Corporatization & Corporatism

Why political action is not working and what to do about it

2010-02-02T12:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-political-action-is-no-by-Chaz-Valenza-100128-675.html

January 28, 2010
Why political action is not working and what to do about it
By Chaz Valenza

Our government is not yet Fascist. To use this term is hyperbole and counter productive.

Calling our current system of governance what it is -- a Corporatocracy -- is powerful because it is a label that precisely defines our current state of affairs.

The term Corporatocracy is simple and descriptive: a form of government controlled by powerful corporations with a veneer of democracy.

Simply put, the wall between our economic system and our form of government has been lowered to the point where money and corporations now have control of our government. We no longer have either a democracy or free markets as market rules are now created by the corporations they are meant to control.

Corporatocracy is its own animal. Once in power this perversion cannot be defeated through democratic means as it has control of the roots of government. This is an important point.

As we have witnessed, petitions, letter writing, emails, phone calls and even our votes are worth so little they are now ineffective.

Voicing opposition by blogging and moaning and commenting on opinion pieces in main stream media has become populous busy work that humors corporate powers who laugh all the way to the bank.

Our representatives barely acknowledge the will of the people, placate majority opinion with half, quarter or obfuscating measures. They cut divergent backroom deals, or overturn fairness and justice publicly with impunity.

Evidence that every branch of our Federal government has been corrupted is now cited frequently. The instances grow more egregious daily:

The Supreme Court: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision.

The Congress: Health Care Reform hijacked by mega insurance, medical and pharmaceutical corporations.

The Executive Branch: Federal Reserve and Treasury Department appointments with direct connections, and a documented history of cronyism and criminal activity, with the largest Wall Street firms.

Get used to it. Say it aloud a few times and let those "poor" and "rat" and "tock" syllables roll off your tongue. Corp-poor-rat-tock-racey. Poor, the vast majority of us. Rats, we know who they are. Tock, like tick tock, doing time not really living.

If you worked for or supported the election campaign of Barack Obama, you learned a valuable lesson. Money talks.

Labyrinth - A new strategy to get at the enemy.

This was a lesson we learned in the W. years when we saw the impact of a small lie, and a lot of cash, used effectively by the Swift Boaters.

You and millions of others like you, including me, bought the election with our small contributions.

We may have purchased Mr. Obama the Presidency; unfortunately those with real money, the mega corporate money, had already purchased him and all of the apparatus of government around him.

If the President is sincerely fighting for change, as he would have us believe in his rhetorically ingenious State of the Union Address, he faces formidable foes on both sides of the aisle.

An army of lobbyists, and an Everest of corporate money, will continue to barricade themselves in a closed marketplace, while they erect a labyrinth of laws to assure obscene profits and a workforce of serfs.

Many voices are calling for radical change. They are not mistaken in proposing drastic remedies to dismantle the Corporatocracy. These include amending the Constitution to deprive corporations of their falsely assumed personhood, impeachment efforts against members of the Supreme Court, and the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Each voice seems to have its own pet yearning to bring down some or other major establishment pillar that will yield a balance between people and self interested organizations, between individuals and the currently "legal" criminal enterprises that rule the day.

How can we ever reach the tipping point and challenge the balance of power? Can it be done legally, without government over-throw and treason?

I believe the answer is yes, but it will not be accomplished without effort and sacrifice on the part of We the People.

Though political action should not necessarily be abandoned, the recognition that it lacks efficacy is prerequisite to accepting an alternative strategy.

The alternative is market-based protest and insurrection. Money talks; who it speaks to, and how loud, is up to us.

Each day we are bombarded with appeals from well-meaning entities that are alternatives to corporate sponsored communications and political influence. When we can afford to make them, contributions to these efforts are important, but only as a starting point.

Several movements in their infancy are means to an end that have the potential of being very effective as thousands, then millions of people take part. They include:

Move Your Money: http://moveyourmoney.info/ Yes, just move your money from a big bank to a local community bank. But don't be surprised to see your community bank fail and be taken over by Big Banking once again. If that should happen you'll be insured by the FDIC. Move your money again.

Use Cash Movement: http://UseCashMovement.org Big Bank and Big Credit Card companies make a fortune whenever you use plastic, debit and credit cards, instead of cash. Both customers and small business can turn this around, promote the use of cash and benefit while Big Banking suffers.

Sell Stocks: I don't believe any retail/small investor, those without connections to inside Wall Street, has any business investing in stock. Yes, the market has come back, the big boys say it's safe to go back in the water. Believe them at your own peril or find a safe haven for your hard earned retirement money and register your opposition by pulling your money out. A sacrifice to give Wall Street the finger, or a smart move? Maybe both.

Boycott Corporations: Everyday we all interact with corporations we hate doing business with for any number of reasons. Operating in today's world, you may not have a choice on some of these matters. But it is always worth questioning authority. Is there an alternative? Can a spend less with these corporations? Do I need their services at all?

'Capitalism is evil ... you have to eliminate it'

2010-01-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/30/michael-moore-capitalism-a-love-story

Chris McGreal
Guardian UK
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:37 EST

'Capitalism is evil ... you have to eliminate it'
Michael Moore says of Capitalism: A Love Story, ‘I want audiences to get off the bench and become active.’

After guns and the Iraq war, Michael Moore is now taking on an entire political and economic system in his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. So what message does the man who once planned to become a priest have?

Michael Moore has been accused of many things. Mendacity. Manipulation. Rampant egotism. Bullying a frail old man with Alzheimer's. And that is by people who generally agree with his views. His latest film Capitalism: A Love Story is already out in the US when we meet. He comes storming down the hotel corridor, predictably unkempt in ragged jeans that have the unusual quality of appearing both too large and too small at the same time.

I wasn't sure what to expect. Arrogance, perhaps. Cynicism. But he begins to schmooze while he's still some distance away, shouting he feels he knows me. A few months ago one of Moore's producers interviewed me for the film. I was cut from the finished version but Moore says he watched my every word.

Settled on a couch I ask why he hasn't managed to persuade the downtrodden, uninsured, exploited masses to revolt. "My films don't have instant impact because they're dense with ideas that people have not thought about," he says. "It takes a while for the American public to wrap its head around some of the things I'm saying. Twenty years ago I told them that General Motors was going to collapse and take a lot of towns down with them. I was ridiculed, and GM sent around this packet of information about me, my past writings - pinko! With Bowling for Columbine, I told people that these shootings are going to continue, we've got too many guns, too easy access to the guns. [In Fahrenheit 9/11] I'm telling people that we're not going to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we've been lied to."

Capitalism: A Love Story seems the natural culmination of all his others, an overarching look at the insidious control of Wall Street and corporate interests over politics and lives. Its timing is exquisite, coming in the wake of the biggest financial collapse in living memory. And once again Moore is bracing himself: as the film drew to a close at its premiere in Los Angeles, he posted a message on Twitter: "The packed house gets up to grab their torches and pitchforks ..."

