*promote *money
I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about corporate personhood earlier this year.

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/opinion/hale-let-the-corporations-have-their-rights-role-in-government-1.2531819

It would be interesting if corporations weren't people. But they are.

The aftermath of a few slapdash U.S. Supreme Court decisions means that today's companies resemble citizens more and more. And, much like the pigs and men sitting at the table in "Animal Farm," it is already impossible to determine which is which.

A few key court decisions sowed the seeds for corporate personhood. In Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), it was ruled that a private business was exempt from state laws seeking to interfere with established contracts. In other words, the court ruled, states can't pass laws that impair business contracts.

In 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision — and its implications were huge — granted corporations the rights of citizenship.

Just last year the Supreme Court ruled, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that First Amendment rights should be extended to corporations. The floodgate of contributions — mostly anonymous — helped sweep the Tea Party to power and shake up the status quo in Washington, D.C.

It won't be long until corporations are extended Constitutional protections enjoyed by U.S. citizens. Rather than stall sharing our rights with big business, perhaps we should endorse it.

Surely, the National Rifle Association would have no qualm extending Second Amendment rights to big businesses. They may argue corporations should enjoy the same protections our forefathers had. After all, they'll say, why should corporations have to only rely on banks and lobbyists to protect their interests? They're guaranteed to blanket their members with pro-corporate paraphernalia backing whichever businesses packs the most heat. And nothing short of San Francisco can stop the NRA.

As soon as Constitutional rights are extended to corporations, they should be able to run for president. Foreign companies — much like Arnold Schwarzenegger — need not apply.

Rather than spending money for voters to elect whichever presidential candidates get the most campaign contributions and airtimes, corporations could cut out the middle man and invest in their own campaigns.

Congress is guaranteed to be friendly to a corporation in the Oval Office. Two corporations — a president and a vice president — could help put an end to wasteful government spending by working closely with legislation. Most legislators already nip at the bit for corporate donations; it's essential to winning. Corporations would bridge the aisle between Democrats and Republicans better than George Washington.

Boeing Co., the world's largest plane manufacturer, would never land billions of dollars' worth of imprudent government contracts to build impractical engines if the money were coming out of their own pockets, so to speak. And Congress would never again have to pursue worthless pet projects to keep jobs in their state, because worthless pet projects would cost corporate White House money.

Every "bridge to nowhere" must have a strip mall at the end.

As is, a majority of the Supreme Court already defers status to big business over citizens, and it wouldn't take too long until the minority could be replaced. The awesome powers of a corporate-backed executive branch, marching in lockstep with the legislative and judicial, would outrival any nation. Even China would eventually owe us money.

Of course, a business oligarchy is probably not what the framers of the U.S. Constitution originally intended for us. But lesser nations have endured far more with far less. And who among us doesn't want what's best for us?

Critics of corporate personhood want to amend the U.S Constitution to limit the rights of corporations. They argue that corporations, because their sole purpose is to make a profit, shouldn't have the same rights as you or I.

These critics are especially alarmed that corporations can make significantly larger political contributions than individual citizens. Some critics say that this is just one example where the rights of corporations actually exceed the rights of citizens. It does seem lopsided. But with such a global competitive market, how else can we compete with other countries?

Maybe corporate personhood isn't such a bad idea after all. What else could unite Americans more than having Coke and Pepsi run on the same ticket?

If a corporation were president it just might invest more time and more money at home. Then, maybe, we could all sit at the table.

This video has been declared a duplicate by the original submitter; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by moodonia.

Yeah its a dupe, how that didnt show up when I was searching for it is beyond me...

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Conan-O-Brien-s-2011-Dartmouth-College-Commencement-Address

might be dupe: http://videosift.com/video/Conan-O-Brien-s-2011-Dartmouth-College-Commencement-Address

By the way, I won't argue with you, rougy because you're absolutely right. But don't forget that CBS, ABC, and NBC, cable channels CNN and MSNBC, as well as major newspapers, news-wires, and radio outlets, especially CBS News, Newsweek, and the New York Times are the Democratic Party's propaganda outlets.

There, I said the obvious again.

A 2002 study by Jim A. Kuypers of Dartmouth College, Press Bias and Politics, investigated the issue of media bias. In this study of 116 mainstream US papers, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kuypers found that the mainstream press in America tends to favor liberal viewpoints. They found that reporters expressing moderate or conservative points of view were often labeled as holding a minority point of view. Kuypers said he found liberal bias in reporting a variety of issues including race, welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080205062048/http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200209/CUL20020917b.html


In a survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1997, 61% of reporters stated that they were members of or shared the beliefs of the Democratic Party. Only 15% say their beliefs were best represented by the Republican Party. This leaves 24% undecided or Independent.

http://www.asne.org/kiosk/reports/97reports/journalists90s/journalists.html

Here's Lynn's biography:

"Lynn previously served as the director for Program Analysis and Evaluation in the office of the secretary of Defense, a position he had held since April 1993, and earlier as assistant to the secretary of Defense for Budget.

