Demonstrators assembled outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison on February 16 to urge action against the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which recently struck down restrictions on the corporate financing of political advertisements. Wisconsin Public Radio reported that the rally participants made speeches and rang "liberty bells," hoping to draw attention to their issue and gather support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the court's decision.

The Supreme Court's ruling, announced on January 21, marks a major change in the rules of electoral politics in America. It makes it possible for private corporations — whether for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, or unions — to use their money to air political advertisements in favor of or against specific candidates in the days before an election. This kind of direct corporate involvement in politics had previously been illegal, banned by legislation going back to the Tillman Act of 1907 and including most recently the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Their bill passed 59-41 in the Senate, but part of the act has now been voided by the 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision.

Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke for the court's majority by arguing that any law restricting corporations from airing political advertisements was an infringement on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Kennedy wrote:

By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. ... We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers. Both history and logic lead us to this conclusion.

Meanwhile, dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens disagreed with the premise that a corporation constituted a "disadvantaged person." Speaking for the court's minority, he wrote:

The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it. ... It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

Madison's demonstrators agreed with those words. Some carried signs with slogans like "Abolish Corporate Personhood" and "Overrule the Court!" I applaud their position. Corporations are not humans. They exist only on paper as tools created by people to achieve some goal. The individual rights of the people involved in corporations — shareholders, directors and employees — were never in question. They have always held the right to speak as individual citizens. The Supreme Court's ruling, as I see it, now gives corporate executives twice the rights that other people hold: their own unalienable right to speak as individuals, plus the right to speak through the corporations they control using those corporations' money and power. Corporations hold immense concentrations of wealth, and because they are often structured simply to generate more, their interests are self-serving. Wealthy multinational corporations can easily outspend real individuals in a race to promote their profit-driven political agendas. Far from enhancing free speech, the court's ruling will help powerful corporations drown out the voices of actual people with real human needs.

Read the rest of this entry »

The earliest published version of Julius Caesar appeared in Shakespeare's posthumous first folio, printed in 1623. Its title page is shown here.

Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar commemorates one of the great turning points in the history of Western Civilization: the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire. Before the time of Caesar, Roman sovereignty had resided with the people and the Senate. After Caesar, power fell into the hands of a hereditary emperor. Shakespeare's play only presents a snapshot of one moment in this long period of transition. It is more poetry than history — but this is its virtue. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare asserts the power of words to mold minds and shape events. He makes language the real force behind history, casts oratory as its general, and crowns clever beguiling rhetoric as the true master of mankind.

Rome's true history is at times indistinguishable from its legends. According to the Roman historian Livy, the Roman Republic began in 509 BCE when the people of Rome revolted against King Tarquin the Proud and conferred authority upon an elected senate. Livy's stories and dates may only be myth, but it is clear that the SPQR — Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and the People of Rome — governed Rome for several centuries with no king. Then, in 49 BCE, the Roman general Julius Caesar led his troops into civil war against the Senate. As Caesar gained power, he prevailed upon the Senate to declare him dictator in perpetuity in 45 BCE. Very quickly, however, a band of senators began to plot Caesar's assassination, fearful that he might otherwise establish a new monarchy and dissolve their republic. On March 15, 44 BCE, as many as sixty conspirators led by Senators Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus attacked Caesar in the Theatre of Pompey, stabbing him 23 times. Although Caesar's dictatorship had ended, his murder provoked a new civil war that ultimately led to the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of a new imperial monarchy under Octavius, who became Emperor Caesar Augustus in 27 BCE. Monarchy remained the dominant form of government in Europe until the twentieth century.

The play Julius Caesar, written around 1599 CE, is a dramatization of the Roman Senate's conspiracy against Julius Caesar and the beginnings of the civil war unleashed by his death, culminating in the defeat of the assassins Cassius and Brutus.¹ Shakespeare based his play closely on the work of the Roman historian Plutarch, but he mixed tradition with poetic invention and contemporary English concerns. For Shakespeare, living in Elizabethan England, there was no such thing as a government without kings or queens. This certainly shaped the way Shakespeare viewed Rome's historic struggle between monarchy and republicanism. Julius Caesar was structured as a tragedy — the conspirators who hoped to maintain popular sovereignty by killing Caesar ultimately lost everything by their deed. The play was in part a warning of the chaos and conflict that could arise from the absence of strong leadership.

The most critical moments of Shakespeare's play take place in Act III, Scene 2 (read the text), shortly after Caesar's death. Rumors of the assassination had spread through Rome, and the scene opened upon a mass of citizens who had gathered in the forum awaiting more news. This crowd was addressed in turn by Marcus Brutus, one of the leading senators involved in the assassination, and Mark Antony, a fellow general and supporter of Caesar. As these men delivered their oratory, the people of Rome would decide on their reaction to Caesar's death and choose whether to support Brutus, the Senate and the Republic, or Antony, Caesar and tyranny.