The film is certainly shocking. Early on, Moore sets out the meaning of "Dead Peasants" insurance. It turns out that Wal-Mart, a company with a revenue larger than any other in the world, bets on its workers dying, taking out life insurance policies on its 350,000 shop-floor workers without their knowledge or approval. When one of them dies, Wal-Mart claims on the policy. Not a cent of the payout, which sometimes runs to a $1m (£620,000) or more, goes to the family of the dead worker, often struggling with expensive funeral bills. Wal-Mart keeps the lot. If a worker dies, the company profits.

Wal-Mart is not alone. Moore talks to a woman whose husband died of brain cancer in 2008. He worked at a bank until it fired him because he was sick. But the bank retained a life insurance policy on the unfortunate man and cashed it in for $4.7m (£2.9m) when he died. There were gasps from the audience in a Washington cinema at that.

They came again as Moore focused on the eviction of the foreclosed. The Hacker family of Peoria filmed themselves being chucked out of their home because of skyrocketing mortgage payments. Randy Hacker, gun owner, observes that he can understand why someone might want to shoot up a bank. In a final twist, the eviction squad offers the Hackers cash to clear out their yard.

The Hackers are Republicans. So was the widow of the bank worker. It is the gap, between the ordinary American - Democrat or Republican, middle-class or dirt-poor - and predatory banks and mammoth corporations that Moore has made his target ever since Roger and Me, his first film, set out to expose the damage wreaked by General Motors on his hometown of Flint, Michigan.

"One movie maybe can't make a difference," Moore says. "I'll say, what's the point of this? What do I want [my audiences] to do? Obviously I want them to be engaged in their democracy. I want them to get off the bench and become active."

Last summer something happened that renewed Moore's conviction that his film-making was politically worthwhile. "I'm in the edit room and there's Bill Moyers on the TV interviewing the vice-president of Sigma health insurance. Massive, billion-dollar company. He's sitting there, telling the country that he's quit his job and he wants to come clean. That he and the other health insurance companies got together and pooled their resources to smear me and the film Sicko to try and stop people from going to see it because, as he said, everything Michael Moore said in Sicko was true, and we were afraid this film would be a tipping point.

"I came away from that, with 'Wow, they're afraid of this movie, they believe it can actually create a revolution.' The idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea."

Moore's critics would argue this is his ego speaking. The idea that his film about the failings of the US healthcare system was on the brink of prompting a revolution of any kind looks all the more far-fetched given how the political fight over the issue has panned out. But if Moore's primary intention is to send up a warning flare, to alert Americans to what is going on in their country but not usually reported, he's been pretty successful.

At the end of Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore makes a pronouncement: "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy." Michael Moore once planned to be a priest. In his youth he was drawn to the Berrigan brothers, a pair of radical priests who pulled anti-Vietnam war stunts such as pouring blood on military service records. In an instructive moment for Moore, the brothers made clear they weren't just protesting against the war, but against religious organisations that kept silent about it.

These days he disagrees with Catholic orthodoxy exactly where you would expect him to - he supports abortion rights and gay marriage - but he credits his Catholic upbringing with instilling in him a sense of social justice, and an activism tinged with theatre that lives on his films.

But what does it mean, to replace capitalism with democracy? He sighs and tries to explain. In the old Soviet bloc, he says, communism was the political system and socialism the economic. But with capitalism, he complains, you get political and economic rolled in to one. Big business buys votes in Congress. Lobbyists write laws. The result is that the US political system is awash in capitalist money that has stripped the system of much of its democratic accountability.

"What I'm asking for is a new economic order," he says. "I don't know how to construct that. I'm not an economist. All I ask is that it have two organising principles. Number one, that the economy is run democratically. In other words, the people have a say in how its run, not just the 1%. And number two, that it has an ethical and moral core to it. That nothing is done without considering the ethical nature, no business decision is made without first asking the question, is this for the common good?"

These days Moore, the son of a Flint car worker, lives in the smalltown surrounds of Traverse City with his wife Kathleen Glynn and stepdaughter Natalie, a four-hour drive and a world away from where he came from. But Traverse City, which is on Lake Michigan, has endured its own decline. Walking along the restored foreshore, a sign says that the city was once a major lumber exporter. Now it is known as the "Cherry Capital" of America.

"When I first got here the theatre was boarded up," says Moore. "It was a mess. I said, look, let me reopen this theatre, I'll create a non-profit. It has brought, like, half a million people downtown in the first two years. If they're downtown they go out to dinner, they go to the bookstore. It livens everything up. Stores open. Now there's no plywood on any windows." This, says Moore, has made him something of a local hero even in a town that votes Republican.

"The county voted for McCain and for Bush twice. But not a day goes by when a Republican here doesn't stop me on the street and shake my hand and thank me. Me, the pariah!"

There are conservatives who get Moore's message, particularly families such as the Hackers who have been betrayed by the system they thought was working for them. But identifying their suffering, and even the cause of their problems, is very different from persuading them that capitalism is evil, although they might just buy in to what Moore says is the core message of his latest film - "that Wall Street and the banks are truly the enemy, and we need to tie that beast down and quick".

His enemies in the rightwing media will be doing everything they can to ensure this doesn't happen, portraying him as a propagandist. And even some of his supporters say he is too willing to leave out inconvenient facts. But there's no denying some very powerful truths in Capitalism, one of which is that it didn't need to be this way in America.

Moore has dug out of a South Carolina archive a piece of film buried away 66 years ago because it threatened to rock the foundations of the capitalist system as Americans now know it.

President Franklin D Roosevelt was ailing. Too ill to make his 1944 state of the nation address to Congress, he instead broadcast it by radio. But at one point he called in the cameras, and set out his vision of a new America he knew he would not live to see.

Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights to guarantee every American a job with a living wage, a decent home, medical care, protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness and unemployment, and, perhaps most dangerously for big business, freedom from unfair monopolies. He said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence".

The film was quickly locked away.

"The next week on the newsreels - and we've gone back and researched this - they didn't run that," said Moore. "They talked about other parts of his speech, the war. Nothing about this. The footage became lost. When we called the Roosevelt presidential library and asked them about it they said it wasn't filmed. His own family told us it wasn't filmed." Moore's team scoured the country without luck until they were given a tip about a collector connected to the university of South Carolina.

The university didn't have anything archived under FDR's speeches that fitted, but there were a couple of boxes from that week in 1944.

"We pop it in. It was all there. We had tears in our eyes watching it. For 65 years not a single American saw that speech, not one. I decided right then that we're going to fulfil Roosevelt's wishes that the American people see him saying this. Of all the things in the film, probably I feel most privileged that I get to share this. I get to give him his stage." It's a powerful moment not only because it offers an alternative view of American values rarely spoken of today - almost all of which would be condemned as rampant socialism - but also an interesting reference point with which to compare the more restrained ambitions of the Obama administration.

It is hard to imagine any circumstances in which Obama could put forward such an agenda, I suggest. Moore disagrees.

"He could make that speech."

And survive politically?

