brandenpridgen

Posts by: brandenpridgen

Melting Pot?

May 18

Since the first immigrants arrived this has always been a Euro-centric place. Surely that’s understandable, since it was Europeans who were the primary immigrants for a very long time. Of course, after a while we started importing Africans to be our slaves, but there was no need to change our orientation, since Africans weren’t considered full human beings. Some time later people began to arrive from Asia, Mexico and Central America, but the Euro-centrics were the huge majority of the population and continued to be the powerful, the culture controllers.

The Euro-centrics were something else. too: they were mostly Protestant. The Founders and most of the immigrants and most of their descendants where Protestant, so that has been the dominant religious orientation from the start. That the Founders inscribed freedom of religion into the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: . . . “) had no impact on that, so white, European Protestants have been the dominant force in America.

In the early 1960’s I overheard a conversation between two men. One was saying with obvious concern, perhaps anger, that Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs star, had purchased a house a couple of blocks from where he – the speaker – was living. This was in Chicago, a starkly divided city of neighborhoods where Poles, Italians, blacks, Jews and others pretty much stayed in their own area. It was birds of a feather flocking together for safety. And here was good ol’ Ernie, a black man, purchasing a house in a white area. So, I asked what seemed to me to be an obvious question: “Are you going to picket his house with your neighbors, or ask for an autograph?”

My question wasn’t received well, as you might imagine, as my irreverent attempt at humor was a poke in the eye to this fellow’s quite serious, “He’s not like us and I don’t like him and don’t want him living down the street from my children” attitude. His ignorance led to fear, which led to hate. He was not alone in his behavior, nor has that ever been unusual.

Seema Jilani wrote a stunning and deeply disturbing piece for the Huffington Post about American racism today. Read this piece with the knowledge that your sense of right and wrong, fairness and even simple courtesy are at risk of feeling violated. And know that hers is similar to the day-to-day experience of millions of non-white or non-Protestant Americans. If you’re feeling really courageous, do a gut check on your own prejudices. Unless you’re somehow immune to the messages that bombard you daily to fear what is different from you, stoked continuously by political manipulators, you may find something there.

We humans do reasonably well with what is known to us and typically fear what is not known. It’s a survival instinct and it worked well when our ancestors were living in caves and every day brought existential threat.

Almost on our doorstep is something that is not known – what American life will be like when white Protestants are a diminishing minority, incrementally losing power and control. Just imagine all that racism reversed – shoe on the other foot, so to speak – and having to endure the slicing and bleeding of discrimination a hundred times a day just to function in every day life.

Did you say that you just want to be tolerated by those who are different from you? No, you did not say that. Nobody wants to be tolerated. Other than Dick Cheney, we all want acceptance. Toleration, by definition, suggests that others are willing to hold their noses in your presence, as though that is somehow better than beating you up.

So I’ll tell you what: I won’t tolerate you and you can stop trying to tolerate me. Let’s instead pull a Rodney King: “Can we all just get along?” King didn’t live long enough to see that happen. We haven’t yet either, but perhaps we can do something about it now.

It Ain’t Easy – And Their Mothers

May 11

Before you decide that those who see the immigration issue quite differently from the way you see it as having brains operating at sub-optimal levels, consider a few things.

First, let’s be clear that the issue is about non-citizens who are in America without the legal right to be here. Many of them are people who arrived with a valid visa and stayed beyond the expiration of their documentation. Some arrived without the legal right to do so. Likely, there are other descriptors for these folks, but all share an important characteristic: They broke the law.

It doesn’t matter if they did it with that intention before entering America or things changed once they were here and they did not want to or could not leave. All of those are simply stories of explanation and they do not change the fact that they broke the law.

There is a substantial imperative from our sense of right and wrong that wrongdoing deserves consequences. Our sense of right and wrong is offended when a wrongdoer gets away with it. Doubt that? Consider your feelings about the Goldman Sachs creeps who promoted worthless mortgage backed securities to their clients while at the same time dumping their own holdings of those securities. That’s called fraud, but not one of those guys has been prosecuted. One more time: How do you feel when wrongdoers get away with it?