From 1987 until 1993, Lynn served on the staff of Senator Edward Kennedy as the legislative counsel for defense and arms control matters and his staff representative on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Prior to 1987, he was a senior fellow in the Strategic Concepts Development Center at National Defense University, where he specialized in strategic nuclear forces and arms control issues. He was also on the professional staff of the Institute of Defense Analyses. From 1982 to 1985, he served as the executive director of the Defense Organization Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Lynn is a graduate of Dartmouth College (1976). He has a juris doctorate from Cornell Law School and a master's in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University (1982). His publications include "Toward a More Effective Defense" (1985) as well as articles in various newspapers and professional journals."


Given this guy's CV, especially with nuclear proliferation on the verge of spinning out of control, I'd give this guy a big fucking waiver, too.

Short answer - Canadian universities are WAY younger than those in the States, so we adopted the 'classic' European terminology. I mean, U of T was founded in 1827 (yeah, guess where I graduated from), and there may be some older universities in Canada (I don't know which), but probably not as old as, say, Harvard.

>> ^Sarzy:
I've got a question which is semi-related to the topic at hand: what's the deal with the terms college and university being seemingly interchangeable in the states? In Canada, college and university are two different things (college is generally a one or two year program in which you learn a trade, whereas university is a three or four year deal in which you learn something a bit more abstract (ie. political science, english, physics, etc.). Is this not the case in the U.S.?


Yeah, American terminology like that bothers me - where's the UNIVERSITY GRAD option???

Anyway, enough people were annoyed by this like us to make a small essay on the topic - the Canadian system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#Canada

And here's the bit about Amerika
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#The_origin_of_the_U.S._usage

The founders of the first institutions of higher education in the United States were graduates of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. The small institutions they founded would not have seemed to them like universities — they were tiny and did not offer the higher degrees in medicine and theology. Furthermore, they were not composed of several small colleges. Instead, the new institutions felt like the Oxford and Cambridge colleges they were used to — small communities, housing and feeding their students, with instruction from residential tutors (as in the United Kingdom, described above). When the first students came to be graduated, these "colleges" assumed the right to confer degrees upon them, usually with authority -- for example, the College of William and Mary has a Royal Charter from the British monarchy allowing it to confer degrees while Dartmouth College has a charter permitting it to award degrees "as are usually granted in either of the universities, or any other college in our realm of Great Britain."

Contrast this with Europe, where only universities could grant degrees. The leaders of Harvard College (which granted America's first degrees in 1642) might have thought of their college as the first of many residential colleges which would grow up into a New Cambridge university. However, over time, few new colleges were founded there, and Harvard grew and added higher faculties. Eventually, it changed its title to university, but the term "college" had stuck and "colleges" have arisen across the United States.

Eventually, several prominent colleges/universities were started to train Christian ministers. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown all started to train preachers in the subjects of Bible and theology. However, now these universities teach theology as a more academic than ministerial discipline.

With the rise of Christian education, renowned seminaries and Bible colleges have continued the original purpose of these universities. Criswell College and Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas; Southern Seminary in Louisville; Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois; and Wheaton College and Graduate School in Wheaton, Illinois are just a few of the institutions that have influenced higher education in Theology in Philosophy to this day.

In U.S. usage, the word "college" embodies not only a particular type of school, but has historically been used to refer to the general concept of higher education when it is not necessary to specify a school, as in "going to college" or "college savings accounts" offered by banks. "University" is sometimes used in such contexts by Americans who wish to avoid ambiguity, for example in the context of Internet message boards where the reader hail from a different English speaking country.

What does this have to do with the world being round? Stop trying to build a strawman argument or whatever hand-waving you're trying to do, and deal with the actual issue at hand. The problem does not begin with two doors, it begins with three. And since the greatest chance of choosing a wrong door begins with that initial choice, it therefore becomes to the player's advantage to rechoose, thus exchanging a lesser probability of choosing the right door for a higher probability when one wrong door is eliminated.

Also, since I know you're not going to really read the above, before you go off on your next obnoxiously self-congratulating post, please explain to me how, myself and my fellow sifters aside, mathematics, physics, and computer science professors from (and I'm taking this straight from Google as they come) the University of California San Diego, Hofstra University, the University of Southern Carolina, the University of Chicago, Rice University, the United States Naval Academy, Dartmouth College, the University of Illinois, the University of Alabama, and Stanford University have all managed to slip up and not realize how right you really are? And since of course science and math are not, as you said, democratic, perhaps you should take the time to alert them to their collective silly mistake, as well as correct each of their obviously wrong examples that they have provided on their respective websites. You could change the world of mathematics as we know it!