Visitor For Hire

by Vincent M. Mallozzi

Squinting through dark sunglasses at row after row of neatly lined headstones, Terry Marotta-Lopriore drove slowly through Gate of Heaven Cemetery.

Holding the steering wheel with one hand and a bouquet of flowers with the other, she pulled to the curb, glanced at several notes scribbled inside a folder and walked to Section 17, Plot No. 26, Grave No. 6. There, she came upon a pinkish headstone, bathed in bright sunshine, that belonged to Cristy Akyildiz. Chiseled inside a giant heart were the words “Angel of God, Cristy, October 25, 2001.”

“Poor little girl,” Mrs. Marotta-Lopriore said before kneeling and gently laying the flowers on the grave.

Mrs. Marotta-Lopriore is not a relative or a family friend.

In fact, she had not known the girl.

A paralegal and married mother of three trying to earn extra money in a tough economy, Mrs. Marotta-Lopriore, 57, embarked last month on a new career: cemetery visitor for hire.

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Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters

Bear Napping

Photo and caption by Rick Sheremeta

On a recent photo trip to Alaska’s McNeil River, I spent four days observing and photographing Brown Bears. The bears routine became pretty obvious – they’d fish for a while until their bellies were full, then they’d wander off into the grass for a little nap. This ole gal never quite got that far – after snaring this salmon, she wandered into a shallow pool at the side of the river, cradled the fish under her arm, and promptly nodded off. It was really comical to see her just sitting there sound asleep.

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Gassed by John Singer Sargent (1918)

[ed.  I recall as a young boy listening to my grandfather describe the horrors of mustard gas in World War I.  He never mentioned it more than once but the images have stuck with me all my life. The poem at the end of this piece pretty much says it all.]

My Daily Art Display painting for today follows the theme of yesterday’s offering. Once again I am featuring a painting which highlights the savagery of war. This is another realistic depiction of the horrors of war which are often badly received by people who prefer to just see depictions of glorious victories, heroic acts and the happy return of our fighting men. Sadly these kinds of pictures give one a false impression of the reality of war and it is sad to think that some of us want to close our eyes to what a war really is about and the terrifying effect it has on those who have to fight for somebody’s cause. My painting today is entitled Gassed and is by the American artist John Singer Sargent which depicts the horrors of the trench fighting in the First World War. It is a massive painting measuring 231cms high and 611 cms wide (91 inches x 240 inches) and can be seen in the Imperial War Museum in London.

John Singer Sargent was an American painter. His parents were Americans but he was actually born in Florence where the family had moved to as an aid to his mother’s health. The family travelled extensively throughout Europe. Sargent loved his country yet he spent most of his life in Europe. He became one of the most celebrated portraitists of his time but at the very height of his fame as a portrait painter he decided to devote full time to landscape painting, water colours and public art.
 ...
So today’s featured painting was very different to his normal works. It is a scene Sargent witnessed in August 1918 at Le Bac du Sud on the road between the French towns of Arras and Doullens in the Somme area of Northern France. We see a line of nine soldiers, blinded by mustard gas, being helped along a boarded path by two orderlies towards a medical station. The medical post is out of sight to the right of the scene but we can make out the guy ropes which support the tent-like structure. The line of men who struggle to make their way towards the tent are silhouetted against the golden sunset sky. In the left background we can just make out some bivouacs and to the right we see another line of wounded men being led towards the medical facility. The foreground of the painting is littered with the wounded lying at rest, many with their heads bandaged.

The Good Short Life

by Dudley Clendinen

I have wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

I love them all. I am acutely lucky in my family and friends, and in my daughter, my work and my life. But I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., more kindly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, for the great Yankee hitter and first baseman who was told he had it in 1939, accepted the verdict with such famous grace, and died less than two years later. He was almost 38.

I sometimes call it Lou, in his honor, and because the familiar feels less threatening. But it is not a kind disease. The nerves and muscles pulse and twitch, and progressively, they die. From the outside, it looks like the ripple of piano keys in the muscles under my skin. From the inside, it feels like anxious butterflies, trying to get out. It starts in the hands and feet and works its way up and in, or it begins in the muscles of the mouth and throat and chest and abdomen, and works its way down and out. The second way is called bulbar, and that’s the way it is with me. We don’t live as long, because it affects our ability to breathe early on, and it just gets worse.

At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.

No, thank you. I hate being a drag. I don’t think I’ll stick around for the back half of Lou.