Of course, our immigration issue isn’t that simple. If the estimates are correct we have somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million people here without permission. Catching, prosecuting and deporting that many people is simply not do-able – that’s a limit of logistics. Sure, we can make a show of it, but that would be substantively meaningless.

The 14^th Amendment to the Constitution says that people who are born in America are American citizens, regardless of the nationality of their parents. What will we do with the Made-In-America children of our non-citizens? We tried to take a step forward on that with The Dream Act, but the knuckle-draging, fanged droolers in Congress shot it down. Do we prosecute and deport the parents, leaving their minor children to be wards of the state? Do we deport the kids, too, even though they are American citizens?

The people who are here illegally are paying Social Security tax, Medicare fees, sales taxes, real estate taxes and they help to support our communities in many ways. They contribute to society as friends and neighbors and many of them do jobs that you won’t do, but which need to be done. That complicates things.

But what about the people who have been standing in line for a long time, following the rules to become naturalized Americans? How could it be fair to them to allow those who broke the law to have the same opportunity and to be in line with them? It seems that there are a lot of balls to juggle to arrive at a solution that is fair and reasonable to everyone.

And there is one more aspect to consider – it’s found in the mirror.

We have all been complicit in allowing people to be here illegally because we have liked and benefited from the low skill jobs that get done because there have been people here we could exploit. We haven’t prosecuted employers for knowingly employing those folks and paying them poorly. We’ve made stabs at requiring employers to verify the right to work of employee candidates but at the same time we have prevented employers from being able to access the information necessary to know whether they are complying with the law. We have consistently refused to dedicate the necessary resources to stop people from entering this country illegally. To put all the blame and consequences onto those here illegally is hypocrisy.

There is a good chance that Congress will either find a compromise that satisfies nobody and frustrates everybody or it will do its now-familiar polarization dance, with the knuckle-dragging, fanged droolers once again trying to sound like tough, patriotic Americans, but succeeding only in preventing us from solving our problem. Whatever we decide to do and whatever your point of view on this issue, just get that immigration is a lot like many other issues, in that it is more complex than we’d like it to be and a simple black-and-white analysis is willfully blind and of no value.

Okay, this is switching topics – slightly – but it may help to understand the black-and-white types in our midst.

That “no value” part of a simple black-and-white analysis is true, unless you’re up for re-election. Then doing whack-a-brain stupid stuff like casting a polarized vote that goes against the will of the American people may get you lots of special interest campaign cash. Think about that the next time some American flag pin wearing legislator googles their eyes and proudly froths out dingbat stuff. How proud their mothers must be.

Special Ice Cream Edition

May 10

Whatever your issue, budget, debt, global warming, immigration, guns, healthcare, civil rights or any other topic, the reason things aren’t getting better is because of something that controls your issue: Money. Big money. Big money that influences elections, politicians and distorts the will of the people into the will of the very few enormously wealthy people. For more on that, take a look at Larry Lessig’s TED talk.

Should you doubt that big money influence is preventing the will of the people (that’s you) from being done, just recall the recent vote on background checks prior to gun ownership. Have you ever seen an issue in the United States where 90% of the people were in agreement? That’s highly unusual and one would expect those who represent us to get the message and vote accordingly. Didn’t happen that way. Enough of our politicians flagrantly voted against our wishes because of big money influence and they caused the wrong result.

The Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream guys have something to say about that. You can read about it here on the CNN Opinion blog. They explain it better than I do.

Just because those gun money politicians defeated the sensible gun ownership background check that you wanted doesn’t mean that they can defeat everything that we want. We Americans are united in opposition to big money buying our elections and our country. So, get off your Barcalounger, get a stamp here and get the message out so that next year we will elect candidates who will begin to make things right.

Is this issue important to you? Comment below and then email this to 3 friends.

