Friday
"You're Not People," Sotomayor Tells Corporations
Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s newly installed Supreme Court Justice, has a few words for corporations seeking protection under law.
You’re not people.
During arguments in a recent campaign-finance case
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that may upend campaign finance law
to allow more spending by corporations,
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Sotomayor suggested that the core underpinning of protecting corporations’ rights was flawed.
Judges “created corporations as persons;
gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said,
the Wall Street Journal noted Friday.
“There could be an argument made that
that was the court’s error to start with…
[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”
Corporations were first afforded the rights of persons under United States law in the 1800s, allowing them wide protections under federal code.
Development of the law mushroomed as corporations — which were originally chartered by and in single states — began to grow larger and cross state lines.
Eventually, courts ruled that states didn’t have the right to revoke contracts made by the corporations themselves.
They also ruled that states didn’t have the unhindered right to revoke corporate charters.
Corporate personhood emerged
from the 1886 Supreme Court Case,
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
Those seeking to gut campaign finance regulations use this argument when positing that the ability for firms to spend lavishly on political campaigns is tantamount to their right to free speech.
Sotomayor’s comment, while limited in scope, could mark a shift in judicial thought on the bench.Supreme Court Justice Roberts, installed by President George W. Bush, was seen by critics and fans alike as a strong defender of corporate rights.
“Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions,” Douglas Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, was quoted in the Journal as saying.
On the other side of the fence, the pro-corporate Heritage Foundation said they found Sotomayor’s remark problematic.
“I don’t want to draw too much from one comment,” Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said.
But it “doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of rights that it should be afforded.”
Wednesday
The Field Project
Our Story
The Field Center, established in 1993 during a typically stormy Central Florida summer, is an educational forum offering a unique curriculum for practicing joyful awareness, conscious creating, and shifting into more aligned states of identity.
During the four years following the Center's birth, our founder and director, Philip Golabuk, “witnessed a lifetime of study, formal training, and investigation gathering like a storm into a remarkable curriculum,” and in the fall of 1997, we offered the Course for the first time to a small group of students.
Our aim was to correct the oversimplifications, confusions, and misconceptions pervasive in the New Age literature about how personal consciousness “creates reality” in the world, particularly with respect to the whole notion of "manifestation," as we recognized that these errors in thinking and practice had cost many people dearly.
Enrollment grew rapidly, and today we are proud to support students, Certified Facilitators, and blog subscribers in some 75 countries.
How We're Different
Field training is arguably the most thorough and precise model available on the subject of how our consciousness becomes the events and conditions of our experience both inwardly and outwardly.
Unlike even sophisticated approaches such as Ernest Holmes’s Science of Mind and the work of Neville Goddard, Field training recognizes the element of paradox inherent in conscious creating, and most importantly, incorporates this element into its practice. This alone would set it apart.
In addition, however, Field training is unique in its assertions that "creation follows identity," that "the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation," based directly on its handling of paradox, and rooted in a practice that begins where the so-called New Age methods of visualization and affirmation leave off.
Finally, no other approach brings together elements as seemingly diverse as the wisdom of the world’s major spiritual traditions, the new physics, ontology (the study of Being), and phenomenology (the study of phenomena as events in consciousness).
Why People Study with Us
Many come to the Field Center after years of following some spiritual path or other, because they have a deep sense that something’s still missing.
It may be showing up in one or more staging areas of life that remain unfulfilled, a general feeling of incompletion, or even homesickness.
Often, they’ve studied Seth, A Course in Miracles, Science of Mind, Abraham, Neville, Chopra—the list goes on—but they still feel a “divine discontent.” They know there’s more.
All of these models miss what Field training understands as the essential gesture of deliberate creatorship—namely, a wholehearted and undistracted immersion in the creative moment for its own sake, an unconditional giving of self to the ideal.
The techniques and methods they offer invariably aim at creating a desired outer fact, e.g., prosperity, romantic partnership, improved health, and so on.
In short, the focus is always on changing the world.
Field training, on the other hand, recognizes that conscious creating is first and last about the self, about identity, and not about worldly conditions at all.
It begins with a longing, not to have more, but to be more.
Further, changing consciousness in order to change the world implicates us in a contradiction that all but ensures failure.
Field practice is a path of wholeheartedness.
It calls for a certain virtuosity of creative authority, so that we remain poised in a stance of inner friendship and agreement, and the war between desire and belief finally can end.