Shakespeare depicted the "throng of citizens" in Julius Caesar as helpless to think for themselves in the face of the powerful language wielded by Brutus and Antony. The masses were convinced first by one speaker and then the other. In the end, the people made Antony and Caesar their heroes and Brutus their villain. Tyranny prevailed, and the scene appropriately closed with news of the arrival of Octavius ― the man who would become Emperor. In order to see why the citizens in Shakespeare's play ultimately chose to revolt against their own sovereignty, it is essential to examine the speeches of this scene and uncover the inner workings of their rhetorical magic.

Read the rest of this entry »

"A Music Party"

This 1864 painting by Arthur Hughes illustrates an idealized family enjoying music together in an age before recording.

In 2008, I posted an article at Acceity entitled Music Everywhere. In it, I asked whether the ubiquitous nature of recorded music in the digital age enhanced or cheapened the role of of music in our lives. Those who read the post replied that today's abundant music is a good thing. Although music may no longer be as highly valued as it was in the past, there are now unparalleled opportunities for everyone to enjoy it.

I've been prompted to consider the value of music again after reading the results of a study released two weeks ago by Wharton marketing professor Raghuram Iyengar. The study, which aimed to determine the optimal market price for digital music downloads, is summarized at the Knowledge@Wharton web site, which also provides a link to the complete paper. Iyengar's main finding: music today is too expensive.

Online music retailers like Apple iTunes and Amazon.com currently charge customers about 99¢ per song for most downloads. Iyengar's study showed that this price may actually be inhibiting demand. He based his research on conjoint analysis, which involves offering consumers a variety of theoretical purchasing options and prompting them to choose which, if any, they find attractive. Judging by consumer's choices, Iyengar predicts that if record companies would cut the retail price of their music to about 60¢ per song, the accompanying rise in demand and sales would actually lead to an increase in their profits.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever assumed that what you do on the Internet is private unless someone is looking over your shoulder, think again. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently published a series of articles about how easily people can be identified online even within the limits set by federal laws and typical web site privacy policies. Although these policies usually promise that any "personally-identifiable information" you share will be kept strictly confidential, they also make exceptions for the supposedly anonymous demographic information you reveal. This includes statistics like your birth date, gender, zip code, and the technical specifications of your computer and web browser. It would be impossible to identify you from just one of these anonymous bits of information. However, the EFF points out that these demographic facts, used in combination, are almost always enough to pinpoint individuals.

For example, in a September blog post, the EFF cited a study at Carnegie Mellon University to show that 87% of Americans have a unique combination of birth date, zip code, and gender. If you live in the United States, that means there is an 87% chance that these three supposedly "anonymous" facts, taken together, are enough to identify you. The less populous your zip code, the more likely that someone can link that data directly to your name. For a more detailed explanation of the mathematics of identifying unique individuals with this kind of demographic information, see the EFF's recent Primer on Information Theory and Privacy.

The technical information that your computer sends to each website you visit reduces your anonymity even further. Websites collect data on the configuration of your computer in order to optimize their own compatibility with your system. However, the high number of unique computer configurations means that few people are likely to be using exactly the same combination of operating system, screen resolution, web browser version, browser plug-ins, and fonts as you are. The EFF has launched a website called Panopticlick that can tell you just how unique your own setup is.

Like a fingerprint, a unique computer configuration can easily be tracked as it hops from web page to web page, even if you have cookies disabled and you have a dynamic IP address. If you share information as limited as your birth date, gender, and zip code at a website where someone connects it with your particular computer setup, that person could potentially track your movement online, gaining clues about your interests, your hobbies, your beliefs, your political opinions, and your friends, while linking this data directly to your name and address. Companies like Acxiom specialize in just this kind of data analysis in order to help advertisers develop targeted marketing campaigns, and to aid credit card and insurance companies in deciding whether or not to provide you their services and at what price.

You may think you have nothing to hide. Privacy isn't just about keeping dirty secrets, however. You can surely think of things in your life that you would be embarrassed to tell certain people. Is that wrong? How many people would tell their parents everything they tell their best friends, or tell their best friends everything they tell their parents, or tell either of these things to their children or their coworkers? The truth doesn't have to be "bad" to be uncomfortable. Think of the secrets you keep with good intentions, to surprise someone or protect someone. Is that wrong? Would you tell a random stranger where you live? Would you give away your email password or your bank account number?

We all have secrets. You have a right to privacy — a right to choose what the world should or should not know about you. Information is power, and information about you is the power to persuade you, to embarrass you, to manipulate you, to rob you, and even to predict you. Laws about privacy are defined by our expectations of privacy. What happens if you don't care what kind of information Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter collect from you? The U.S. Constitution only guarantees against "unreasonable searches and seizures." If you think it's reasonable to be spied on while you're on the web, then how much privacy does the law grant you?