For Purist Lefties and Windshields

May 05

I’m surely talking to myself here, but this just might fit for others, too. JA

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The Radical Right provides enough material in a single sentence of extremism than can be corrected in a 750-word response. I’ve heard as many as three fictional facts in a single short sentence. Let them go on for two minutes and it’s such a dizzying array of fantasy that it’s impossible to know where to begin to correct the falsities. Those guys know how to spray incendiary, divisive and destructive language. They’re really good at demanding that everything be decided their way and insisting that that they never make mistakes.

For example, don’t you just hate it when the far righties tell us how safe George W. Bush kept us? Try telling that to the kids whose mother or father was crushed to death in the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Those far righties want to end Medicare and Social Security and they have concocted fatuous, misleading names for the programs they designed to do just that. Then they have had the gall to tell us that they don’t want to end those programs.

When 20 little kids were gunned down in Newtown, CT the far righties made sure that we didn’t do anything to begin to limit access to the kinds of weapons that make it easy for violent people to do such things. They insist with self-righteous fervor that they have the one true interpretation of the Second Amendment and they ignore the demands of the rest of us, as they pursue campaign cash to support their careers.

So we call these people crazy. They are hateful and mean. They are dishonest in sixteen different ways. Our guts snarl and our spittle flies as we yell at our windshields.

To pull a Columbo, there’s just one more thing.

What is it that you were saying as President Obama worked toward compromise with congressional Republicans during all those iterations of budget and debt issues? What was it you were saying as he failed to press for universal health care? Now he’s offered chained CPI as a negotiating chip. I’ll bet you had serious juice about those issues and your words for him might have sounded a lot like your comments about crazy righties.

Obama let the Republicans kill his jobs bill, even as they were telling us it was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. You pilloried the Republicans, but did you also lambast Obama for his lack of leadership on the issue?

How many times did you wail that Obama gave up his negotiating leverage by caving in at the beginning of discussions with Republicans? It seems that President Obama just won’t be the absolutist leftie some want him to be. Maybe you’ve sprayed a coating on the inside of your windshield over that.

We can keep strolling down the path of all the ways Obama and the Democrats have failed – surely that has happened. Yet here’s the key point: governing is compromising and nobody gets all of what they want all of the time.

The Radical Righties have done a really good job of strong-arming America for over a decade. Their demand that everything be decided in the far righty way is incomprehensible to many; just get that a similar demand from the far left is just as incomprehensible.

For those who get off on anger, who feel powerful by living in their disparagement of anything and anyone who disagrees with them, I have a news flash: You are a lot like those whom you pillory.

Fight for what you believe in. Oppose what you disagree with. Just don’t be so certain that you have the one and only true vision of what is best, lest you become a yet another ideological roadblock and put the inside of still more windshields at risk.

Pogo

Apr 28

As the heat subsides from the immediacy of the Boston Marathon bombings and shootings, our national dialogue naturally turns to more contemplative issues, like preventing such attacks in the future. Concurrently, we continue to wade in the morass of Sandy Hook and our elected leaders blather ineffectively over action to prevent more gun massacres. The connective tissue between those seemingly different situations is angry people acting out violently to, in their minds, right a wrong or to make a statement and be heard or because some mental illness led them to kill.

Setting aside mental illness as a motivator, what we have are people who do horrific things, yet those very same things seem sensible – even mandatory – to them. The popular saying is that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

It is never popular to suggest that we have a part in what goes on elsewhere. We’re more comfortable pointing fingers at the crazy, violent people. But what if there are things we can do so that we don’t spawn so many people who see violence as their only option?

Here’s Human Being 101 on this: every one of us has a fight or flight response ready to be triggered instantly. It’s located in the so-called reptile brain, the oldest component inside our skulls, and its operation isn’t ruled by notions of consequences, fairness or reason; indeed, it isn’t ruled by conscious thought at all. It is survival level stuff as practiced by alligators and it works really well for – guess what? – survival. It isn’t good for much more than that and that’s the problem when we humans feel threatened or wronged.