"He has told people he's going to operate these four years not with an eye on getting re-elected but on getting things done. I have been very happy for the last year. We came out of eight dark years and his election was - what's the word? - the relief I felt that night, I've been filled with hope since then. Now my patience is running a bit thin. He hasn't taken the reins and said: I'm in charge here, this is what we're doing. Do it. I can understand he's afraid but he's gotta do it."

Capitalist Tool

2010-01-30T05:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Capitalist-Tool-by-Michael-Collins-100127-259.html

January 27, 2010
Capitalist Tool
By Michael Collins

Just a few cynics doubted the magnificent procession of then Senator Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. He was the redemption of our past sins, the proof that we were a better nation than we had been. After all, race has been at the center of American politics since Bacon's Rebellion was crushed in 1667 but we were moving beyond that. And we did.Race was set aside for most of those who voted.

As it turned out, the campaign wasn't about redeeming anything other than the bill that Wall Street presented to the citizens of the United States in October, 2008. The financial system was grinding its gears, about to flame out in a series of big investment bank failures. The Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, told a private session of Congress that absent immediate aid, the financial calamity would be so devastating that Congress should prepare for riots by outraged citizens.

The people spoke in unison as they hadn't in decades. No bailout! Congressional staffers were swamped with a flood of telephone calls, emails, and faxes. The people's will and wisdom was honored and the first bailout proposal was defeated 228 to 205 in the House of Representatives.

Undeterred, The Money Party swung into action. They hit the offices of reluctant supporters and plied them with "contributions" (also known as legalized bribes). More importantly, they put on a show of political unity, something they like to call bipartisanship. Both presidential candidates showed up in Washington and spoke to their party caucuses. They worked their magic and the bailout was complete. Wall Street was saved to wage class war against the citizens once again, at will, with few if any restraints. The prize -- the biggest wealth transfer in history, the looting of the Treasury for private firms, and a free hand to pay their bonuses as they saw fit. It was and is all about them.

Capitalist Tool

President Obama won the election amidst a great hope for change that he'd promised.

What did we get?

Right away, the new president turned the Treasury and economic policy over to consummate, long-term Wall Street insiders, Tim Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, and Larry Summers as economic guru. Geithner "was one of our nation's top regulators" for Wall Street during the great rip off of the Bush years and Summers had helped repeal those pesky laws that restrained big banks from dangerous investments. The foxes were in charge of the hen house. There were more bailouts and the Federal Reserve extended $23.7 trillion line of credit for the big banks.

Then, there were the attempts to help citizens with epidemic foreclosures and usurious credit interest rates. We did get a Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights but the president and Congress forgot to cap those huge credit card interest rates. Unfortunately for the millions of victims of mortgage fraud, the president and Congress couldn't quite figure out how to pass a modest foreclosure relief bill. The sponsor of that legislation threw up his hands, as the president sat it out, and said, the banks "frankly own the place!" No kidding.

It didn't stop there. A few months into the era of hope and change, we found out that the administration was heavily staffed with CitiBank insiders who were doing their best to keep that tottering zombie walking as though it were alive.

All the while, the jobless rate rose month after month until real world unemployment reached 17%. That single digit unemployment figures we get don't include workers who simply give up looking for jobs after months of finding nothing. They're unemployed, none the less.

Instead of focusing on jobs, the administration became obsessed with passing a health reform bill. It was reform, but not for citizen health. It seems that the health of the insurance companies was a bit off after years of bad investments and acquisitions. They needed 40 million new customers and a central role in the new plan. They got both. Citizens are now about to get a Frankenstein health bill that they can't afford. Hard to pay those premiums if you're out of work, or earning flat wages for the past ten years.

Tonight, we're told that domestic programs will be frozen for three years while foreign aid and military expenditures for Obama's new war in Afghanistan won't be touched.

And, to add insult to injury, the president just announced that a big part of NASA will be privatized with the corporations "too big to fail" launching our astronauts into space.

We are nothing to them

It doesn't take much to figure that out.

We lose our jobs. The insiders have theirs forever.

Our wages are flat while Wall Street fat cats get ever increasing bonuses.

We lose our health coverage while Congress, the Judiciary, and the Executive branches enjoy the best insurance around.

Commercial credit for most is tight but the big banks have trillions in credit.

Organized crime would never have been this insensitive. At least, they realized that they needed customers with a few bucks to place a bet.

We are in the great decline of the ruling elite, addled by nepotistic inbreeding and cronyism beyond imagination; coddled by the government that they bought and paid for; and ready to take everything that isn't nailed down, only to blame the people for having nothing.

Welcome to the new klelptocracy where insiders make the rules then claim the high ground of intelligence and morality after winning a game they rigged in the first place.

Once, we had a real hope that endured despite the challenges. It helped produce major changes when we demanded them. Now, we're left with scraps from the movable feast that is devouring the nation and we're expected to say, "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

The Corpocracy Rules / For Now

2010-01-30T05:12:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2010/01/27.html

January 27, 2010
The Corpocracy Rules / For Now
By Allen L Roland

Aided by a mind boggling decision by the Supreme Court allowing unlimited campaign spending by private interests ~ the Corpocracy, where corporate dollars trump individual votes, has revealed its ominous ruling presence and insatiable appetite for power, profit and control but also has set the stage for a major populist revolt.

Now that the Supreme Courthas ruled that corporations may buy and own as many congressman as they can afford ~ it's time for a widespread populist revolt particularly in this mid term election year.

As John Geyman noted last year in the Huffington Post ~ " The scope of corpocracy goes beyond what most of us realize.
According to a 2007 report of the Institute for Policy Studies, 51 of the top 100 economic entities in the world are corporations. Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil each have higher annual revenues than the gross domestic product of Poland or Saudi Arabia. The top 200 corporations account for about one-quarter of total economic activity in the entire world."

Geyman goes on to reveal " that Most of these large corporations are multinational and largely immune from the laws of any one nation. They are free to set up partnerships of convenience across borders, seek out countries that best serve their interests, and often pay little or no taxes." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-geyman/corpocracy-vs-democracy-i_b_241452.html

This is a dangerous time for American where our Republic is rapidly morphing into a Plutocracy or government by the wealthy. FDR warned of this possibility in 1938 ~

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence is Fascism~ ownership of government by individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
The game is on ~ the enemy has been identified ~ as activist groups organize and a few courageous politicians try to implement legislative stop gaps to this insidious corporate cancer but corporate groups are also ready to attack the legislators who dare to oppose them.

Forget Obama, whose allegiance to the corpocracy gained him the presidency, we all need to be involved in this upcoming battle of the people versusthe corpocracyand Bill Moyers sums up the stakesthis election year ~ "The game goes on and the insiders keep dealing themselves winning hands. Nothing will change~ nothing ~ until the moneylenders are tossed out of the temple, the ATM's are wrested from the marble walls, and we tear down the sign they've place on government - the one that reads, 'For Sale.'"

As ChrisHedges, who wroteEmpire Of Illusions, says "Our for-profit health care system makes money off of death, the same way our arms merchants make money off of death. And the inability within our country to face this reality, the inability in a corporatized media to even have this discussion is, I think, evidence of the power of the corporate state, which drives debate, which permits institutions that are morally bankrupt to have a seat at the table. And that is symptomatic of a society in deep decay."

