Thinking about political free speech for organizations

I just read "Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision" by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. It got me to thinking:

Whose Political Opinions are Expressed by Corporations

Organizations don't speak. Sometimes a person is designated to speak for an organization, but organizations don't have the physical equipment to speak.

More importantly is the way organizations make decisions. The owners of an organization are in theory its stock holders, and if an organization were to express opinions they ought to be the opinions of its stock holders. While there are stock holder meetings, many of the stock holders of large corporations are themselves other organizations -- banks, pension funds, mutual funds, etc. There is no practical way to ascertain the political preferences of the people who own large corporations.

In fact, small groups of people make decisions as to the advertisements that corporations pay for. Thus a small group of people is using money belonging to the corporation's stock holders to pay for advertisements promoting political views of that small group rather than the documented opinion of the stock holders. I can not imagine that the corporate charters give that power to the management of corporations, nor that the ultimate people whose money forms the capital of the corporation are informed that their money will be used in that way.

The question is not whether the rights of corporations as "legal persons" have the right to political speech, but whether the management of a corporation has the right to determine the content of political speech of the corporation that they manage.

We generally agree that foreign nationals do not have the right to advertise to influence American elections. Thus foreign owned corporations should not have that right either. How about corporations chartered in the United States with foreign owners? What percentage of the capital in a corporation could come from foreign investors before the corporation should not be allowed to influence an American election?

Indeed, I have made the argument that decisions on political advertisements funded by corporations are actually made by small groups of people in the corporate management. What if some of all of those people are not American citizens?

Do we want the Federal Elections Committee to try to make such fine distinctions and to try to ascertain whether corporations meet the criteria to be allowed political advertisements? I think not.

Balance in the Media

The Supreme Court decided in the past that the government had the right to assure balanced coverage of controversial issues in the media, accepting a "Fairness Doctrine" from the FCC. While the FCC no longer enforces a fairness doctrine, the government might do so.

The fairness doctrine was imposed in part because the broadcast spectrum is owned by the people and managed by the people to serve the public interest. In the second half of the 20th century, most people got their information from from radio or television, and there was a potential danger that if those media presented a biased coverage of the issues before voters, then the voters would not have the information necessary to vote wisely.

Similarly, the FCC has enforced a newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule. The rule again establishes the principle that in order to assure that voters have balanced information on issues before them the government can regulate the media.

Today people have vastly more access to information via cable television and the Internet than they had when those principles were established. Faced with a virtual flood of information, the question is to what do viewers attend? It is possible that the government has a legitimate role in encouraging the public to attend to a balanced set of views on key issues. I would hold that such is at least worthy of consideration.

Money is now used to buy attention through advertisements in newspapers, radio, television, email, social media, search engines, etc. Indeed, money is used to buy "news channels" such as Fox News and MSNBC that present conservative and liberal views of issues respectively.

It would seem to me that the government has a potential role in assuring that the funding for political advertising is not so heavily directed towards one point of view that voters are unlikely to attend appropriately to other legitimate views on the issues. I would think limitations on the funding of political advertisement by Super PACs, corporations and non-profits be considered in this respect. 

Science and the Israel-Palestine conflict

The Committee on Freedom and Responsibility of ICSU has released a statement on 'Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and the Israel-Palestine Conflict'. This statement recognises that scientific freedoms have been compromised and/or threatened in both Israel and Palestine and emphasises the responsibility of the global scientific community to promote cooperation and understanding.

Facebook Changes Egypt

ESRAA RASHID (center) was jailed for helping to organize protests online.

Source: "Revolution, Facebook-Style," SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO, The New York Times Magazine, January 22, 2009.

Excerpts:

Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members. This month, hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members, in private homes and at Internet cafes, have set up Gaza-related “groups.” Most expressed hatred for Israel and the United States, but each one had its own focus. Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas.......

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

The Article goes on to describe the April 6 movement in which thousands of Egyptians, primarily young and educated, use Facebook to arrange meetings.

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN, a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told me that the April 6 movement illustrates what he calls the “cute-cat theory of digital activism.” Web sites or proxy servers created specifically for activists are easy for a government to shut down, Zuckerman says, but around the world, dissidents thrive on sites, like Facebook, that are used primarily for more mundane purposes (like exchanging pictures of cute cats). Authoritarian regimes can’t block political Facebook groups without blocking all the “American Idol” fans and cat lovers as well. “The government can’t simply shut down Facebook, because doing so would alert a large group of people who they can’t afford to radicalize,” Zuckerman explained.