Impulses from the reptile brain flood our system ten times faster than thoughtful deliberation and we go primitive quicker than the snap of fingers. This is the kind of stuff that is handy for recruiting members for militias, for white supremacists and for al Qaeda. All those recruiters need to do is to smear “others” as threatening what the recruited hold dear, like their loved ones, their country, loyalty, right over wrong – you can make up your own list – and the sign-up is easy. All that fierce reptilian stuff feels good, because when it’s engaged we feel powerful. That’s especially useful for manipulating those who have felt disempowered, ignored or bullied. Violence feels to them like strength and, perhaps, like it is their only remedy.

Next thing you know the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is blown up, 6-year-old children are blasted apart by 10 bullets each in Newtown, CT and Americans are blown up at the Boston Marathon.

We have an unlimited supply of people exhorting us to primitive, violent redress to every conflict. Their chest thumping and their simplistic solutions appeal to our desire for quick resolution and to make us feel safe. Indeed, our war drum beating legislators seem to believe that most problems should be resolved through military means.

For every Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. insisting that we be non-violent in dealing with our grievances, there are hundreds of others rattling sabres. Humankind has always been short of peacemakers. Actually, it is a hazardous profession, as those folks have a way of becoming prematurely dead, thanks to ever-present violent people who feel threatened.

Just get that clobbering other people will not convince them not to attack us. That applies to the Muslim world, the various places where we expend ordnance in order to prove to ourselves that we’re Number 1, as well as to our neighbors across town who may be somehow different from you and me. Come to think of it, I’m not too sure of you.

That last was, of course, tongue-in-cheek. It is meant as a placeholder for all the ways we “other” people who seem, well, other. We can succumb to fearing whoever might appear to be different or we can get past that. John Lennon said it well:

“If you want money for people with minds that hate,

“All I can tell you is brother you’ll have to wait.”

We have to figure out that we cannot dominate and kill our way to security and comfort because that just leads to the next generation of people who want to attack us. Nothing is going to get much better until we figure that out. Pogo said it best: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The way we have been is not who we have to continue to be. Perhaps – just perhaps – we can find remedies to our individual and collective challenges. We’ll all need to do our part in that.

The Best Thing That Could Have Happened

Apr 21

Sure, it was very simple and would have made only marginal improvement in violence reduction. Of course, we can characterize it as something that would have been nearly pointless. Still, the bill went down in defeat and it’s the best thing that could have happened.

Let’s start with what it was and what it was not. The vote was not on whether to close the so-called “gun show loophole” and require background checks for all sales of firearms. It was not a vote on whether to create a national registry of gun owners. It was not a vote on the Second Amendment. It was a vote on whether to override a Republican filibuster that was preventing even a discussion of the proposed background checks bill. The gun thumpers won and the rest of us lost.

That’s “lost,” as in putting something ahead of protecting our children. That’s “lost,” as in cowardice replacing courage. That’s “lost,” as in willfully refusing to do the job one was hired to do and even lying about it.

The lying is a big piece of what gets under our skin, because it violates our sense of right and wrong. Sometimes it’s covert, like Wayne LaPierre and his National Rifle Association forcing a watering down of the bill, then lobbying against it, saying that it’s too wimpy to accomplish anything. Slimy, sneaky stuff like that.

Sometimes the lying is overt, like saying that the bill would create a federal registry of gun owners, which they claim is the next step toward taking guns away from citizens. Ignore for the moment the good sense of knowing who has which guns. Focus on this simple fact: the proposed bill imposes a $15,000 fine on anyone attempting to create such a registry. That means that all the fools telling us that the bill would create a gun registry were either willfully ignorant or they were lying to us. How does that feel under your skin?

The 46 senators who voted against defeating the filibuster (same as blocking the bill from a vote) had their reasons. Perhaps some are true believers in the unintented-by-the-Framers meaning of the Second Amendment. Maybe they imagine that Second Amendment actually has something to do with anything other than the brand new United States of America needing an army in 1776 and not having the resources to equip it. Perhaps they get some kind of proud, testosterone rush and a swelling in their chests of patriotic fervor just by thinking about their right to own a semi-automatic Bushmaster assault rifle. Or maybe it was something else.

