Burrowowl

Actor Leslie Nielsen featured prominently in my childhood movie-watching habits. Surely he will be missed.

There’s been a lot of talk about the American public’s rate of taxation, much of it from the perspective that we are currently overtaxed and that raising taxes would place onerous burdens on our individual liberty and collective prosperity. The following is a quick list of sitting legislators that want your taxes to go up this year, broken down by legislative body.

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The other day I actually heard a radio spot for Meg Whitman that wasn’t just a scurrilous attack on her Republican primary opponent Steve Poizner. I was taken aback. I nearly had to pull over. You see, Mrs. Whitman put out a forty-eight page “plan for California” outlining how she’s going to fix our state government. Previously all I knew about her campaign is that she historically hasn’t participated in politics even as a voter and that Steve Poizner is the anti-Christ or something.

I checked out her site this morning and found a PDF version of the document. I wasn’t sure what I expected, exactly, but it had a fair amount of stuff in it. Being the lazy citizen than I am, I hit ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+tab and went to Wordle to let it pare everything down for me. From the resulting graphic (above), I can deduce that the plan consists largely of Meg Whitman and the state of California, along with some new taxes from the government. Good luck with that, Mrs. Whitman.

*edit: After a little fun with sed, sort, and uniq on my commandline, I preprocessed the House Reconcilliation Bill to the point where Wordle could handle it. The following mess is without “common English words,” and I tried to get rid of some of the words like “section” and “subsection” that are just the legalese equivalent of hypertext:

Sorted with the command cat reconcile.txt | tr ” ” “\n” | sort -fbi | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed -e ‘s/^[ \t]*//’ | sed -e ‘s/\([0-9]*\) \(.*\)/\2:\1/’ with its output available here. I had a heck of a time getting sed to use the [:punct:] POSIX notation, hence all the parentheticals that slipped through the cracks.

*Edit again: The Senate version, after similar massaging as the reconciliation bill:

Trimming out some of the section numbers and words like “paragraph” and “subsection” reveals that there are a lot of damned typos in there. 845 instances of “seretary,” for example.

With a case before the United States Supreme Court regarding the rights of corporations as persons (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), and with a lot of hyperbole coming from instant experts on the subject, I figured it would be nice to brainstorm some repercussions. Not likely repercussions, but conceivable repercussions for the Supreme Court finding that the 14th amendment applies to entities like Exxon, Starbucks, or Google.

I’ll warm up with some things I’ve heard folks like Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes put forward:

• With equal protection under the law and money being a form of speech (Buckley v. Valeo), companies will be able to buy political candidates on an unprecedented scale through massive media purchases and such, tipping the scales on the election process.
• Under the second amendment to the constitution, corporations would have the right to bear arms. Corporate armies come immediately to mind, and certain self-defense principles start getting a little scary.
• In some jurisdictions corporations could run for elected office. Mayor General Electric?

Depending on where you are in you daily medicinal regimen, the above theories can sound pretty reasonable, scary, or ridiculous. Let’s carry on with some more ramifications:

• Under the 13th amendment, people cannot be held as property, as slaves. This would make it illegal to be a shareholder in a corporation or compel it to any particular action. This would also prevent one corporation from purchasing or selling another.
• Corporations are generally thought, as legal constructs, to be indistinguishable from their owners (particularly if a single natural person bears a majority of shares). In regards to elections, this means that any corporation at least partly owned by foreign persons (natural or otherwise) would be subject to regulations regarding foreign interests interfering in our political processes. No more contributions or political ads from any transnational or widely-traded corporation.
• Corporations would be subject to personal income tax (many at the top bracket)
• Corporations could be compelled to purchase health insurance under some variants of the current health care reform bills.
• Corporations could be jailed or even put to death for various criminal acts. I’m not sure how one would administer a lethal injection to a legal entity, but that’s Texas to figure out.
• In some states, where marriage is defined as a civil union between two consenting persons, perhaps companies could get married. Could this lead to issues with anti-poligamy laws in the case of conglomerates?
• Corporate board members that run their companies into the ground could be brought up on homicide charges.

I’m certain there are more.

A lot of people are going to vote in ten days. Many already have, either at early-voting precincts or by absentee ballot. Some people aren’t going to. Many because they do not consider their choices appealing enough. Some because they do not feel their votes will account for much. Some unknown number will, however, show up to the polls and not actually vote. Vote suppression, caging, registration purges, broken polling equipment, and uncounted provisional ballots may yet steal the franchise of thousands of citizens this year, just like in 2004. This is essentially the last remaining path to victory for the John McCain campaign, which is trying desperately to put up a fight in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia.

If they do it again, if Ohio voters in predominantly minority and urban areas have to queue up for hours in the rain, if thousands of registered voters are turned away at the polls due to a typo in some database, if contested voters are forced to use provisional ballots in Colorado, Indiana, and Florida that will then be re-contested after the voter has left, and the election is stolen, what happens next? Some pretty broad-scale election fraud is already under way, so what do we do about it?

Keep an eye on the news November 4th. Election fraud is a hard story for the nightly news to cover, as it involved actually getting reporters out on the streets to interview poll workers, voters, and election officials. It takes more than two seconds to explain what “caging” means, so the producers on the 24-hour news networks are reluctant to tie up air time with it.

Get your buddies together and plan yourself a party. A celebration of freedom, democracy, and the rule of the people. Don’t have it at your house, have it at your town square. Have it on the lawn in front of your city hall. Bake some pies, bring some drinks. Invite everybody. Plan on having a grand old time, like 4th of July on the 5th of November. See if you can get the local campaign HQ of your presidential candidate of choice in on the act. Make up lemonade for their campaign volunteers and have a big shindig. If things go sour on election day, you may be able to have a few hundred people already set to hit the streets.

tl;dr – the power to govern comes from the consent of the people, even by way of apathy. Don’t give it and they don’t have it.