We are beyond the point of no return and only a full fledged populist revolt can right this badly listing Republic. Under G.W. Bush, torture became legal and under Obama, bribery has just become legal.

Five Supreme Court Judges Do Da Corporate Takeover Hustle, And They Must Be Stopped

2010-01-30T05:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Five-Supreme-Court-Judges-by-thepen-100127-257.html

January 27, 2010
Five Supreme Court Judges Do Da Corporate Takeover Hustle, And They Must Be Stopped
By thepen

This the second in a series of action alerts about the fundamental willful and pernicious errors underlying the decision by 5 agenda driven right wing judges on the Supreme Court to gut all restraints on corporate meddling in our elections. Each of these successive alerts will analyze additional derelict aspects of this shameful and truly dangerous decision, to further demonstrate why we the people must speak out and act to reverse it.

In the first alert we made the triable case (which no attorney has written us to dispute) that failing to even bother to distinguish between domestic and foreign owned corporations, and knowingly leaving America vulnerable to the latter BY their ruling, was de facto an act of treason by The Supreme Court 5.

This alert will focus on their abandonment of every prudent rule of judicial review, in favor of haste and the most extreme form of judicial activism, again with specific page number references to the opinion itself.

There are TWO critical action pages related to this, which we are asking each of our participants to submit and also pass on to everyone you know, which will send your message by fax to all your own members of Congress, and President Obama too. You do not need your own fax machine to participate, the action pages do all this for you automatically in real time.

Action Page: Corporations Are NOT The People http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1029.php

Action Page: Impeach The Supreme Court 5 http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1030.php

The most bedrock principle of appellate review is that first an appellant must have PRESERVED the issue for appeal, by arguing and getting a ruling on the point of law from the court below, necessitating fact finding by the lower court to create a "record". Innumerable appellants since the beginning of time have had the door to review slammed in their face with the admonition that if they HAD preserved the issue then and only then could a higher court review it.

And in particular, appellate courts have traditionally been loathe to making their own findings of fact (and only in a corrective way) absent very clear error by the Court below, which is as it should be. The role of a higher court is to apply the law to the facts, and make rulings of what the LAW is, not make their own findings of fact. And this is supremely true of the Supreme Court.

So even beyond the outrageousness of the result, it is at least outrageous the way it was reached, and how that reach was justified. As justification, The Supreme Court 5 asserted that some legal emergency existed requiring a broader inquiry in this case, resurrecting a claim already ABANDONED by the appellant in the court below (opinion p. 12). Why directly overturning precedents at least 20 years old would suddenly be such an emergency they do not explain.

And when you actually read the opinion, the only pressure really on the Supreme Court was because so-called Citizens United was bound to LOSE on the case they did preserve (opinion pp. 10-11). The Supreme Court 5 wanted that party to win. This was in itself an over the top act of judicial activism. But even beyond that they were hell bent on undoing as much as 100 years of campaign finance regulation (Stevens' dissent p. 3). Even the most conservative commentators agree this is what they have in fact done.

Appellate courts have been known on occasion to comment (in no binding way) that if an appellant HAD made a particular argument they might have been receptive to it, a kind of higher court invitation for someone to bring an actual case, an actual "controversy". And then there would be a factual record in some subsequent case. But here there was no controversy on the issue on which the ruling was based, for it had already been WAIVED a priori, thereby denying the Supreme Court any jurisdiction to rule on it (Constitution Article III, Section 2, Clause 1).

But even further assuming that the Supreme Court was justified in reopening a can of worms already discarded, the appropriate procedure would have been to return the case to the lower court with instructions, what is called a "remand", and which is done all the time after a ruling of LAW, for the court below to make findings of fact and conduct further proceedings, so that there would be a factual record for them to review, should the appellant wish to appeal to the higher court again in the case of an unfavorable ruling by the lower court.

All these prudent judicial things are exactly what the Supreme Court 5 did NOT do. Instead, they called for hurry up further briefing on the new question of law THEY wanted to rule on (Stevens' dissent p. 4), in a vacuum of insufficient facts to make those arguments of law. Instead, they set a scary new purported standard of review that says they basically can make rulings on any point of law THEY want to raise, whether developed in a lower court by an appellant or not.

This is truly frightening! It means that these five absolute dictators in black robes have now asserted the unheard of prerogative to make their own law pretty much any time they like, if only tangentially related to appellant's actual arguments on appeal (opinion pp. 13-14), a profoundly dangerous NEW standard, to become a new stare decisis if not immediately challenged and reversed by their removal from office. It means they now assert unchecked prerogative to make their own findings of fact whenever necessary to reach the result THEY want to reach.

And they must be stopped. The Supreme Court 5 must be impeached before they go even further off the deep end. Whatever else within the law that Congress can do to counteract this decision must be done, and to make sure such a thing can never, ever happen again.

So please submit both action pages above now. The next alert in this series will analyze the totally bogus basis of the so-called facts the Supreme Court pulled out of sheer hot air in this case.

NEW FOUR COLOR BUMPER STICKERS

In the meantime we are making available for no charge (not even shipping) your choice of one of two new bumper stickers. Take a "Corporations Are NOT The People" bumper sticker, OR a "Impeach The Supreme Court 5" bumper sticker for free. Of course if you can make a contribution (or if you want both), please DO contribute what you can, which is what allows us to send these out for free to anyone who cannot make a donation right now.

We have engaged one of the top commercial printers in the country for printing these, they have gone to press using the highest quality 4 color process, the proofs are absolutely gorgeous, and we will be taking delivery shortly of the first run.

So you can still request your bumper sticker from the return page after you submit either of the action pages above to get in on the first shipping. Or you can do directly to this page and get them there.

Bumper Stickers for no charge: http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers.php

Facebook participants can also submit the action pages at

Corporations Are Not The People: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1029

Impeach The Supreme Court 5: http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1030

And on Twitter, just send the following Twitter reply for the Corporations Are Not The People action

@cxs #p1029

And this Twitter reply for the Impeach The Supreme Court 5 action

@cxs #p1030

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.millionfaxmarch.com/in.htm

State of the Corpo-Nation

2010-01-30T05:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/State-of-the-Corpo-Nation-by-Kevin-Gosztola-100127-620.html

January 27, 2010
By Kevin Gosztola

This is not the State of the Union speech President Obama will deliver tonight. But, what if he gave an address like this?

Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and the First Lady of the United States, CEOs, and all those from small businesses who are tuning in tonight:

I am here tonight to not only address the distinguished men and women in this great chamber and their corporate financiers but also the very people who I depend on for small donations to make it seem like I am not under the control of corporate and special interests in Washington.

I know that for many Americans watching right now there's been some distress and concern. I would like to reassure you that American Idol will continue in its normal time slot next week. But for now, I suggest that you try college basketball on ESPN, NCIS on USA, Man vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel, or Real World on MTV if this is not what you would like to view on television tonight. And, of course, you know that Lost will be premiering next week and we wanted to make sure you all could view that so we moved up this address to tonight.

