“…democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which ‘all’ decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, ‘all,’ who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.”

- Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace.

From CNET:

[T]he Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Hope! Change!

I really think it must be a slow news week. The entire country, it seems, is all in a tizzy about John Mayer’s use of the word ‘nigger’ in a Playboy article. When I read fellow Nashvillian Molly Secours’s latest Huffington Post article in which she takes Mayer to task, I honestly thought it was satire. It had to be, right? How else can a writer launch into a diatribe in which she heaps coals on the heads of all white people for being racist?

In an attempt to be subtle, I suppose, she begins her piece with a rather superior rumination on young pretty women. It’s the first of many confidently declared prejudices in an article laced with gleeful snobbery.

Yesterday I was musing about the unconscious arrogance of pretty young women who believe they will enjoy the world of privilege and power afforded to them by beauty — forever. It seems all it takes is a 40th birthday to notice the expiration date on the ‘all access pass.’

Not unlike wealthy men who cannot conceive of operating in the world without the limitless advantages of the double platinum American Express — until it is revoked.

Wow. Bold, Molly. Bold. I wonder what has caused her to live with such a classist mentality? Let’s boil this one down: “Racism is awful, and also I group people into easy stereotypes and ridicule them for the thoughts I assume are running through their heads.” It staggers the imagination.

Suffice it to say Mayer’s words were symptomatic and indicative of white arrogance.

I suppose Secours feels she can be so bold in her declarations of white arrogance because she’s white. (Maybe she’s revealing her own racial proclivities? One has to wonder.) She apparently holds to the notion that one cannot be racist about their own race. Sane people argue, on the other hand, that making sweeping derogatory statements about a group of people because of their race is the very definition of racism. Being a member of the group in question provides no exemption. The baseless comment is ignorant regardless.

Perhaps she’s speaking specifically of one person and his tendency toward racial slurs? Not even close. Without wasting time, she ropes all whites in together as racists.

Mayer is exhibit ‘A’ when illustrating that racism resides within all white people. No exception. Sorry. Whether you are a hip, young liberal white guy who has played music with famous black musicians or a guy working at a factory in a rural Kentucky.

Mayer is just another white man of privilege who has not wrestled with the harsher realities still facing many black and brown folks or the arrogance depicted by his words. I doubt he has struggled with his identity as a white man of privilege and how his own behaviors have unconsciously contributed to reinforcing white supremacy.

So due to a major social faux pas in which John Mayer played a bit too familiar with a culturally charged word, this silly writer responds with a literary garbage heap that has become home to some of her most cherished prejudices. So forward thinking.

If we need further evidence that Ms. Secours does not live in reality, we need look only to her bio.

In 2000, she presented an intervention to the United Nations in Santiago, Chile, proposing that the U.S. “repudiate the official histories and language(s) that maintain the hegemonic and unearned privileges accorded to those who are identified as “white”.

Whoa.

Late into this morning (which was really only just a few hours ago), a friend and I were discussing the recent Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC which brought us to the topic of Corporate Personhood. “But Kevin,” you ask. “How could you even go to sleep after something that exciting?” I know. But it gets even better.

The thrust of our conversation ended in an agreement that the tradition of Corporate Personhood in America was patently ridiculous, extra-Constitutional, and destructive. It wasn’t that corporations should enjoy no protections, we concluded. We both felt that the idea of a corporation being treated like a human person, though, afforded a corporation undue advantages over individuals and even smaller companies. Besides, the legal precedent for it was shaky at best.

Then I wake up to this: Post Politics: Tea partiers should reject ‘corporate personhood’

It was actually a court reporter who, in an attempt to summarize the case Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, coined the term. Author Thom Hartmann explains in Common Dreams: “In writing up the case’s headnote — a commentary that has no precedential status — the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, opened the headnote with the sentence: ‘The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ ”

[...]

No one is saying corporations should have no expectations of legal protection, but to assert they deserve the rights of human beings is absurd.

A corporation cannot long for a woman or love his children. A corporation cannot feel pain or remorse and doesn’t have to die. Corporations clearly are not persons in any sense of the word. If we are all truly “endowed by our Creator” with certain rights, there can be no rights for corporations.

[...]

Corporations don’t seek to influence the government to promote a libertarian utopia. They get involved with government to gain a competitive edge, either through regulation or subsidy. All the corporate money in our politics does not go to secure a free market, despite what some on the anti-corporate left will tell you. The very last thing big corporations want is a fair or free market. Big Business plays politics to secure its position and keep the little guy out.

Like I said, whoa.

I’ve never even had a discussion on Corporate Personhood before last night. I’m at this very moment checking my home for Kleinheider’s bugs.

He makes a great point in that last paragraph. A distrust in Big Government can, if one is unprincipled, lead to an inordinate trust in Big Business. Yet Big Business does not seek to play fair. It seeks to win, and will do so using whatever advantage it can get that increases the bottom line. I’ll write to expand on this later, but considering a corporation to be a person brings with it a whole slew of issues, among them that it puts corporations in a position to crowd out smaller competition and buy politicians from the local sheriff to the President himself.

I’m with Kleinheider on this, and it’s definitely an issue that crosses political lines (though that alone is never reason enough to earn my support). Tea Parties should reject the long-standing tradition of corporate personhood.