Protecting Free Speech Also Means the Speech of Corporations Who Are Made Up Of People

The most important job of the Supreme Court is to protect the free speech of Americans. And they did that recently. This is a major victory of all of us. So what is a corporation? Are they made up of sheep? Cows? Dogs? No! Corporations are made up of people that have a right to voice their opinion...regardless of whether Washington likes it or not. We must be ever vigilant of our rights as individuals, groups, or corporations. If we allow one type of speech to be regulated we will all lose our rights to free speech eventually.

...The court's opinion earlier this year in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission said that politicians could not enact limits on independent campaign contributions targeting corporations or unions. President Barack Obama famously chided the justices for this opinion during his State of the Union Address.

Congress is considering a bill that would again specify who could no longer speak freely, including companies that received Troubled Asset Relief Program funding (meaning the key banks) and U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-based companies. The same restrictions would not limit the speech of unions with large foreign activities. Political parties would get discounts on broadcast advertisements to respond to corporations or unions.

Citizens United has been viewed as a case about campaign reform, but it's better read as a broad, 21st-century primer on free speech....

...Citizens United is part of a line of cases beginning in the 1940s that protected the rights of unions to endorse candidates in print and through television broadcasts. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in one such case that the Constitution required "no point of view be restrained or barred," so that voters "have access to the views of every group in the community."

Speech rights are the same whether exercised through pamphlets or the Web, and whether by individuals or through associations of individuals, incorporated or not. "When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought," the justices warned in Citizens United. "This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves." Read at WSJ "Tech-Savvy Justices Protect Free Speech".

Mark Lloyd the Diversity Czar and Killer Free Speech and Press?

Mark LLoyd. Ever heard of him? Seems like he slipped by us and here we are with a man that wants to destroy our freedom. Well we got Obama and that came with the whole tamale didn't it. All one had to do was look at his associations, the church he attended and the "comrades" he had. IBD has an article calling our attention to this ominous situation we find ourselves in "Diversity Czar Threatens Free Speech".

1st Amendment: Mark Lloyd, a disciple of Saul Alinsky and fan of Hugo Chavez, wants to destroy talk radio and says free speech is a distraction. The new FCC diversity "czar" says Venezuela is an example we should follow.

...But as angry constituents flood town hall meetings and call in to talk radio, a man dedicated to silencing them sits at the right hand of the president.

They share a common hero — Saul Alinsky — who wrote the community organizer's bible, "Rules for Radicals." It speaks of confrontation or, as candidate Obama put it, of "getting in their faces" as a way to obtain power, not from the people or for the people, but over the people.

Lloyd has written that we make too much of the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and the press — for "the purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance."

We thought we were democratically governed. We thought we could vote as we choose after a vigorous and open debate. Once the major networks served as information gatekeepers controlling what we saw and heard. Now talk radio, the Internet and cable news have enhanced democracy by promoting the free flow of information and discourse. Lloyd wants to stop all that. (READ AT IBD)