a publisher or broadcaster to guarantee the accuracy of his factual assertions may lead to intolerable self-censorship. Allowing the media to avoid liability only by proving the truth of all injurious statements does not accord adequate protection to First Amendment liberties.
The First Amendment requires that we protect some falsehood in order to protect speech that matters. Per Supreme Court Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. 418 U.S. 323 (1974).
"Speech that is obscene and thus lacking First Amendment protection must be without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. It also must appeal to the prurient interest in the view of an average person according to community standards, and it must describe sexual conduct or excretory functions in an offensive way."
To sustain a claim of defamation or libel, the First Amendment requires that the plaintiff show that the defendant knew that a statement was false or was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was accurate.
The First Amendment as it relates to libel laws, is that seditious libel – criticism of government and public officials – falls beyond the police power of the State [273-276]. In a democratic society such as ours, the citizen has the privilege of criticizing his government and its officials.
The OSRA of 1998 eliminated a system that had kept shipping relatively stable through booms and busts. Prior to the OSRA, the U.S. regulated ocean shipping as a public utility, based on the Shipping Act of 1916.
Merchant Marine Act of 1920 aka ‘the Jones Act,’ both designed to protect the domestic ship production industry.
With destructive competition, entire high fixed cost industries first over-invest in capacity. Then firms become unprofitable as they undercut one another, undermining safety standards, system reliability, and worker pay. Eventually there are mass bankruptcies of weaker firms, and consolidation as the strong buy the weak and establish pricing power. That’s what happened with railroads in the 19th century and airlines in the 1980s. The remaining firms became monopolistic, cut less trafficked routes, raised prices, and discriminated against different classes and regions.
228 Republicans Blasted for Brief Urging Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade from commondreams.org website.
John L. O'Sullivan on Manifest Destiny, 1839 Excerpted from "The Great Nation of Futurity" in the United States Democratic Review, Volume 6, Issue 23
The Constitution “demands that content-based restrictions on speech be presumed invalid . . . and that the Government bear the burden of showing their constitutionality.” Content-based restrictions on speech have been permitted only for a few historic categories of speech, including incitement, obscenity, defamation, speech integral to criminal conduct, so-called “fighting words,” child pornography, fraud, true threats, and speech presenting some grave and imminent threat the Government has the power to prevent.
“So much of political thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” George Orwell
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.” Thomas Jefferson
"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
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