Maybe it was their share of the $25 million that the NRA spent on campaign contributions in 2012 and their fear that a challenger would get that money in the next election cycle. Maybe it was the direct and indirect money they benefited from due to the generosity of Colt Industries and the rest of those in the private citizen killing business. Maybe they figured that they’d get primaried by a screwball even more Neanderthal than they are, so they did what they did for “the greater good.”

All that rationalizing comes down to this: Those 46 senators decided that their careers are more important than the lives of our American children. They see their financial well-being following their senatorial days, as they shift to become highly paid lobbyists, as being more important than the 3.5 Americans who are killed by gun violence every hour of every day of every year.

And now you know. Now the 90% of Americans who want our communities to be safer know. And now we have the leverage to do something about it.

There will be a general election in just over 18 months. That is when we get to tell our legislators exactly how we feel about their cowardice, their self-centered focus and their contempt for the American people.

That is when we get to elect people who will scrap the pitiful bill that was just rejected and replace it with a bill that has a hope of beginning to reduce American gun violence. We can enact legislation that will require background checks on all transfers of firearms, even those between Grandpa and grandchild, because one of those grandchildren might be like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine infamy. We can enact legislation that denies assault weaponry to child killers in Newtown, CT. We can eliminate 33-round clips and 100-round drums of ammunition that were so deadly in a movie theatre in Aurora, CO. And we can even do something positive to help our mentally ill citizens.

Here’s how Gabby Giffords puts it:

“Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.”

That is why this cowardly filibuster override failure is the best thing that could have happened.

A Special Kind of Nuts

Apr 14

North Carolina’s recently introduced House Joint Resolution 494 tells us that, “. . . each state is sovereign and may independently determine how the state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion . . . ,” and that, “. . . the North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.” It seems that the state of North Carolina may soon be free of that pesky First Amendment, right up until the time that the Supreme Court of the United States lets them know in a 9 – 0 decision that they are a special kind of nuts. That will be the end of a legal process that will have cost the state of North Carolina millions of dollars over a brainless political ploy.

Elsewhere, the good citizens of North Dakota will have the scientifically interesting prospect of voting on a new amendment to their state constitution in November, 2014. The science connection exists because their duly elected state legislators just voted to place on that ballot a referendum for a state amendment that would declare that a human egg penetrated by a sperm is a human being immediately upon their connecting and it has all the unalienable rights of citizenship. It’s called the “personhood amendment” to their state constitution.

Not to be outdone, the braniacs in the state legislature of Kansas have overwhelmingly passed a bill that declares human life to begin “at fertilization.” Further, the Kansas legislation will proscribe the information that doctors must provide to pregnant women and to those who might become pregnant, apparently believing that the politicians know more about medicine than do the physicians.

Note that Kansas is the home of the State Board of Education that a few years ago declared that evolution is just a theory. The board mandated the teaching of “intelligent design,” which is creationism in a different wrapper. I haven’t checked their genealogical charts, but I suspect that those Kansas Board of Education members are related through unhealthy intermarriage to the geniuses in North Carolina who think it’s okay for them to establish a state religion.

The most poignant part of the current “personhood” effort in Kansas was provided by State Senator Steve Fitzgerald (R – Leavenworth), who is quoted as saying, “The human is a magnificent piece of work at all stages of development . . .“ Who could argue with that?

The problem, of course, is the stage of development we’re talking about. It appears that the Republican legislatures of those states and those of about 13 others doing similar things had their development arrested around the Pleistocene era, about the time the first human beings scratched on the walls of caves.

Senator Fitzgerald, you and your fellow mental luddites in governments all around America are, indeed, a piece of work, a special kind of nuts.

After the 9/11 attack we heard demands from the Muslim extremist world for a return to the fundamentals of Islam, as they understood them. These are the same principles that punish petty theft by hacking off a hand of the perp and which make women the property of men. We decried their backward demands as an attempt to return to primitive, dark ages ways. Yet here we are in America doing the same kind of regression.