For those of you with the capacity to pay attention to me for an hour, let me begin by saying that I am just as glad as you are that the recession is over. But, that doesn't mean we are in the clear. You know this better than anyone. You've been layed off from your job at the department store you were working at; the bank cannot find your mortgage but yet you are still forced out of your home; the credit card company keeps billing your son or daughter in college for more money; the fatness of your baby is a pre-existing condition so you can't get coverage for your baby's health care; or if you work for a major bank or have a job on Wall Street, you feel like you are supposed to feel guilty for causing the nation's economic problems.

But, let me reassure you. The economy is improving and while the economy continues to improve, while we all work to find our footing and restore our confidence in our daily lives, I want every American to know this: There's a drug for you.

There's an anti-depressant that can treat depression, certain types of social anxiety conditions, post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder in adults over age 18. For more than 15 years, Lozoft has safely and effectively treated millions of people with depression and certain anxiety conditions. Lozoft is available for multiple strengths, so your doctor can decide a dose for you.

Depression is a serious medical condition. Concomitant use of Lozoft with NSAIDS or aspirin may be associated with an increased risk of bleeding. Side effects may include dry mouth, insomnia, sexual side effects, anal leaking, nausea, fever, sweating, atrophy of the muscles, change in mental functioning, sudden stopping of the heart, and increased blood pressure. Talk to your doctor about how Lozoft might help you.

This economy will fully recover soon. Finding answers to the problems we face doesn't require rocket scientists. We haven't needed rocket scientists since the space race and the Cold War. No, our answers lie with the people of this nation who are constantly working to get by and make this country work.

I'm talking about the union worker at GM who will take a pay cut so America can have another shot at having better automotive vehicles than the Japanese; the sheriff who evicts people from their homes even though he knows in his heart he should not; the TSA agent who will gladly perform secondary security searches that involve invading people's privacy so that our country can be kept safe; the scientist working to engineer genetically modified seeds so people don't go hungry; or the private at Guantanamo obediently interrogating terror suspects so our nation can have the best intelligence we need in the make a great effort against people prone to supporting Islamic ideas which lead to violence (formerly known as the "war on terror").

Now, if we are truthful about where we are at in this point in time, we can see that we haven't been fulfilling responsibilities, as we should. The government and the people have failed time and time again. I'm not saying this to play some kind of blame game. I just think the point needs to be made that the problems we face didn't happen overnight and many of them could have been stopped if we as a people had paid more attention. I could go through a long list of where we went wrong, but it would be so similar to what I said a year ago that I won't.

Apparently, you don't think you have to help fix any of the problems I mentioned a year ago because the housing market is barely rebounding, the stock market is good--I'll give you that, we're still addicted to oil, health care reform's like Terri Schiavo--Republicans don't want it to die because they enjoy scoring political points off of it but at the same time it's not really alive anymore, our teachers still don't think they should get fired if they do a poor job--apparently they think like Wall Street bankers they should get rewarded for failure. Our national debt is so unmanageable that I've had Reagan's corpse moved into my office to help lead the way.

Sure, I wish you people would go shopping and buy more. It would make my job easier. I wouldn't have to constantly be thinking about creating new jobs. But, I won't do that. I will suggest, however, that more of you participate in Cyber Monday next winter because you can reduce your carbon footprint and stimulate the economy at the same time.

Americans, we're lucky. We dodged a bullet. We managed to grab a hold of the cliff as we were falling off and pull ourselves up. We were able to survive a massive water boarding that wasn't torture but one hell of an enhanced interrogation technique.

Now is the time to act boldly and wisely. If you've got a group energized by a social issue that we in the Democratic Party can use to gain votes in 2010, we need you to go to Whitehouse.gov and sign up to help out now.

TO BE CONTINUED

Some remedies for the Supreme Court power grab

2010-01-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00429

Some remedies for the Supreme Court power grab
COMMENTARY | January 26, 2010
It’s easy to find activism, impossible to find original intent behind the Roberts/Scalia group’s ruling on corporate political spending. Martin Lobel suggests six sharp, practical steps to deal with it.
By Martin Lobel
Lobel@LNLlaw.com

Lincoln said that, even in the midst of war, the power of corporations made him tremble for the safety of the country.

The media need to focus public attention on the judicial legislating by the five “conservative” Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in deciding Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. They ruled that corporations have a right to spend as much money as they want to buy ads to support or oppose politicians – a question that the litigants weren’t arguing but that the Justices reached out to decide.

Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito divined that that was the original intent of the drafters of our Constitution even though Jefferson had warned against just such concentrations of power and they ignored Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux when he referred to a corporation as an “invisible, intangible and artificial being” and “certainly not a citizen.” Apparently they believe that they know better what the drafters of the Constitution meant than Chief Justice Marshall who actually knew the drafters. The only rational conclusion to draw from this action is that “original intent” is merely a subterfuge to justify whatever action Scalia and his followers want to take.

The five “conservative” Justices had no problem substituting their opinion for the carefully balanced Congressional legislation to curb the power of money in elections. Under the now stricken McCain-Feingold legislation, corporations could spend money that was “ voluntarily” contributed to Political Action Committees (PACs) or to overpaid lobbyists who in turn would contribute or bundle contributions to candidates. Whether such contributions were really voluntary or not is open to question, but at least it gave economically powerful interests a means to influence elections without the appearance of a quid pro quo that direct expenditures entail. Apparently, even though the Justices don’t run for office, they felt they were more expert in deciding what influence money has on elections than those who do.

There is another interesting, and I hope unintended consequence, of the decision. Foreign corporations can now influence American politics directly by spending unlimited amounts of money. I can just see the memo now from an American subsidiary of a Chinese corporation to its home office:

“Dear Chairman, The United States Supreme Court has just decided we can directly influence their elections with our money. Please send me $100 million of the US Treasury Bonds we own so we can defeat those politicians who stand in our way of taking over the US economy.”

As long as those five supposedly conservative Justices are there, we are likely to see even more judicial activism and legislating, contrary to the judicial philosophy Chief Justice Roberts espoused at his confirmation hearings. It will be interesting to see what the Court will do with a case seeking to prohibit the publishing of the names of those petitioners opposed to gay marriage on the grounds they might be subject to ridicule or harassment. Will the same First Amendment rights so precious to corporations be struck down when it comes to revealing who signed a petition seeking a referendum opposing gay rights?

Congress still has remedies to protect the country from abusive corporate political spending. Here are several of them:

Congress and the SEC have the power to make sure that corporate political spending reflects the will of the shareholders, not just management. There is absolutely no dispute that boards of directors have a fiduciary obligation to represent the interests of the shareholders, although, unfortunately, since boards are chosen by management, this has been honored more in its breach than its observance.

As a partial solution, the SEC and the FEC should promulgate rules before the next election to ensure that decisions on corporate political spending represent the desires of the shareholders. This could be done by requiring boards of directors to poll shareholders before making any specific political expenditure. Boards should be required to vote on each such political expenditure and publicly reveal every member’s vote. Ads paid for by a corporation or group of corporations should be required to reveal who was paying for it and perhaps, like a candidate, the Chairman of the Board should be required to appear and say the board approved the ad.