Comment: I have spent a few months in Egypt over the years and came to the conclusion that my viewpoint based in the culture of the United States, modified by years of living in Latin America, does not provide much insight into the way Egyptians think about politics and political participation. Still, I think it the effect of online social networking is likely to open Egyptian political processes.

I suspect that when social networking via cell phone networks becomes universal, coercive control of information will become all but impossible. JAD

An Interesting Book on Human Rights

Source: “Our Rights, Our Information -- Empowering People to Demand Rights through Knowledge,” Maja Daruwala and Venkatesh Nayak (Editors), Cecelia Burgman, Carrie Gage, Claire Cronin and Reshmi Mitra (Research and Compilation), The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, 2007.

Excerpt from the Foreward:

The right to information has long been recognised as a ‘Fundamental Right’ of a free citizenry. It is from this right that other basic human rights can flow. No society can claim to be truly free unless it has both the instruments and the practice of providing its people with access to information.....

Although, the exercise of the freedom of information has now matured in several societies, it is relatively nascent in most developing countries. These countries moreover are in many cases those which are only now emerging from the incubus of a colonial hierarchy, structured to exploit the skills of its people at the least cost to the colonial masters and the economic ruin of the colonised populace.......

(This book) show cases how the right has been used by ordinary people to change systems, redress grievances and realise other rights. It places these experiences in the historical context of the evolution of this right from an esoteric freedom of a highly enlightened society aloof from the humdrum of the prosaic world, to its recognition through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as a fundamental right for all. It highlights with detailed discussions the bearing the right to information will have not only on social development through promoting gender equality but also on economic development while protecting the essential requirements of humankind like the need for food and water.

Bushies Managing the Media

Source: "Putting Her Foot Down and Getting the Boot," by Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, July 10, 2008.

Apparently Gina Grey (right), an Iraq vet, was fired from her job as public relations director at the nation's most important military cemetery because she wanted the press who were allowed by family members to cover military funerals to he allowed closer to the funerals. It seems that under the Bush administration the rules for Arlington cemetery were changed to reduce access, and cemetery officials are calling families encouraging them to disallow press coverage.

"Had I not put my foot down, had I just gone along with it and not said regulations were being violated, I'm sure I'd still be there," said the jobless Gray, who, over lunch yesterday in Crystal City, recounted what she is certain is her retaliatory dismissal.

Remember how the Bush administration in the past censored the photos of the coffins of the dead soldiers being returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.

We depend on the media to provide the information we need in our democracy to help us make the right decisions as citizens and voters. Keeping the press from doing their work, or from doing it well, is a real disservice to democracy. We need to be reminded, and reminded often, of how many Americans are dying and how many are being wounded and injured in Iraq.

Indeed, we need to be reminded of how many Iraqis (and Afghanis) are being killed, injured, wounded, and having their lives disrupted and ruined by the American occupation of their country. I find that Doonsbury is the site that does this best, which is even more a complaint about mainstream media than a compliment to Gary Trudeau.

One wonders what kind of democracy President Bush thought the United States would promote in the Middle East? Of course, someone who thinks that they can promote democracy by invasion and punting the occupation......

"Freedom of Speech in Government Science"

David Resnik has a good article in the recent issue of the National Academy of Science's Issues in Science and Technology dealing with the need both to guarantee freedom of speech for government scientists and to assure that those scientists when the speak do so with proper respect for the ethics of science, including refraining from publication of low quality data or excessive extrapolation of the meaning of their results.

Resnik recommends a watchdog committee to oversee the rights to freedom of speech of government scientists. This seems to me a very good idea. He suggests that this might be done by the AAAS, and I would suggest that it might also be done by the National Academies.

I would dispute one of Resnik's conclusions. He correctly recognizes that governments have to make decisions on the allocation of scarce resources, and states:

Government agencies use peer review committees to decide which research proposals should be funded. Scientists who are denied funding by a federal agency are still free to conduct their research using funds from a different source, such as a private company, university, or foundation.

Unfortunately, political ideology sometimes trumps the recommendations of impartial peer review panels, and I think Resnik may underestimate the power of political officials to retaliate financially against scientists who displease them or threaten to challenge their pet myths with scientific observations. I think government scientists and scientists seeking government funding need institutionalized protection mechanisms against inappropriate political interference with the funding process. Fortunately, a free press, the Congressional checks to administration power, and non-governmental organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and the AAAS provide some such mechanisms. Still, more might be done, perhaps by reviving a scientific advisory body for the Congress extending the functions of the long lost Office of Technology Assessment.

"Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica"

Source: Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post, January 14, 2008.

The article states that new research indicates that climate change is destabilizing ice sheets in western Antarctica much more than had been thought. It raises the specter that we might see both the Antarctic and Greenland ice melting, leading to sea level rises of meters this century rather than feet as had previously been thought. There was a recent report that scientists looking at the long-distant past climate had found that when the climate warmed as much as is expected in the 21st century, sea level rose some 20 feet.

Sea level rises of that magnitude would be catastrophic for small island nations, Bangladesh, and indeed for low lying coastal areas all over the world. While they would decimate vacation homes on the coasts of the United States, they would be much worse for poor people in many countries who don't have the resources to survive such changes.

As far as I can figure out, scientists have not developed a very good understanding of the climate-ice pack dynamics. Clearly, huge amounts of cold, fresh water entering the oceans would have oceanographic effects that would be unprecedented and thus difficult to predict. The overall interplay of oceans, atmosphere, and ice is not only complex, but apparently non-linear. Predictions based on simulations of such systems for decades are not only very difficult, but are very sensitive to assumptions that are made.

In short, the world is facing threats that could be very grave, with very unsatisfactory scientific information on which to base decisions. We know that mankind is in trouble in this century, but we are not sure how bad that trouble may be. Caution would seem to be the prudent course!

HOW THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS ARE UNFAIR TO AFRICA

William Easterly, Working Paper 14, The Brookings Institute, November 2007.

ABSTRACT: "Those involved in the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) campaign routinely state 'Africa will miss all the MDGs.' This paper argues that a series of arbitrary choices made in defi ning “success” or 'failure' as achieving numerical targets for the Millennium Development Goals made attainment of the MDGs less likely in Africa than in other regions even when its progress was in line with historical or contemporary experience of other regions. The statement that 'Africa will miss all the MDGs' thus paints an unfairly bleak portrait of Africa."

Comment: Easterly makes a number of points, including that starting counting of MDG performance in 1990, a decade before they were promulgated, fails to take into account the African problems in that decade, and that it is harder to achieve the goals for Africa since it starts from further back. I know what Easterly means, but I don't know how goals per se can be unfair. What might be unfair is the interpretation of goal accomplishment. Certainly African nations have made significant development gains in the last decade and a half, and should be credited with those successes.

On the other hand, the Millennium Development Goals may be unfair to richer nations, since they do not much challenge those countries. It also seems that countries with abysmal poverty in is aspects of hunger, ignorance, illness and early death should be challenged with ambitious goals to eliminate those problems. JAD

Egyptian blogger beaten in jail: rights groups

Yahoo! News, November 20, 2007.

Lead: "An Egyptian blogger serving a 4-year jail term for insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak has been beaten in prison and sent to an isolation cell, rights groups said on Tuesday." The article continues:

Abdel Karim Suleiman, a former law student convicted in connection with eight articles he wrote since 2004, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for Internet writings.

The February verdict was widely condemned by human rights groups and bloggers as a dangerous precedent that could limit online freedom in the most populous Arab country.

Reporters without Borders said Suleiman, in letters sent from prison, had complained of being handcuffed and beaten then put into an isolation cell where he received very little food or water.

Check out the Free Kareem Website!

Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill

Subtitle: "Some Telecom Companies Would Receive Immunity"
By Jonathan Weisman and Ellen Nakashima
The Washington Post, Thursday, October 18, 2007

I quote:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

Comment: I hope it is not too late to rectify this problem, and resuscitate the House version of the law. Lets hold people, even rich powerful people, responsible for what they do. Don't set a precedent that will bear bitter fruit in the future. JAD

Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007

Source: Reporters Without Borders

According to Reporters Without Borders latest edition of its press freedom index:

"There were slightly fewer press freedom violations in the United States (48th) and blogger Josh Wolf was freed after 224 days in prison. But the detention of Al-Jazeera’s Sudanese cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, since 13 June 2002 at the military base of Guantanamo and the murder of Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in August mean the United States is still unable to join the lead group."

Reporters Without Borders compiled this index by sending a questionnaire to the 15 freedom of expression organisations throughout the world that are its partners, to its network of 130 correspondents, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists. It contained 50 questions about press freedom in their countries. The index covers 169 nations. Other countries were not included because of lack of data.