It falls to those of us who think that science and learning are good things and who accept actual, fact-based reality to figure out what is behind this national rush to primitive thinking and then to redirect America to a sane path. So, you better help others remember the current insanity when it’s time to vote in November, 2014 and 2016. If you let these primitive deniers of reality off the hook, things will get worse.

A New American Award

Apr 06

Nanoarchaeum Equitans Virus

The smallest known organism

There are scientists who feel that viruses are not the smallest organisms because they lack a cellular structure. Others believe that this condition is not disqualifying and it is this group of scientists whose views are invoked for this noteworthy recognition, The Virus Trophy.

Our nation has been poorly served by many of our leaders. They have engaged in debates over issues designed solely to distract and polarize us. They have refused to do the work to create the actions our nation truly needs and have instead concentrated their efforts on what serves themselves. In short, they have focused on making us small at a time when we desperately need big thinking.

Our country wasn’t built on small thinking or by small men and women. It was built by leaders who were giants and by the American people who worked hard, looked after one another, sacrificed and did the right thing. There was a shared belief in doing whatever it took. We built a country.

Now we find our leaders telling us all of the things that we cannot do. They teach us to lie and to be hypocritical, to diminish one another and to defeat ourselves by rejecting learning and science. They tell us to be afraid of one another.

They say stupid things, like telling us that the way to stop the killing of 33,000 of us every year with guns is for more people to be packing heat. Actually, we tried that. It was called the Wild West and a lot of innocent people got killed, until at last we figured out that it was counterproductive to safety for angry people to be running around with loaded guns. Of course, more people having guns serves the gun manufacturers quite well and it serves those who receive campaign contributions from them, too, but it’s small, selfish thinking.

And so it is . . .

– for bible thumping haters of all stripes

– for social program haters who lie to us

– for those who tell us that austerity will lead to prosperity, this in the face of well known economic principles that make it clear that austerity leads to contraction of the economy and poverty for the people

– for self-serving fools who tell us to “Drill, baby, drill” when doing that is a certain trip to climate catastrophe.

It’s time to stop thinking small.

We need to rebuild America so that our bridges are strong and safe. We need to rebuild America so that we transmit electricity with minimal losses of the power that we generate with renewable resources. We need to embrace all Americans, even those who are different from ourselves, both because our diversity is our strength and because it’s the right thing to do. We need to reaffirm that our true international power cannot be found in unnecessary, punitive wars, but in the strength of our influence, the juggernaut of our culture and the power of our economy. We need to stop pretending that we can kill our way to security and instead take action to make friends. We need to deal with the displacement that will occur when we stop building unwanted and unneeded weaponry and repurpose those skilled workers for building 21^st century America.

It’s time to think big.

That is why the first awarding of The Virus Trophy goes to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. He has spent over four, small-thinking years focused on just one thing: “To make sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president.”

Oddly, I had thought that a senator’s job was to represent the people of his/her state and to provide leadership to move America forward. I had thought that the oath of office required our leaders to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. For McConnell, though, those things seem to have been secondary at best.

There are other stupid, distracting, small-minded things that he has focused his energy upon in order to un-focus us from what is truly important and to keep us small. Most of his energy has gone into opposing anything that President Obama promoted, regardless of the devastating effect of his actions on America and Americans. All of that in the aggregate is what demonstrates McConnell’s true smallness and the richness of his deserving of the first Virus Trophy. Congratulations, Senator McConnell. However, you’re too small for America, so please take your award and go away in 2014.

Perhaps you’d like to extend your congratulations to Senator McConnell for winning this smallest of awards. You can do that here. And be sure to pass this along to the Kentucky voters you know – so that they know.

Steam Engines, Headnotes and 91%

Apr 01

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1868 and Section 1 of that amendment begins this way:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (bold and italics mine – JA)

Those are the “due process” and the “equal protection” clauses of the Constitution. Look at the date of the amendment and consider what the amendment says and you’ll be quite clear about its intent: This was entirely about protecting and advancing the condition of former slaves. In the wake of the Civil War many southerners did whatever they could to retain their former advantage, this to the extreme disadvantage of former slaves, now free in name only, so this amendment was both clear and necessary.

