n all the hoopla about the U.S. election last week, a couple of significant events sneaked by. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that corporations are not persons. And the U.S. media acknowledged that they have ethical responsibilities.
First, the media. Friday night after the U.S. election, still-president Donald Trump ranted for 16 minutes of outright falsehoods and accusations without evidence, that he had won the election. At least six American networks cut him off in mid-sentence. Two others let Trump finish, before their own staff came on to correct his claims.
Historically, the American broadcast media have avoided questions of ethics. They claimed to present to the public (or at least to their audience share of the public) the news as it happens, without distortion or bias.
It’s not possible, of course. The media must always pick and choose which statements to quote, which events to attend, which speakers to feature. If the CBC and Fox News ever cover the same event, they will deliver a dramatically different impression of what happened.
But both will claim to let the events speak for themselves.
The media generally do not see their role as policing what people say. If a white supremacist in Charlottesville is willing to scream racist imprecations into a camera, the networks will carry it – minus a few bleeped profanities.
Indeed, the more inflammatory the opinion, the more likely it will attract audience attention.
Print, by its nature, is more reflective. Less immediate. Newspapers and magazines reporter can balance a quoted untruth with an immediate correction; broadcast media cannot.
Unprecedented act
So for the networks to pull the plug on a sitting president is an unprecedented act.
Australian broadcaster Denis Muller called it “a Rubicon,” a parallel to Julius Caesar’s irreversible defiance of Roman authorities in 49 BC.
It was not a planned cutaway. Trump gave no warning of what he would say, not even that he was going on air.
By cutting their president off, while he was still speaking, the U.S. networks acknowledged that they are not just a vehicle for transmitting diverse views, they also bear responsibility for the accuracy and content of those views.
Reversal of precedent
In the second piece of overlooked news, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that, in certain situations, corporations are not persons.
The case itself is almost ludicrous. A company in Quebec was fined $30,843 – the minimum fine for building code violations. Not satisfied with getting a minimum penalty, Canadian Press reported, the company challenged “the constitutionality of the fine, arguing that it violated the guarantee against ‘any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment’ in Section 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
The Supreme Court threw the case out. Unanimously.
The notion that a corporation is a “person” under the law goes back to a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1886, Santa Clara vs Southern Pacific Railroad.
Like the Quebec company, Southern Pacific sought constitutional protection against what it considered punitive taxes. The lawyer for Southern Pacific, Roscoe Conkling, cited the 14th Amendment – which forbids a state to deny equal protection of the law, to any person within its jurisdiction.
As the last surviving member of the Congress committee that drafted the 14th Amendment, Conkling claimed that the committee had intended to include corporations as “persons” but some other person or persons had edited their text.
“Laws referring to ‘persons’ have by long and constant acceptance … been held to embrace artificial persons as well as natural persons,” Conkling insisted.
Later research suggests that Conkling lied.
No matter. In his preamble – legally speaking, his “headnote” – court reporter Bancroft Davis indicated that the court bought Conkling’s argument. On whether “the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,…applies to these corporations,” Davis wrote, “we are all of the opinion that it does."
Even though the court itself issued no written ruling on that issue.
Nevertheless, Davis’s headnote stood unchallenged. Two years later, another Supreme Court made Davis’s editorial summary official, in a case against a mining company in Pennsylvania.
And it was key to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United that corporate coffers have the same right as private individuals to seek to influence government policy by making huge donations.
Today, it’s generally taken for granted that corporations – created by words on paper, as artificial a person as Huck Finn – have the same rights as any flesh-and-blood human.
Dare I hope that these two unrelated decisions may, like stones tossed into a lake, generate ripples that will spread?
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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
I expected last week’s column about the decline of the American empire would foster quite a few letters. Most of them agreed with me – am I preaching to the choir? – but one letter from a U.S. listener sounded pained.
Norma Wible wrote, “I was disappointed in your pessimistic assessment of our country, and particularly the stalemate that you predict will happen in January. I think there’s a strong possibility that our leaders will come together and find common ground. I believe that’s been a characteristic of Joe Biden for decades, and if a few intractable people will just get out of the way...
“And if we are to be considered less dominant than we were, perhaps a humbling is a good thing.”
Cliff Boldt also saw hope: “Biden has a historical moment which comes close to the FDR initiatives in 1933 to cure the depression. FDR turned the USA around …. It really is time for a new deal for the USA, a time to check the compass, look around the world and see that things like climate change and COVID are creating opportunities and acceptance for change that we haven’t seen in my life .”
Jean McCord: “I think many people are so delirious about dumping Trump that—even when we realize the tremendous problems ahead in trying to undo what he did in four years—we haven’t looked deeply enough into where the U.S. stands. Others, of course, want to keep what he did and go further. It helps to have an outside viewpoint.”
Steve Roney: “I agree that things look shambolic in the USA these days; but I am unconvinced that they are in decline… Bad as things look in the USA, they look to me at least as bad for any other obvious candidate to replace them at the topof the junkheap.
“People are saying China will replace the USA, economically and militarily. Having lived in China, and retainingChinese friends, I am amazed the current Chinese regime has survived this long. To preserve its power, almost lost at Tiananmen, the CCP has systematically destroyed all civil society. When it crashes to earth, as it is bound to, this meansthere will be no smooth transition. There is liable to be a period of chaos before new structures can be created.
“Historically, China periodically descends into chaos.”
Tom Watson also listened to “the Jeffery Sachs speech, and I agree that there's plenty of evidence of the decline and fall of the American Empire. However, the results of the election do, at least, provide a glimmer of hope, whereas four more years of the Donald Trump era would certainly have seen further erosion.”
Bob Rollwagen thought that “America has learned a tough lesson. The President-elect is already working to make it a distant memory. The US can thank the current President for showing them just how far they have strayed from the basic human values that were the basis of their founding.
“The previous Democratic administration inherited a country in financial collapse. This Democratic government gets a nation losing the battle against a viral pandemic. In both cases, the government losing power had only focused on increasing the wealth of the already wealthy -- a theme common for such governments around the globe.
“It will be a long painful road back. The good news is they have started.”
Michael Jensen took a less political perspective: “Yes, there are worse things to lose than an election.
“The family, the backbone of society, is weaker. Morality and integrity are losing out to anger, revenge, and fear. Belief in God continues to lessen… Secret societies wield more power and influence than even the drug cartels.
“The answer is for each of us to live the best life that we can, summed up in the law given by Jesus Christ: love God, love your fellow humans, and love yourself.”
To be fair, I did get one letter that praised Trump, that attacked Joe Biden as a sexual predator and a pawn of a Chinese conspiracy, but it was so incoherent that it doesn’t deserve printing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.