if you could pass one or two laws,what would they be?

[qeuqheeg222]

lets hear em

[thombergeron]

1. Two years compulsory national service for all U.S. citizens, beginning at 18. Not necessarily military, but do something you lazy sods.

2. A Constitutional amendment strictly defining juristic personhood.

Neither of these will ever happen, of course. But I think both would go along way in bringing back a culture of altruism in this country.

[guyone]

2. A Constitutional amendment strictly defining juristic personhood.

Why would you need an amendment to define corporations? Unless you're talking about robots.

[trish]

Still on vacation, but I found an opportunity to drop a few posts.

1. Neither the president nor the vice president, nor any congressman or senator may take a vacation while the United States of America is at war, whether that be an declared war or an undeclared war, a police action or a metaphor (such as the “wars” on terror, drugs, childhood obesity and whatever).

2. Any person revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent or any high official ordering the disclosure of a covert CIA agent shall be sentenced to death without possibility of pardon.

[Quinn]

Still on vacation, but I found an opportunity to drop a few posts.

Hope you are having a good vacation, Trish.

-Quinn

[Cuchulain]

1) 70% income tax on ALL personal income over $5 million.

2) Remove income cap on Social Security tax.

[blckhaze]

1) an i.q. test for all politicians.

[arnie666]

1 birching should be brought back as a punishment in the UK to be used as an alternative or compliment to prison

2 Britain should have a bill of rights but it should be our own not one prescribed by foreigners ie those in Europe.

[TJT]

Bring back the 18 year old drinking age. If you're old enough to get your ass shot off for your country you're old enough to drink.

Legalize drugs and prostitution. You can't legislate morality.

That's it for now.

[bucatini70]

Abolish the tax code, implement a constitution admendment to ban taxing income of any type derieved from any source or manner and implement a federal sales tax

No lawyer may become president or person whose net worth is more than 5 million dollars

[LG]

lets hear em
-Legal recognition of all trans people as being of their declared gender
-Legal protection against discrimination based on sexual preference, gender and disability
-Legal acceptance of same sex marriage
-Legalisation of cannabis for personal use (even though I don't use it)
-Banning all alcohol and tobacco advertising in print and media
-Banning junk food and toy advertisements before the watershed (8pm or 9pm) on TV and certainly during cartoon shows
-Reduced taxation for lower income groups. Increased taxation for higher income groups.
And some ideas with the US in mind. Though I'm not going to tell you how to run your country, I think these might be worth a look:
-Tougher handgun legislation
-Tighter controls on greenhouse gas emissions
-Ban on the sale of arms to oppressive regimes
-Increase in fuel tax to raise funds for use on environmental and -community projects
-Legalisation of euthanasia in special cases (if you can be humane to your pets, why not your relatives as well?)
-Legalisation of licensed prostitutes and escorts. Such prostitutes should be afforded state protection and basic medical care at least and should have to pay taxes, just like in some EU states

[chefmike]

Fully-funded stem cell research.

Legalize cannabis and prostitution.

Reduce the prison population, shrink the prison industry, and save tax dollars by funding rehab for low-level drug offenders instead of building more prisons.

End religious tax-exemption(tax credits would be allowed for verified charity work).

[tsmandy]

Personally I would probably be most affected if drugs and prostitution were de-criminalized; as would the vast majority of the 2 million plus people locked up.

Though its hard to say really....

How about universal healthcare, I sure wish I could obtain decent care.

Really the list is so long its hard to even begin.

[tsafficianado]

studies cited at least twice in the WSJ and frequently in newsletters i receive from my auto insurer clearly demonstrate that drivers who operate a cell phone have precisely the same accident rate as intoxicated drivers, so obviously.....
first offense, driving while using a cell phone, 12 month license suspension
subsequent offenses, 24 month suspension
and while we're at it, the right to obtain a driver's license is NOT guaranteed in the Constitution, and the fact is that about 40% of the people who have licenses can't drive for shit. the testing procedure at the DMVs should be upgraded.

obtaining a US social security card should require evidence that the aspirant has successfully obtained at least a minimal competency in the English language. there are immigrants whose native language is Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Laotian, Portugese, French, Russian or one of a few dozen other languages, but only those who speak Spanish have been befriended by government and corporate policy.

companies that employ undocumented workers should have their business license revoked for 12 months.

[ps911fan]

Law to insure that the Supreme Court has a limited term - only two can be appointed, the rest have to run (and are given random terms between 1-8 years)

Law to implement medicare as our new single payer health care plan once and for all...all citizens must be enrolled, 100 billion of Defense Budget shifted to a permanent health care fund

[Oli]

the right to obtain a driver's license is NOT guaranteed in the Constitution

This is a good start, but revocation should be permanent for repeat offenders ( on the day Lindsay Lohan gets hersecond dui of the year!).

1) Complete and timely disclosure of all donors, with dollar amounts, given to political candidates and parties.

2) Scrap mandatory minimum jail terms for nonviolent offenses. Give sentencing discretion back to judges with guidelines.

[qeuqheeg222]

a good start so far...i would pass a law that mandates that the parent corporation of all products,media outlets and movies or food and tech must be stated on any packaging or in the context of the media's presentation-something like"brought to you by ABC a division of Disney"..when are people gonna wake up and smell the disney or the FOX..or the Phillip Morris..or the Debeers-moet-hennesy-louis vutton..or the exxonmobil...world......................america is cute place for a few guys to make a buck.......

[TJT]

No beans in Chili.

[guyone]

Outlaw communists.

[chefmike]

Your mom's a communist.

[thombergeron]

Your mom's a communist.

Yikes, Guy! What are you going to do if your mom is outlawed? You would have to find someone else's basement to live in.

Apropos to your earlier question about my proposed Constitutional Amendment, courts have repeatedly found that corporations, as legal groupings of persons, are entitled to the same rights and protections as individual persons under the U.S. Constitution.

But, unlike individual citizens in a democratic polity, corporations are strictly self-interested actors. The purpose of a corporation is the aggregation and protection of capital.

In light of Buckley v. Valeo, corporations have large reserves of constitutionally protected speech in the form of campaign contributions. So a corporation has an inherently greater ability to promote its own political agenda than do individual citizens. I mean this to apply to both for-profit and non-profit corporations.

I just really don’t think this is what the Founders intended. If they had foreseen the influence of capital over the American political process, I think they taken steps to more clearly define the primacy of the individual citizen’s voice.

This is a case where good precedents combine to create a bad legal situation. Considered in a vacuum, I rather agree with the extension of juristic personhood to corporations. And while I don’t necessarily agree with the outcome, I can understand the reasoning behind Buckley v. Valeo. But taken together, we have a situation where the average American citizen has no influence at all over the contemporary political process.

[Cuchulain]

Hi Thom. Here's something I found regarding 'corporate personhood'. Have you ever seen or heard about this info?

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1226-04.htm

A Review of Thom Hartmann's
Unequal Protection: the Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

by Richard W. Behan

Orthodoxy has it the Supreme Court decided in 1886, in a case called Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were indeed legal persons. I express that view myself, in a recent book. So do many others. So do many law schools. We are all wrong.

Mr. Hartmann undertook instead a conscientious search. He finally found the contemporary casebook, published in 1886, blew the dust away, and read Santa Clara County in the original, so to speak. Nowhere in the formal, written decision of the Court did he find corporate personhood mentioned. Not a word. The Supreme Court did NOT establish corporate personhood in Santa Clara County.

In the casebook “headnote,” however, Mr. Hartmann read this statement: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment…which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Here, anyway, corporate personhood was “provided”— in the headnote, instead of the formal written decision of the Supreme Court. But that’s not good enough.

What is a “headnote?” It is the summary description of a court decision, written into the casebook by the court reporter. It is similar to an editor’s “abstract” in a scientific journal. Because they are not products of the court itself, however, headnotes carry no legal weight; they can establish no precedent in law. Corporate personhood, Mr. Hartmann discovered, is simply and unequivocally illegitimate.

The court reporter for Santa Clara County was Mr. John Chandler Bancroft Davis, a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Mr. Hartman has in his personal library 12 books by Davis, mostly original editions. They display Davis’s close alliance with the railroad industry, and they support persuasively Mr. Hartmann’s argument that Davis injected the personhood statement deliberately, to achieve by deceit what corporations had so far failed to achieve in litigation.

If Davis knew his headnote was legally sterile, though, we can only speculate about his tactics. Perhaps he thought judges in the future would read his headnote as if it could serve as legal precedent, and would thereafter invoke corporate personhood in rendering court decisions. That would be grossly irregular, and it would place corporate personhood in stupendous legal jeopardy if it ever came to light. But something of that sort must have happened, because corporate personhood over time spread throughout the world of commerce—and politics.

[ezed]

TWO FUCKING LAWS?

okay.

1. Lawyers can't hold elected political office in America.

2. People who have held politcal office can't take jobs in law firms.

Pass these laws and everything else will fall in place.

But of course I may be Dorthy in OZ if I think this could ever happen.

[qeuqheeg222]

i'm gonna get the sayin wrong possibly but doesnt it say someswheres in the good book about not being a "lender or borrower" yet that is all we have for an economic system these days...

[thombergeron]

It's from Hamlet:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

But for many of us secular humanists, Shakespeare's moral guidance is far more useful and relevant that "God's." Note the country's current credit crisis and the 311 point drop in the Dow yesterday.

Cuchulain, I am familiar with Thom Hartmann. He's quite well read, though I find him a tad shrill. I haven't read Unequal Protection, and I hadn't heard this argument regarding Santa Clara County. But I'm dubious. Corporate personhood has been established through a century of precedent, not just Santa Clara County.

[guyone]

The only law you're interested in is getting more welfare.

[tsmandy]

The only law you're interested in is getting more welfare.

More welfare is hardly necessary, just a redistribution. Hell I would even be fine in a reduction in welfare, as long as we are talking corporate welfare (which drastically exceeds social welfare). But of course we are suppose to ignore the fiscal realities and instead turn our anger at the poor and marginalized who are unable to sway public opinion with billion dollar PR campaigns.

Miserly bastards.

[Cuchulain]

The only law you're interested in is getting more welfare.

More welfare is hardly necessary, just a redistribution. Hell I would even be fine in a reduction in welfare, as long as we are talking corporate welfare (which drastically exceeds social welfare). But of course we are suppose to ignore the fiscal realities and instead turn our anger at the poor and marginalized who are unable to sway public opinion with billion dollar PR campaigns.

Miserly bastards.

Well said! :claps

[chefmike]

The only law you're interested in is getting more welfare.

Your mom's on welfare.

[guyone]

Your mother wears combat boots.

[tsmandy]

I bought combat boots and booze with your moms food stamps.

[chefmike]

I bought combat boots and booze with your moms food stamps.

LMAO!