Tag Archives: free speech

Free Speech, Belgian Style

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Didier Bellens, CEO of Belgacom (Belgium’s largest telecommunications company) has been fired.  He complained too much about government regulation and taxes.

As The Wall Street Journal described it,

Over the years, Mr Bellens has launched a number of broadsides against the government.  Friday’s dismissal comes after the latest attack, in which he asked a business club breakfast in the chic Brussels suburb of Uccle, “Who’s the worst shareholder?”  His answer: “The Belgian state.”

Yep.  The Belgian government owns 53.5% of Belgacom.  And the government disapproved of Bellens’ political—even business—speech.  Last Friday, Prime Minister Elio di Rupo fired Bellens, announcing

The repeated, accumulated outbursts have irreversibly damaged the confidence of the Belgian state in Mr Bellens[.]

There can’t even be an argument that Bellens hadn’t been performing up to snuff from a business perspective.  Stefaan Genoe, a telecommunications analyst at brokerage Petercam, had this about Bellens’ results:

Overall, Belgacom has evolved very well strategically during his tenure.  It has a very healthy balance sheet.

Dividends are still attractive, at 8 or 9%[.]

And the Progressives in our own government want to Europeanize us.

Hmm….

A Censoring Press

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How does this work, exactly?  The Los Angeles Times has decided that it will no longer publish letters to its editorial staff from “climate change deniers.”

The Times‘ letters editor, Paul Thornton, wrote, with no trace of irony,

Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published.  Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.

No statement of an opinion, here.  Mm, mm.  Thornton is a newspaper man.  Each of his statements a Truth.

Here’s what Thornton is demonstrating with his censorship.  When someone is unable to make a coherent argument for his case, when he’s unable to concede the possibility of the error of his case, when he lacks the integrity to concede the possibility of that error, he does his best to prevent the opposing case from being spoken—either through ad hominem attacks against the opposing case’s presenters or, as Thornton does here with his control over speech, through outright censorship of the speech with which he’s unable to dispute coherently.

I can’t hear you, indeed.

Free Speech

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Much has been made of President Barack Obama and his colleagues’ assault on free speech through his IRS and apparently through his FEC and SEC.  It’s important to understand that, reprehensible and dangerous to America as these assaults are today, Obama and his are simply channeling one of their Progressive forebears.

Here’s President Woodrow Wilson on the usefulness of government censorship, during another war in which the US was, at the time, participating only peripherally.  He wrote this letter to Congressman Edwin Webb in May 1917.

My dear Mr. Webb:

I have been very much surprised to find several of the public prints stating that the administration had abandoned the position which it so distinctly took, and still holds, that authority to exercise censorship over the Press to the extent that that censorship is embodied in the recent action of the House of Representatives is absolutely necessary to the public safety.  It, of course, has not been abandoned, because the reasons still exist why such authority is necessary for the protection of the nation.

I have every confidence that the great majority of the newspapers of the country will observe a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury, but in every country there are some persons in a position to do mischief in this field who can not be relied upon and whose interests or desires will lead to actions on their part highly dangerous to the nation in the midst of a war.  I want to say again that it seems to me imperative that powers of this sort should be granted.

Cordially and sincerely yours,

WOODROW WILSON

The “recent action of the House” concerned a provision for explicit Federal government censorship of the press that Wilson had demanded be included in The Espionage Act of 1917, then under debate in both houses of Congress.  In the event, the Act was passed in June without the provision (the Senate having removed it by a one-vote margin) and signed into law by Wilson, even though he continued to protest the necessity of the “right” to commit censorship.

Authority to exercise censorship over the press is absolutely necessary to the public safety.

While Wilson didn’t get that power of censorship in the Espionage Act, he did get it in the Sedition Act of 1918:

Whoever…shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States…shall be punished….

The added invention of the Obama claque is that “some persons in a position to do mischief” are conservative persons who criticize the Obama administration.  Such criticisms are viewed by today’s Progressives as “disloyal” and “scurrilous.”  And plainly “abusive.”

Hmm….

Transparency and a Phony Scandal

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Here‘s some more on President Barack Obama’s phony scandals—the IRS one.

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee letter directly blames acting Commissioner Danny Werfel for the “systematic manner” in which his agency has “attempted to delay, frustrate, impede and obstruct” the committee’s investigation, despite his promising just weeks earlier to fully cooperate.

“The actions of the IRS under your leadership have made clear to the committee that the agency has no intention of complying completely or promptly with the committee’s oversight efforts,” wrote committee Chairman Congressman Darrell Issa (R, CA).

Indeed, Werfel has only delivered some 12,000 pages of the requested 64 million—less than 2 hundredths of a single per cent of the request—and many of those are merely duplicates or so badly redacted as to be useless.

This is transparency of Orwellian proportions.

Regulation and Free Speech

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A mandate of the Dodd-Frank financial law, [a] Securities and Exchange Commission rule requires companies that use certain minerals linked to violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding region to file a report with the SEC saying what steps they took to verify the minerals weren’t taxed or controlled by rebel groups.

Never mind that those steps involve proprietary information.  Or that the government-mandated message would tar the companies, inaccurately, with a bigotry brush.

The National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce, representing a broad group of businesses, in a hearing in federal district court in Washington said the regulation is unconstitutional because it forces companies to make disclosures linking their products to human-rights violations.

Paul Keisler, a lawyer representing the NAM and the Chamber, argued the rule is just a Scarlett Letter requirement and represents, further, government-mandated speech, not free speech.  Even so,

SEC Assistant General Counsel Tracey Hardin…argued the rule wasn’t different from advertising restrictions requiring fast-food restaurants to post the calories contained in their menu items or cigarette labels containing warnings about the dangers of smoking.

This, though, is just a cynical conflation of two widely disparate situations.  The one impacts directly the health (or not) of the user.  The other has no impact on the user, nor does it on the purported victims, since the minerals of interest here have a ready world-wide market, demonstrated by the high prices those minerals command.

Wait—there’s Citizens United.  But, no, Mr Corporation, that doesn’t count.  Just sit down and say the words Government gives you to say.