Help Give Away Supreme Court Protest Bumper Stickers,

[G_j]

Tens of thousands of you have already received your "Corporations Are
NOT The People" bumper stickers, which we have been sending out
mostly entirely for free, and more are being stuffed into envelopes
even as this alert is going out.

Now we need your help spreading this initiative to reverse the outlaw
Supreme Court even further and wider. We have created a special page
where you can pick up a 25-pack of these dynamic messages stickers,
at a very modest cost, just so we can keep this thing going.

Bulk Bumper Stickers: http://www.usalone.com/bumper_stickers_bulk.php

Please consider being the hero activist in your neighborhood by
distributing these bumpers stickers that EVERYBODY wants. Of all the
issues we have addressed in the last 5 years, this is the one that
has people mobilized the most, for on the issue of control of our
government by the corporations turns the survival of our democracy
itself.

And if you somehow missed the previous alerts and just want a free
sticker for yourself that would be this page.

Free Bumper Stickers: http://www.usalone.com/bumper_stickers.php

Not surprisingly, this is also the top issue at the new Independent
Voters page on Facebook. So again, if you are already on Facebook we
urgently need you to get involved there. We have a totally wide open
vote going on what the "Statement of Priorities" for this new
resource should be, so please go to the link below and participate
making sure YOUR priorities are represented.

Independent Voters page:
http://www.facebook.com/Independent.Voters?v=app_109302975758164

And again, please be patient if you are not a Facebook kind of
person, because we WILL build out an alternate connection page for
you once we get the thing really rolling.

You can even get the free bumper stickers from the Facebook page too!

Free Bumper Stickers:
http://www.facebook.com/Independent.Voters?v=app_106690312695773

The rest of the alert we will dedicate to the next of our much
anticipated installments tearing up into little itsy bitsy pieces the
rogue Supreme Court ruling to declare our country the kingdom of the
corporations. We're not proud, we're not tired. But there are still
yet more fundamental and unforgivable errors in this opinion we have
not yet addressed. This is the eighth, and it is entitled:

First Amendment Absolutism, But Only For Corporations Says The
Supreme Court 5

Here we confront the shameless hypocrisy of creating a super
protected status for the "speech" (amounting to nothing more than the
power to spend vast sums of money) of corporations, by the same
Supreme Court line up that has demonstrated zero tolerance for the
"free" speech of just about anybody else.

In his opinion, Kennedy, writing for The Supreme Court 5 (including
Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito), can find no other reading of the
First Amendment except that the "speech" of corporations cannot be
constrained in any way "beyond all doubt" (opinion p. 19). Even
requiring them to maintain a PAC as a vehicle for their political
speech is too onerous of a paperwork burden he says (opinion pp.
20-21). And though previous courts and Congress have long recognized
a compelling governmental interest making sure ordinary citizens were
not drowned by a flood of corporate money, for Kennedy this was
somehow a new invention of the Austin case that he then arrogates to
overrule (opinion p. 31), specifically a governmental interest in
preventing

"... the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of
wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and
that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the
corporation's political ideas."

That quote from Austin actually sounds pretty good to us just as it
was.

And of course his own citations to other cases which he provides for
this very quote proves that this concept in law is nothing new, but
instead backed by a long line of case precedents. On another page
(opinion p. 27) Kennedy cites a minority opinion from 1948, where
they complain that the majority in that case (U.S. vs. CIO) should
not have limited "undue influence" by a speaker's "large
expenditures". The point he was attempting to make was that there has
always been a line of dissent, of course proving nothing more than it
has always been the minority view.

The precept that there is a compelling governmental interest in
limiting undue financial influence over our elections has been long
recognized, long acknowledged, and long accepted, except by this same
grousing, grudge settling minority (indeed two of these same judges
were the dissenters in the Austin case itself), but which by the
unfortunate and ill-advised seating of one final corporatist partisan
has now been empowered to execute their long plotted judicial coup.

So what, you might now be asking yourselves, would be a compelling
governmental interest in limiting free speech? The opinion cites a
handful of some 20-30 plus year old cases, examples of people in the
military, people in prison, etc. (opinion pp. 24-25) But of course we
don't have to look that far to find evidence of Kennedy's hypocrisy.
This same line up of judges has spoken very recently on the free
speech rights of ACTUAL people, and let's just see what they said.

In Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006), Kennedy wrote the
opinion that a whistle blower, who was a deputy district attorney,
could be retaliated against for speaking out against wrongdoing by
the police. Somehow defending the free speech of someone charged with
protecting the integrity of our law enforcement agencies was not a
compelling government interest. But making sure multi-national
corporations are not even slightly inconvenienced in buying our
elections? That is, according to this same judge.

In Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), Roberts wrote the opinion
that unfurling a nonsensical joke banner ("Bong Hits For Jesus") off
of school property was such a threat to the foundations of our
society that it must be stamped out with the biggest possible boot, a
dire governmental emergency. But having our policy debate leading up
to an election totally dominated by corporate special interests? For
Roberts, not so much.

Yes, when it comes to actual people or real compelling interests
(like stopping police wrongdoing) the First Amendment is not for us.
Because we now have a majority on our Supreme Court for which only
the rights of corporations are supreme, inviolable, and sacrosanct.
But for more evidence of just how dreadfully bad this decision is,
you will have to wait until the ninth bone chilling installment of
the Night of the Living Dead Dissents.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. K&R for great info!

[G_j]

2. ==