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.
And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

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How to Mend a Broken Heart

by Shannon Service

One question snowballed into a museum: What about the little wind-up bunny?

It was seven hours into our flight to Croatia when I starting worrying about the juggler’s balls in the luggage hold below. The balls were a gift from my ex-girlfriend Andrea, who made them out of socks stuffed with rice. They were exactly the right size for my small hands and landed with a dense, satisfying plunk. More importantly, they reminded me of the day I taught Andrea to juggle on the lawn outside my apartment.

I’d gotten her to the point where she could cycle through a few rounds, a feat accomplished through gritted teeth and wildly flailing limbs. I went inside while she practiced, catching her profile through the window: hair spiked up, body tilted to forty-five degrees, chasing her tosses across the window before disappearing. I laughed, but when she came back for another pass, I began to cry—overwhelmed by the knowledge that I was absolutely, incontrovertibly in love with this crazy person, balls aloft, in full physical comedy, running through my yard. But nine months of elation dissolved into nine months of hell, until we broke our engagement over what we agreed to call differing opinions on fidelity. From there it was five years of putting myself back together until, finally, there I was, forty thousand feet above Greenland, about to hand the juggler’s balls over to a couple I’d never met who ran a museum I half suspected was a brilliantly conceived gimmick.

As I drifted off to sleep, the balls started expanding in my mind. They grew and grew until I had the thought—grotesque, uninvited—of the juggling balls bursting out of the cargo hold and dangling beneath the plane like a pair of testicles, rocking back and forth so ferociously that the passengers began to panic, worried the plane would soon flip over. Pandemonium ensued. Cries and shrieks. Then, just as quickly, the thought passed, and I was left, once again, in row sixty-one, aisle seat, the lone passenger awake in a sea of angled heads.

Breakups are tough on the psyche. Really tough. One study shows there’s a chance that heartbreak alone can spur heart spasms in otherwise healthy people. The researchers call it “myocardial stunning due to exaggerated sympathetic stimulation”—a heart seizure brought on by overwhelming emotion. Most breakups aren’t lethal, of course, or most of us wouldn’t have survived junior high. But they can be substantial, and they run the full emotional gamut, varying in wide and interesting ways. Some splits are big and public, while others fracture in stifling silence. Paul Simon sang of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but it turns out there are far, far more than that. In fact, there are at least four hundred, as collected and assembled in Croatia’s newly opened Museum of Broken Relationships.

Which is exactly where I was headed.

The Museum of Broken Relationships was conceived late one night at a kitchen table in Zagreb. Late because OlinkaVistica worked long hours coordinating Croatia’s biggest film festival and late because Drazen Grubisic, her now ex-boyfriend, never put words together effectively until after noon. They sat across from each other in the house that seemed already cleaved down the middle, divvying up the physical remains of their four years together. Some objects were easily sorted by value—she gets the TV, he gets the computer—but then there were the incalculables, the objects with little monetary worth but pounds of emotional weight. Objects like the Little Wind-up Bunny.

The bunny is scruffy and about five inches tall. Sometimes, when Olinka came home at night, she’d open the door and find him marching in circles in the entryway. If one of them left on a trip, the bunny went along in the suitcase, and the partner at home got photos. There’s one picture of the bunny in Iran and another of him on a podium addressing a crowd. He didn’t belong to either of them as much as he belonged to both of them. But “they” had collapsed, which is why, late at night with their possessions all around them, they suddenly hit on the answer to the question that would snowball into a museum and send them both around the world: What about the Little Wind-up Bunny?

Olinka and Drazen are artists, and after some time passed, they did what artists often do: they put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival. It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul, showing the concept to the world. Everywhere they went, from Bloomington to Belgrade, people packed the halls and delivered their own relics of extinguished love: “The Silver Watch” with the pin pulled out at the moment he first said, “I love you.” The wood-handled “Ex Axe” that a woman used to chop her cheating lover’s furniture into tiny bits. Trinkets that had meaning to only two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience that seemed to recognize the same heartache all too well.

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Gil Scott-Heron

My Golf Game

"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."

~ Albert Camus

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The Man Who Invented Free Love

by Christopher Turner

When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud's pupils, arrived in New York in August 1939, only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex – as Alfred Kinsey's renowned investigations, which he had begun the year before, were to show. However, it was only after the second world war that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large. Reich could be said to have invented this "sexual revolution"; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown. That was the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks. "A sexual revolution is in progress," he declared, "and no power on earth will stop it."

Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the panacea for all ills, he thought, including the fascism that forced him from Europe. In his 1927 study The Function of the Orgasm, he concluded that "there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction" (the italics are his). Seeking to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, he argued that repression – which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition – could be shed, leading to what his critics dismissed as a "genital utopia" (they mocked him as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"). His sexual dogmatism got him kicked out of both the psychoanalytic movement and the Communist party. Nevertheless, Reich was a figurehead of the sex-reform movement in Vienna and Berlin – before the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine European society, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud. Reich fled to Denmark, Sweden and then Norway, as fascism pursued him across the continent.

Soon after he arrived in the United States – by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity – Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users' "orgastic potency" and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened "orgone energy"; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments. As he saw it, the box's organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, acting as a "greenhouse" and, supposedly, causing a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.

The charismatic Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics. After two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich's claims. However, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 50s, and Reich grew increasingly notorious as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. The accumulator was used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Macdonald and William S Burroughs. In the 1970s Burroughs wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled "All the Accumulators I Have Owned". In it, he boasted: "Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas." At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in Sleeper (1973), giving it the immortal nickname the "Orgasmatron".

To bohemians, the orgone box was celebrated as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora's box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague – the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex. Reich's eccentric device can be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of his era, which witnessed an unprecedented politicisation of sex. When I first came across a reference to the accumulator, I was puzzled and fascinated: why on earth would a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that its symbol of liberation was a claustrophobic metal-lined box?

Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in America and he was interned at the outbreak of war under suspicion of being a communist (his FBI file is 789 pages long). After the Soviet invasion of Finland, however, he became a committed anti-Stalinist. He rejected politics and now referred to the "self-regulating" sexual utopia of his imagination as "work-democracy", which many of his fans among America's avant-garde identified with eroticised anarchy.
In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to understand the Holocaust, and intellectuals disillusioned with communism fled the security of their earlier political positions, Reich's ideas landed on fertile ground. After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich's theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism's failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich, capturing the mood of this convulsive moment, presented guilty ex-Stalinists and former Trotskyites with an alternative programme of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In his biography of Saul Bellow, who bought an orgone box in the early 50s and sat in it for daily irradiations, James Atlas wrote that "Reich's Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky's Art and Revolution had been a decade before."

In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals to view their promiscuity as political activism and justify their retreat from traditional politics. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the "frozen", grey, corporate consensus. People sat in the orgone box, whose empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which the left then found itself, hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. As Michael Wreszin put it in his 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald, who promoted Reich's ideas in his anarchist-pacifist magazine Politics and hosted nude cocktail parties and orgies at his Cape Cod retreat: "In the gloom of the cold war years intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called 'the rebellious imperatives of the self'."

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Brothers Johnson

Dying Languages

by Tim Johnson

AYAPAN, Mexico -- Only two people on Earth are known to speak the Ayapanec language, Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velasquez, old men of few words who are somewhat indifferent to each other's company.

When Segovia and Velasquez pass away, their language also will go to the grave. It will mark the demise of a unique way of describing the lush landscape of southern Mexico and thinking about the world.

Ayapanec isn't alone in its vulnerability. Some linguists say that languages are disappearing at the rate of two a month. Half of the world's remaining 7,000 or so languages may be gone by the end of this century, pushed into disuse by English, Spanish and other dominating languages.

The die-off has parallels to the extinction of animals. The death of a language, linguists say, robs humanity of ideas, belief systems and knowledge of the natural world. Languages are repositories of human experience that have evolved over centuries, even millennia.

"Languages are definitely more endangered than species and are going extinct at a faster rate," said K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of the book "When Languages Die." "There are many hundreds of languages that have fewer than 50 speakers."

Hot spots for endangered languages may not be where you think. They include places such as Oklahoma, which holds the highest density of indigenous languages in the United States, partly because faraway tribes were forcibly relocated there in the 1800s; northern Australia, home to many small and scattered Aboriginal groups; and Central Siberia, which has 25 Turkic, Mongolic and other languages that face extinction.

In Mexico's Tabasco state, which faces the Gulf of Mexico, several languages and their dialects are in agony. Less than 2 miles northwest of the town of Ayapan is Cupilco, home to a handful of elderly residents who still speak a dialect of Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztecs. Linguists call the dialect "moribund" because no children speak it.

Silence Looms

When Ayapanec and Cupilco Nahuatl die, bridges will not fall down. Ecosystems will not be disrupted. Few may notice. Language is an invisible triumph of humanity and its disappearance brings only silence.

"It's not as flashy as a pyramid but it represents enormous human achievement in terms of the thought and effort that went into it," said Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist at Indiana University who's about to publish a dictionary and grammar of Ayapanec.

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Ann Peebles

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The Next, Worse Financial Crisis

by Brett Arends

The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.

Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.

1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.

2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.

3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.

4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with $500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a $500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent $474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

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Me, Inc.

by Pamela S. Karlan

When the Supreme Court heard Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, few would have pegged the case as a turning point in constitutional law. The matter at hand seemed highly technical: could California increase the property tax owed by a railroad if the railroad built fences on its property? As it turned out, the Court ruled unanimously in the railroad’s favor. And in so doing, the Court casually affirmed the railroad’s argument that corporations are “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So certain were the justices of the Fourteenth Amendment’s applicability that their opinion did not engage the issue, but the Court reporter recorded the justices’ perspective on the topic:

Before argument Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: ‘The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.’

That statement marks the origin of the view that corporations are persons as a matter of constitutional law. This played a central role in the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that restricted corporate spending on electioneering communications in the run-up to a federal election. The Court declared that Congress could not discriminate between electioneering communications according to the identity of the speaker: since individual human beings clearly have a First Amendment right to speak about candidates during the election process, so too must corporations.

Much criticism of the Citizens United decision has focused on whether corporations should have rights under the Constitution. This critique is mistaken. Corporations come in many forms, ranging from large, publicly traded profit-driven companies (think IBM) to smaller, ideologically motivated nonprofits (the American Civil Liberties Union or the Audubon Society) with many others in between (your local newspaper). The diverse nature of corporations may mean that some corporations have stronger claims than others with respect to particular rights, but on the whole it is clear that our democracy could not function if corporations received no constitutional protection. One of the most famous First Amendment decisions of the Warren Court, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), protected a for-profit newspaper from a libel suit for publishing a paid advertisement criticizing a public official. Many foundational freedom-of-association cases likewise involve corporations, such as the NAACP. And even with respect to purely economic rights, it is hard to argue persuasively that the government should have no obligation to provide due process to corporations before imposing fines or condemning their property.

So corporations are entitled to constitutional protection. But are they entitled to the same protection as living, breathing human beings? In this year’s Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, the Supreme Court suggested they are not so entitled. The Court refused to extend to AT&T a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that exempts the disclosure of material that might cause “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” A corporation, Chief Justice Roberts said, does not have the “type of privacy evocative of human concerns.” Similarly, corporations cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.

But even if the Court decided that corporations are in every way like persons, there might be limits on the corporate role in politics. When faced with the issue of popular confidence in the democratic process, courts have agreed that the speech rights of flesh-and-blood persons may be bounded. The Hatch Act, for example, forbids government employees from engaging in partisan political activity, including some activities in their off-time. In fact, when it comes to a willingness to restrict constitutional rights in the name of confidence in the democratic process, the Court’s decisions show a troubling and puzzling asymmetry in favor of corporations. A few years ago, the Court upheld Indiana’s draconian voter-identification statute, which threatened to deny the fundamental constitutional right to vote to thousands of individuals who lack government-issued photo ID. The Court asserted, “Public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.” The Court nowhere explains why a similar rationale should not apply to political spending. Several legislatures think it does and have concluded that citizens are less likely to participate in a process they think is rigged in favor of large corporate interests.

The real question, then, is not whether corporations deserve some constitutional protections: they do. The issue is whether there is something about the nature of corporations that makes it appropriate to limit their involvement in the political process. The Court has foreclosed the most common affirmative answer to that question: corporations have accumulated enormous wealth, which enables them to distort a political process that rests on a commitment to equality, embodied most prominently in the principle of one person, one vote. The Citizens United decision rejected this argument by overruling a prior holding in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990).

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The Smithereens

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Isley Brothers

I Can Sea Clearly Now

See the world below you with remarkable clarity in this 2 person canoe. This hard shell transparent canoe provides 100% visability. It weighs only 40 lbs., and is lighter than most aluminum or wood canoes.

This canoe is beautiful and has a highly functional design. And it's tough. It's made out of the same polycarbonate material used in the production of bulletproof glass. The seats provide excellent back support and comfort. This canoe comes with a retractable skeg system that improves tracking which among other things, makes it easier to paddle long distances.

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