In order to prevent money laundering, bundling the cost of such ads under a group’s name should be prohibited so the public really knows who paid for the ad. Shareholders who disapproved of such expenditures should be allowed to get from the corporation their proportionate share of the expenditure. This wouldn’t have much effect if an individual wanted his money, but it would have an effect if pension funds and other large investors demanded their money.
In addition, foreign owned or controlled (5 percent or more?) corporations should be prohibited from spending money to influence American elections.

Congress ought to explicitly prohibit corporations from deducting the cost of such ads from their income so that taxpayers are not subsidizing them.

Congress should prohibit corporations that are government contractors from spending money on such ads. Such spending would seem to fall within the same rationale that the Court recognized in continuing to prohibit direct corporate contributions to politicians or upholding the Hatch Act.

If any member of the Court voted to strike down such clearly constitutional restrictions on corporate spending, it would then be time to discuss impeachment for subverting the Constitution.

We should remember what Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1864:

We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . . It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
The passage appears in a letter from Pres. Abraham Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864.

The Source of Corporate Power

2010-01-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/print/52194

January 28, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by Robert C. Koehler

"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

The words are those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in last week's landmark Supreme Court decision marking some sort of culmination in the long corporate trek to personhood. It's the word "simply" that gets to me: Exxon-Pinocchio is a real boy now, and has his opinions, and the government has no right to stop him from "simply engaging in political speech."

What a cheap cover story; it's up there with "bringing democracy to Iraq" in its tawdry manipulation of iconic national values to justify a raw power grab. The 5-4 decision in the long-awaited Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case overturns restrictions on corporate spending to influence election results, giving entities with millions (in some cases, billions) of dollars at their disposal unlimited license to electioneer for the candidate with the friendliest attitude toward their interests.

The tendency of money and power is to concentrate, of course. The big trick, from a human perspective, is to make sure our core values remain pre-eminent, that they are served by the ways in which we concentrate power. Democracy is the great mechanism for doing so, the hope of the world, or so we are told, but the wakeup message in this nakedly cynical ruling by the Roberts Court, with its slim (but sufficient) right-wing majority, is that the concept of democracy is mortally wounded.

As former Sen. Bob Kerrey wrote recently on Huffington Post: "Instead of doing the nation's business, elected officials are spending a third of their time or more dialing for special interest dollars in never-ending campaigns for re-election.

"Industry lobbyists," he goes on, "are helping to write the very bills in Congress that affect their bottom line, placing private profit ahead of the public good. Billions of taxpayer dollars are going to benefit big contributors through earmarks, subsidies, and special regulations."

And as Chris Hedges explains on TruthDig: "Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation."

The interests of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Coal, agribusiness, the financial sector, the insurance sector and, of course, the military-industrial complex, have infinitely more clout in government than the collective popular will and the voices calling for eco-sanity, universal health care and an end to war. Note: This is already the case.

Corporate entities have thoroughly gamed the system, leaving us with little more than a textbook-democracy façade. What the latest Supreme Court decision does is legitimize all this, shoving the corruption in our faces by declaring the absurd: Corporations are people too! They have a right to weigh in on the candidates just like the rest of us - to get their billion-dollar opinions out to the public throughout the election campaign.

This is an "activist" judicial decision, that is to say, a decision that serves a prior agenda, with any principles cited (e.g., the sanctity of free speech) sheer window dressing in service to a larger, and covert, cause.

As a New York Times story points out, the case itself - involving a conservative, not-for-profit corporation called Citizens United, which was restricted in its ability to distribute an attack film about Hillary Clinton, "Hillary: The Movie," during the 2008 presidential primary elections - could have been decided on narrow grounds. The court chose instead to expand the scope of the case, making it into a challenge of existing laws that regulate corporate election spending, most notably the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. McCain-Feingold, which prohibits corporate electioneering within 60 days of an election. This is what we've lost.

The good news is that the decision has generated a huge outpouring of anger around the country. Within a day of the ruling, the website MoveToAmend.org had garnered some 40,000 signatures (it's now close to 50,000) in support of a constitutional amendment to establish that money is not speech and only human beings have constitutional rights. The amendment would also guarantee our right to vote and participate in elections, and to have our votes count.

A number of bills and legislative actions are also in the works, attempting to circumvent the Supremes. The proposals range from patch jobs to cries for profound change, both of which are necessary in the process of resuscitating democracy.

No matter what, though, the Roberts Court has hastened the propagandizing of the national discourse, mostly through the medium of television, as corporate interests amp up their thought-control machines in the name of free speech. I see little hope for a gullible nation that allows the tube to hemorrhage urgent inanities directly into its consciousness for 18 hours a day. This gullibility is the source of corporate power. Democracy can only thrive where people think for themselves.

© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

1984=2004? Our "Newly" Born Corporacracy

2010-01-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1984-2004--Our-Newly-Bo-by-Michael-Bonanno-100124-865.html

January 24, 2010
1984=2004? Our "Newly" Born Corporacracy
By Michael Bonanno

I consider myself a poet. Obviously there are some poetry publications, both online and in hard cover, who agree with me to some extent. I've had some of my poetry published and have even gotten small monetary stipends.

I've been writing poetry since 1964 and most of you have never heard of me. So, obviously, I spent my life working a so called "middle class" job within a middle class life story. I worked for a Fortune 500 multinational corporation for twenty-five years. After receiving bonus after bonus after bonus for exemplary work, I was "delayered" (Orwell was a genius) in 1997. This was three years before I could have officially retired and enjoyed the health benefits of an "official" retiree.

During my working years, I took a sabbatical from writing. In fact, I was treated so well, and deservedly so, by the corporation, that I lost touch with what was important in the world. Believe it or not, I was so disinterested in this "thing called NAFTA", that I didn't even know what it really was, let alone what it meant sociologically.

When I found I had some time on my hands, I began writing again. This may be more a critique of my writing than anything else, but, for me, when I found the right inspiration, writing poetry (and music) was like getting right back on the horse or bike after taking a spill. I didn't seem to notice the huge gap.

I was a disgruntled ex-employee, but, after I left the corporation, I became aware of a crime which it had committed. I tried to pass this on to the local newspapers both in Connecticut, where I was raised and born (not necessarily in that order) and in California, where I moved in 2001. I started this paragraph by saying I was a disgruntled ex-employee and that's exactly how the newspapers accepted my "gossip". Unfortunately for them and for citizens in a specific part of the nation, they missed out on breaking what would have been a huge story about a corporation, who, in cahoots with Connecticut's Department of Environmental Protection, covered up a crime of significant importance. Criminals-1, the rest of us-0.

As reporting that crime got me nowhere, I turned to the internet to find forums which focused on writing and, more specifically, poetry.

The first community I found was a wonderful place called the Arcanum Café. What I learned at AC augmented what I already knew about writing and poetry. The people were, and still are, talented and helpful.

Most of the forums dealt with different subject matter to which poems were posted. However, there were a couple of forums that didn't concentrate as much on poetry.