Eighteen years later a lawsuit appeared on the docket of the Supreme Court. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was a tax jurisdiction case that tested the provisions of then-new California laws against those of the federal government. The case was decided in favor of the railroad and, oddly, that turned out to be the least important thing associated with this lawsuit.

The court reporter for the Supreme Court was Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis. He, like other court reporters of his day, was far more than a stenographer for the cases presented before the court. Back then the job of court reporter was a most prestigious position and Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis was actually paid more money than Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite.

Recordings of the proceedings were made with up to-the-moment technology, ink pen and paper, and Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis had the good fortune to be allowed to publish his recordings of the proceedings and collect royalties for his efforts. Along with his best efforts to record the case by hand, he was allowed to publish what were called “headnotes”. These are comments of the court reporter and were not part of the court’s opinions or rulings, nor intended by the court as legal precedent. Indeed, headnotes were not even from the court proceedings, but were solely the comments of the court reporter.

Here is what Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote in his headnotes to the publication of the proceedings of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case:

“The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States . . . “

Corporate “personhood” was not tested before the court in this case; remember that this was a simple tax jurisdiction issue. That makes what followed Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis’ writings the strangest part of this case: Davis’ headnotes, his editorial opinion, has been cited as precedent for all of the efforts to give corporations the same rights as flesh and blood human beings ever since.

That’s right: A constitutional amendment that was designed to protect former slaves was and is being used to give artificial personhood to inanimate corporations. It is what is allowing billions of corporate dollars to influence our elections and bend legislation and regulation to the desires of those same corporations. It is what drives huge cash contributions to political candidates and influences voting in Congress.

Right now 91% of Americans want universal background checks and registration for all gun sales. Legislation to accomplish that is clumsily being cobbled together in Congress but getting our corporately influenced legislators to do the will of the people is proving to be really difficult. And to reemphasize the insanity causing that, the engine driving congressional intransigence is based not on the decision of a court, but on an editorial opinion of one court reporter

That strange and damaging precedent was set one hundred forty five years ago and we are still feeling its effect, perhaps now more than ever. Likewise, the decisions we make today will be felt by our descendents one hundred forty five years from now. That is to say, just as sure as the flow of impact from Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis’ headnotes to us, there will be an impact of what we do today on our great-great-great-grandchildren when they are adults just like you.

You can be passive and do nothing; that is your right as an American. After all, you have the right to vote, but not the legal obligation. You have the right to appeal to your elected officials to act as you prefer, but that is not a requirement of citizenship, either.

On the other hand, you might want to close your eyes and envision the America you want for your children, your grandchildren and, if you can see that far, for your great-grandchildren. Likely, if you do nothing, that’s not what they’ll inherit. Indeed, unless you speak up, the vision of people who want a very different America from the one you want will be the America of tomorrow, because those people will be the only ones talking.

Perhaps you really do have something to say to your legislators. Go ahead. Tell them. Now.

An Island of Clarity

Mar 18

As a student of human behavior I have been trying to understand the craziness that is our social and political culture. So many blatantly false things have been said with great earnestness and an odd assumption of integrity. The absolutist behavior and mean spiritedness displayed for years has been confounding and dismaying. What’s going on?

I feel as though I am incrementally getting a handle on our collective dysfunction, yet I’ve wanted a social scientist, someone who actually studies such things and does experiments and collects statistics – you know, science stuff leading to actual facts – to help me with this.

Happily, my pal Brian Muldoon and I were exchanging some emails following one of my essays and he pointed me to a Bill Moyers interview of Jonathan Haidt. This is the guy I’ve been looking for. I mean, I’ve wondered how two people can look at the same thing and have such different interpretations and reactions to it. Turns out, they’re not looking at the same thing and Haidt explains that and lots of other things.

I invite you to watch the interview. HIs book was released this week and I’ve just started reading it. It’s a page turner for behavioral geeks like me. More about that another time.

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JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler