Unfree Speech

Author: Samantha Sellinger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400824710
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
At a time when campaign finance reform is widely viewed as synonymous with cleaning up Washington and promoting political equality, Bradley Smith, a nationally recognized expert on campaign finance reform, argues that all restriction on campaign giving should be eliminated. In Unfree Speech, he presents a bold, convincing argument for the repeal of laws that regulate political spending and contributions, contending that they violate the right to free speech and ultimately diminish citizens' power. Smith demonstrates that these laws, which often force ordinary people making modest contributions of cash or labor to register with the Federal Election Commission or various state agencies, fail to accomplish their stated objectives. In fact, they have worked to entrench incumbents in office, deaden campaign discourse, burden grassroots political activity with needless regulation, and distance Americans from an increasingly professional, detached political class. Rather than attempting to plug "loopholes" in campaign finance law or instituting taxpayer-financed campaigns, Smith proposes a return to core First Amendment values of free speech and an unfettered right to engage in political activity. Smith finds that campaign contributions have little corrupting effect on the legislature and shows that an unrestrained system of contributions and spending actually enhances equality. More money, not less, is needed in the political system, Smith concludes. Unfree Speech draws upon constitutional law and historical research to explain why campaign finance regulation is doomed and to illustrate the potentially drastic costs of efforts to make it succeed. Whatever one thinks about the impact of money on electoral politics, no one should take a final stand without reading Smith's controversial and important arguments.

Unfree Speech

Author: Joshua Wong
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143135716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
An urgent manifesto for global democracy from Joshua Wong, the 23-year-old phenomenon leading Hong Kong's protests - and Nobel Peace Prize nominee - with an introduction by Ai Weiwei With global democracy under threat, we must act together to defend out rights: now. When he was 14, Joshua Wong made history. While the adults stayed silent, Joshua staged the first-ever student protest in Hong Kong to oppose National Education -- and won. Since then, Joshua has led the Umbrella Movement, founded a political party, and rallied the international community around the anti-extradition bill protests, which have seen 2 million people -- more than a quarter of the population -- take to Hong Kong's streets. His actions have sparked worldwide attention, earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and landed him in jail twice. Composed in three parts, Unfree Speech chronicles Joshua's path to activism, collects the letters he wrote as a political prisoner under the Chinese state, and closes with a powerful and urgent call for all of us globally to defend our democratic values. When we stay silent, no one is safe. When we free our speech, our voice becomes one.

Money and Free Speech

Author: Melvin I. Urofsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Money greases the wheels of American politics from the local level to the White House. In the 2004 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush alone raised nearly $400 million in private and public funds—nearly twenty times the combined total raised by John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960—to defeat challenger John F. Kerry, further fueling anxiety over the power of money to dictate political results. Melvin Urofsky, one of our nation's most respected legal historians, takes a fresh look at efforts to rein in campaign spending and counter efforts in the courts to preserve the status quo. He offers a thoughtful and balanced overview of campaign finance reform and the legal responses to it, from the Progressive era through the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in McConnell v. FEC (2003) and its impact on the 2004 election. Urofsky focuses especially on the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act and 2002 McCain-Feingold or Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), and on challenges to both in the Supreme Court. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Court upheld contribution limits but struck down expenditure caps on First Amendment grounds. In McConnell it upheld the key provisions of McCain-Feingold. In both cases, however, opponents argued that congressional control of campaign financing was an unconstitutional infringement of the free speech rights of campaign contributors. Urofsky deftly steers the reader through this contentious and complex history, revealing how both Congress and the courts have navigated uneasily between the Scylla of potential corruption and the Charybdis of suppressing political speech. Ironically, despite the Court's decision upholding McCain-Feingold, the 2004 presidential election was the most expensive in history—because, as Urofsky notes, money is the mother's milk of politics and both candidates and donors will always find ways to keep it flowing. His book provides an excellent and succinct guide to the controversies and historical debates emerging from that fact.

It's Not Free Speech

Author: Michael Bérubé
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421443880
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
How far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning? The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors? It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech. In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Faculty across the nation can develop protocols that account for both the new realities—from the rise of social media to the decline of tenure—and the old realities of long-standing inequities and abuses that the classic liberal conception of academic freedom did nothing to address. This book will resonate for anyone who has followed debates over #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and "cancel culture"; more specifically, it should have a major impact on many facets of academic life, from the classroom to faculty senates to the office of the general counsel.

The Hong Kong Protests and Political Theology

Author: Kwok Pui-lan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538148722
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
The Hong Kong protests that began in the second half of 2019 captured the world’s attention as demonstrations against an extradition bill grew into a larger civil liberties movement. While protests began as peaceful demonstrations, the disproportionate police force with which the government responded escalated the situation to an international crisis. Kwok Pui-lan and Francis Ching-wah Yip bring together an international cohort to discuss the relation between Christianity and Communism and the neoliberal economy, as well as civil disobedience, religion and social movements, and the roles of the churches in social conflict. This interdisciplinary volume showcases theological reflections by many scholars and activists in Hong Kong.

Capitalism v. Democracy

Author: Timothy K. Kuhner
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804791589
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
As of the latest national elections, it costs approximately $1 billion to become president, $10 million to become a Senator, and $1 million to become a Member of the House. High-priced campaigns, an elite class of donors and spenders, superPACs, and increasing corporate political power have become the new normal in American politics. In Capitalism v. Democracy, Timothy Kuhner explains how these conditions have corrupted American democracy, turning it into a system of rule that favors the wealthy and marginalizes ordinary citizens. Kuhner maintains that these conditions have corrupted capitalism as well, routing economic competition through political channels and allowing politically powerful companies to evade market forces. The Supreme Court has brought about both forms of corruption by striking down campaign finance reforms that limited the role of money in politics. Exposing the extreme economic worldview that pollutes constitutional interpretation, Kuhner shows how the Court became the architect of American plutocracy. Capitalism v. Democracy offers the key to understanding why corporations are now citizens, money is political speech, limits on corporate spending are a form of censorship, democracy is a free market, and political equality and democratic integrity are unconstitutional constraints on money in politics. Supreme Court opinions have dictated these conditions in the name of the Constitution, as though the Constitution itself required the privatization of democracy. Kuhner explores the reasons behind these opinions, reveals that they form a blueprint for free market democracy, and demonstrates that this design corrupts both politics and markets. He argues that nothing short of a constitutional amendment can set the necessary boundaries between capitalism and democracy.

Election Law and Democratic Theory

Author: David Schultz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317145291
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
While numerous books and articles examine various aspects either of democratic theory or of specific topics in election law, there is no comprehensive book that provides a detailed and scholarly discussion of the political and democratic theory underpinnings of election law. Election Law and Democratic Theory fills this important gap, as author David Schultz offers a scholarly analysis of the political principles and democratic values underlying election law and the regulation of political campaigns and participants in the United States. The book provides the first full-length examination of the political theories that form the basis for many of the current debates in election law that structure both Supreme Court and scholarly considerations of topics ranging from campaign finance reform, voting rights, reapportionment, and ballot access to the rights of political parties, the media, and other players in the system. It challenges much of the current debate in election law and argues for more discussion and development of a democratic political theory to support and guide election law jurisprudence.

Rethinking American Electoral Democracy

Author: Matthew J. Streb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135898685
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Is the cure for the ills of democracy more democracy? Is it possible to have too much democracy in a well-functioning government? What should a model electoral democracy look like? In this critical examination of the state of American electoral process, Matthew Streb analyzes the major debates that embroil scholars and reformers on subjects ranging from the number of elections we hold and the use of nonpartisan elections, to the presidential nominating process and campaign finance laws. Ultimately, Streb makes an argument for a less burdensome democracy, a democracy in which citizens can participate more easily. This book is designed to get students of elections and American political institutions to think critically about what it means to be democratic and how democratic the United States really is. Part of the Controversies in Electoral Democracy and Representation series, edited by Matthew J. Streb. Matthew J. Streb is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. He is the author The New Electoral Politics of Race, and the editor or co-editor of five other books including Running for Judge.

The Art of Hunger

Author: Alys Moody
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0198828896
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
When we think of writers today, we often think of them as thin and poor-as starving artists. This book traces the history of this idea, and asks why hunger has been such a compelling metaphor for thinking about writing in modern times.

Changing the Subject in English Class

Author: Marshall W. Alcorn
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809324279
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Alcorn (English and humanities, George Washington U.) argues that the gradual shift in the teaching of composition from a curriculum that looked at literature as an attempt to represent reality to one that stresses the subjectivity of the student in decoding texts has incorporated an insufficiently complex understanding of subjectivity. The current cultural studies programs stress political ideas over expressive writing, but Alcorn argues that political ideas will never be right unless there is attention to self-expression. Basing his work in the conceptual world of psychoanalytic theory, he outlines a cultural-studies practice that develops anti-ideological identity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR