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Hi, folks!
I wanted to raise a couple of issues for discussion. Any comments?
1. As many probably know, the Supreme Court has raised contract law to a
level that supersedes the Constitution of the United States. This has
been an historical evolution starting perhaps has early as Fletcher vs.
Peck (1810), and it certainly was one of the outcomes of the Snepp case
(Snepp vs. United States (1980)), which many may know about.
Frank Snepp wrote the book, "Decent Interval," about the fall of Saigon
in 1975. The govt sued, arguing that he had a contract with the CIA not
to publish without submitting everything to prior review. The Court
upheld the govt, and I think all the profits of the book had to be
turned over to the govt, and Snepp was banned from ever writing anything
else about his govt service without submitting it to prior review. In
short, the Court with this decision upheld censorship and abandonded
freedom of expression as an American right.
2. As many also know, the Court in 1886 in the case, Southern
Pacific v. Santa Clara County, interpreted the law in a fashion that
gave corporations the status and rights of individuals (though not the same
responsibilities -- in fact, corporate responsibilites have never been
codified). In many Bill-of-Rights cases, where business interests
conflicted with individual interests, or where business interests
conflicts with some things govt wanted to do (e.g., search and
seizures), the Court has sided with business interests by and large. This
is especially part of the history of stopping states from interfering
with corporations.
3. We have now reached the point, I would argue, that Court support for
the business ideology is anti-thetical to the interests of individual
citizens and irrational in terms of community decision-making. The
traditional "conservative" support for the marketplace and those who
control it has become untenable. We need legislation that accomplishes as
least these things:
A. We must affirm that the Constitution of the United States is the
Supreme Law of the Land, superseding ALL other areas of the law,
including those areas that protect Executive Bureaucracy, allowing
people with positions in the bureaucracy to think they are above the
law. Contract law must not be allowed to supersede the Constitution:
individual must be protected from being lulled, or forced, into
absolutely signing away their rights, the loss of which is often
economically or professionally related.
B. We need to affirm one of two things: EITHER the responsibilities of
corporations and govt bureaucracies vis-a-vis citizens and communities
need to be codified OR we need legislation that will once again set
forth the Primacy of the Individual and Individual Rights vis-a-vis
corporations and govt bureaucracies. And then the law needs to be
enforced, with individual being held accountable. E.g.: everyone knows
that the CIA has been involved in domestic spying, but when was the last
time anyone was prosecuted for violating the law on this? Corporations
can also spy with de facto impunity.
C. We probably need an Ombudsman bureaucracy with the mandate to
handle all grievances against the govt. This institution should be
staffed with people who can be as arrogant and as impudent as those who
currently work in the Executive Bureaucracy. (Just to give one example: a
Navy submarine pulled a fishing boat into the deep killing one seaman
near Monterey, CA, and subsequently refused to answer ANY inquiry about
the matter. We don't need this kind of crap in America. Anyone who gets a
paycheck from our taxes is answerable to us.) Primacy of the individual
need to be reaffirmed.
As long as individual citizens are the lowest being on the food chain in
institutionalized America, both government bureaucratic institutions and
corporations will continue to win the most important legal battles
relating to constitutional rights (i.e., they will continue to trample
on our rights) and our rights will be sliced away into oblivion under the
guise of some legal justification we are powerless to do anything about.
As individual citizen's we ought to be able to contribute to raising public
consciousness about these issues. It would seem to be in our interests.
Too many juriridical interpretations are morally indefensible and null
and void from a humanocentric perspective.
Any thoughts?
-- CJR
cjreid@netcom.com
"Salus populi suprema est lex" (Cicero)
The welfare of the people is the highest law.
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"Genuine goodness is threatening to those
at the opposite end of the moral spectrum." (Charles Spencer)
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