There was a Short Story forum in which people could obviously post their attempts at writing short stories.

There was also the inevitable Open Discussion forum. I became more involved in this forum as time went on. A lot of the posting to the Open Discussion forum was political and it helped me catch up on what I didn't pay much attention to for twenty-five years. I became outspoken and even touched off some fairly heated debates.

It was in the AC Open Discussion forum that I first used the word Corporacracy, a word that, at the time, I thought that I'd coined. I found later on that Ralph Nader and others had been using the word for many years. So much for ingenuity.

The web master of another poetry site called Studio Eight seemed to enjoy my Open Discussion rants enough to offer me my own forum. She named it Open Mike Soundoff. At this point, I'd rather have not been referred to as Mike. I like Michael much more these days. But Open Michael Soundoff just didn't make much sense.

Let me be clear. I didn't begin to see that The Former United States of America was basically being governed by huge multination corporations when I was "delayered" in 1997. That epiphany was not part of my being a disgruntled ex-employee. It became obvious to me over time.

One only need to ask, "Why would a president stand before the nation blaming Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden for the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and then, almost on a dime, turn around and say that the most import thing that this country had to do was to invade Iraq?"

One could also question how a man like Bill Clinton could run a presidential campaign all but promising to be the next FDR and then sign a bill like NAFTA (I'd learned what NAFTA was and what its consequences would be by this time).

I took a surf down memory lane last night and found the following which I had posted to my Open Mike forum in 2004:

You'll see the word "corporacracy" in a lot of my posts. As I've never seen this word, I'm under the impression that I coined it.

I've created a dictionary type of definition for the word (I actually added it to my MS Word personal dictionary so that it isn't underlined in red when I use it).

Corporacracy (co-por-AC-racy)
n. pl. co•por•ac-racies

1. A word combining "corporation" and "aristocracy".
2. Government by CEOs and top executives of global corporations.
3. Global corporations, considered the primary source of political power.
4. Wealth rules
5. The principles of gross financial inequality and fear of global corporations.
6. The reason the top 5% of the population control over 40% of the wealth.
7. A government that, by blatant disregard for humanity and the environment, is causing the American "middle class" to shrink, fading into an almost poverty level existence. They do this by taking advantage of the "middle class's" apathy and its addiction to fossil fuels.
8. A government that buys figure head leaders, known as "presidents". These "leaders" are called Republicans and Democrats. Members of the shrinking "middle class" still embrace a fantasy which leads them to write editorial letters debating the differences between the two "parties". They are still under the false impression that there are only two "political" parties existing in the US.
9. The Corporacracy controls colonies in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Central and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia. Its sole rule of governance is to create money which creates more money.

We have ceased to be a democracy. Global corporations have turned the entire world into a Corporacracy.

The US has the highest CEO to worker income ratio in the world. The ratio is over 475 to 1.

Have we gone too far? Is this still just plain old free enterprise, fair capitalism or is it becoming more like Bourgeoisie vs. Proletariat.

What perpetuates this situation is that we "elect" presidents and legislators, Democrats, Republicans, it doesn't matter, who owe The Corporacracy big time for the $$$$ they received during the so called election campaigns. So, our vote doesn't count because we are not voting for the liar who is running, we are voting for the special interests to which they are bound.

Again, have we gone too far? Can you still call what is happening free enterprise/capitalism or is it just plain greed? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot for a select few? And, if so, how do we get the word to the American people that the Democratic and Republican parties are owned by The Corporacracy? And, if we get them to understand that, how do we, the working class, change it?

By ignoring the Democrats and Republicans in 2008, if not sooner!

A few nights ago, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina told Keith Olbermann that he'd begun to use the word "corpocray" after the recent Supreme Court give away of our democracy. He told Olbermann that it's a word one wouldn't find in a dictionary, but, if one googled it, one would get a lot of hits.

Well, if one googles "corpocracy" or even corporacracy, one will be asked if the intended word is corporotacracy. Corporatocracy, I believe, may have even been used by Mussolini in describing the fascist state he envisioned for Italy.

It's true that corporacracy, a word I began to use and will continue to use, "corpocracy" or corporotacracy won't be found in a dictionary.

Earlier in this article, I mentioned, parenthetically, that Orwell was a genius. This is a characteristic which I'm certain that the aforementioned Eric Arthur Blair and I do not have in common. However, as I read my 2004 post, I couldn't help wishing that, instead of writing for a small and obscure poetry message board at the time, I was writing oped pieces for The New York Times or The Washington Post. It would have been easier to answer the question ""how do we get the word to the American people that the Democratic and Republican parties are owned by The Corporacracy? And, if we get them to understand that, how do we, the working class, change it?"

If more people were aware of The Corporacracy in 2004, would The Supreme Court have made such an egregious decision on Thursday, January 21, 2010?

By the way, I voted for a Democrat in 2008. This is either akin to the definition of irony or the definition of insanity. I'll let you decide that.

The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too

2010-01-22T16:04:00.000-08:00

The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too
By Scott Klinger, AlterNet
Posted on January 22, 2010, Printed on January 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145323/

This week's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case removes all limits on large corporations to finance and influence federal elections. In its ruling the court reverses a decades-old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaigns, and guts pieces of the popular McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation. In so doing the Court implicitly embraces a 125 year-old precedent in the case of Santa Clara v. Santa Fe, where the Court first developed the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, explicitly granting corporations the same political and civil rights granted to human beings (historian Thom Hartmann discovered that the principle originated with a corrupt court clerk who added it to the case summary, rather than with the court itself).

But what if we accept corporate personhood as the current reality and instead focus on changing the rules so that corporations would also have to be bound by other limitations of humanity? How would corporations be different if they were indeed human-like?

If corporations were human, they would pause for sleep and recreation. When human families vacation, they frequently go to parks or natural places which they inherently recognize as part of the commons set apart from the marketplace. Many corporations know no such bounds; if resources are available, even in the nation’s National Parks, they will seek to develop them. Today’s modern corporations are 24/7 affairs that are always charging forward. The press for continuous growth and the need to deliver the next quarter’s earnings, make corporation’s urgency and intensity toward time a threat to many communities, which have other priorities like caring for children and elders, not the tireless quest to produce more profit.

If corporations were human, they would acknowledge their dependence on a healthy community for their well-being and contribute financially to the vibrancy of the community through payment of taxes. Fifty years ago, corporate taxes made up nearly 22 percent of the federal treasury receipts; today corporate taxes contribute less than 13 percent to the federal budget. The mindset of many large corporations is that of takers, looking to be supported by society with a stream of tax credits and preferential tax rates. According to a 2008 report by the Government Accounting Office, 25 percent of large U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes in 2005 (the latest year studied) despite reporting collective sales exceeding $1.1 trillion.

If corporations were human, they would recognize that their brains are only one of many vital organs. The brain, which provides the executive function for the body whole, nonetheless consumes a relatively modest share of the body’s nutrition. A brain that swells beyond a normal healthy state is a dire threat to the body and most often requires the dramatic intervention of surgery. An inhuman corporation provides ever-larger amounts of nutrition in the form of money to its executive function. These swollen levels of pay are a cancer that often results in excessive risk, putting both the corporation and society at risk.

If corporations were human, they would be accountable to society when they break the law and would be punished with a loss of their freedoms. When a person steals or murders, they are sent to prison, where they lose their freedom to practice their trade and to participate in the economic and political life of the community. When corporations produce products they know to be deadly, or withhold important information on the safety of their products are they not guilty of murder? When corporations submit fraudulent financial statements to investors, or engage in deceptive marketing practices that cost people their homes or their life savings, are they not guilty of felonious theft? Shouldn’t corporate criminals, particularly repeat offenders, be denied their freedom to practice business and have their license revoked?

If corporations were human, they would one day die. Unlike the finitude of human life, modern corporations can live forever under the law, growing in size and gaining political and economic power generation after generation.

It was not always so. When our nation was young, people recognized both the good things that business contributed but also the risks of concentrating too much power in the hands of businesses. Business charters were granted for a set period of time, commonly a generation, after which time the businesses would be dissolved. While businesses could still prosper and grow to have influence, they were kept from becoming "too big to fail"—a condition in which their size alone was a threat to the social order.

Corporations can’t have it both ways—insisting upon the political and civil rights that human beings are guaranteed under the Constitution, while at the same time refusing to live within the constraints of human life in terms of longevity, size, accountability and support of the communities that grant them their existence.

Scott Klinger is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

My Country 'tis of thee--Corporatocracy! Of Thee I Sing

2010-01-22T15:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/My-Country-tis-of-thee-C-by-Daniel-Patrick-Wel-100121-154.html

January 22, 2010
By Daniel Patrick Welch

I know, I know. I've seen the blogosphere screeching about the Death of Democracy now that the Supreme Court has rolled back restrictions on corporate donations to political campaigns. Whiners. Haven't you all stopped for even a moment to think how this might benefit humanity? Sure, sure, we're all aware of the downside, but would it kill us to think positive for a change?

I mean, let's face it: corporations have controlled the agenda since the Mayflower Compact duped those non-puritan losers into thinking it didn't matter where they "settled,' as long as they made some money. Come on, people--it's not as if corporate whoredom hasn't been a Staple(tm) of our 'democracy' from the beginning. The latest victory for corporate personhood just kicks the can a little bit further down Wall Street. Corporations are people too, dammit!

Do we really need such archaic forms of government. When business and information are moving around the globe at the speed of light, can we really afford to wait two, or four or even six years for an "election?' Get real. Corporations know how to spend money wisely, and if we give ourselves completely to their benign control, won't we all sleep just a little better at night? Now don't you smirk! (We own that gesture).

True, some changes will be in order. But we've been indulging this eighteenth century protocol crap for too long anyhow. Will the Gentleman yield? I yield to the Gentlelady from Texas. Come on. Besides, all these geographic obstacles have outspent their welcome, anyway. How about the Senator from Viacom? The Senator from Monsanto is up five points in heavy trading today". No more of this sillynanny powdered wig stuff. It's time to update our institutions: The Gentleman from United Health Care! As in, The Gentleman from United Health Care asks consent to revise and extend his remarks. And what's with this gender bias--aren't we beyond that? Think of the post-feminist breakthrough inspired by a whole new term, say, Gentlecorp.! As in, will the Gentlecorp. yield? I yield to the Gentlecorp..

And it's not just in the formal setting of CongressCorp. that these sweeping changes will take place. Think of the advances for humankind! Not since Upton Sinclair ruined the meat industry with his snarky, lopsided hatchet job will corporations have been so free to not tell it like it is. Imagine--no more cholera, no more botulism or e. coli. In fact, no more disease or pain of any kind, now that definitions and regulations will become a thing of the past, consigned to history with the swipe of a corporate pen. Just like the World Health Organization did to smallpox. Well, virtually.

Homelessness will disappear, along with hunger, poverty and war. Unemployment will vanish--who's counting? Want another double cheeseburger? Pile it on--coronary artery disease and diabetes, like obesity and racism, are things of the past when those silly rules that require reporting or cataloging them are gutted like the mad cows they are not (BSE doesn't exist without testing, genius!). Age of Aquarius? Yeah, right! Make way for the Age of Corporatarius!

Sure, the American Dream will change. But be honest, hasn't it always been in flux? From the dream of female suffrage to joining a union, from home ownership to the negro right to vote... all these quaint notions have come and gone over time. I remember a political cartoonist in the 80's lampooned the dream of a black man running for president. An older, African American man was bouncing a grandson on his knee: "President? No, son--but you may grown up to be Frontrunner!"

Such cynicism! Within a mere twenty years, a black corporation was elected to the very White House this cartoonist implied was out of reach. And that was in the bad old days when corporations had to connive and scheme to line the public trough with billions of dollars of corporate cash. Brand Obama shattered the beige ceiling for millions. And, in time, so will the SCOTUS ruling today, setting the scene for that day not long from now, in some town or godforsaken hamlet somewhere between Orlando and the dawn.... in some lonely, lowly, humblest of business schools, a Latina or African American Grandma will smile, her eyes brimming with tears as she looks on at her successful granddaughter: "I always knew that if you prayed hard enough and worked hard enough... that someday you might just...grow up to [sniff] own a United States Senator!

A Call to the People of the World to Support Iceland Against Financial Blackmail

2010-01-07T11:48:00.001-08:00

http://www.infowars.com/a-call-to-the-people-of-the-world-to-support-iceland-against-financial-blackmail/

A Call to the People of the World to Support Iceland Against Financial Blackmail
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Infowars.com
January 6, 2009

Editor’s note: Birgitta Jónsdóttir is the leader of The Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague, with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jonsdottir is a courageous leader in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic well-being and future of her country.

January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders. The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make, and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum. Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government, after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote on

December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy and dishonesty on the part of the government.

Every day throughout the debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local media or wikileaks.

Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country, spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer, a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers. The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland’s citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best economic interests of their nation.

Let’s also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000 under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the banks.

Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news, saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring us further down!

The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.

Love and rage from Iceland
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament

Documentation: I append links to the files about Icesave that were leaked to wikileaks, and which show how the EU member states blackmailed Iceland into the same corner the government helped push into by accepting the Icesave bill. This file also contains letters between the main financial adviser to the Iceland Finance Minister and Mark Flanagan of the IMF:
http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf and http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf

Right and Left Agree: Mandates are the Road to Neo-Feudalism

2009-12-31T11:49:00.001-08:00

http://firedoglake.com/2009/12/30/right-and-left-agree-mandates-are-the-road-to-neo-feudalism/

December 30, 2009 by firedoglake.com
Right and Left Agree: Mandates are the Road to Neo-Feudalism
by Jane Hamsher

There is tremendous fear rising on both the right and the left that the announced intention of Congress - to force every American to pay tribute to private corporations, with no government alternative - sets a dangerous and frightening precedent with implications far outside the scope of health care.

If the health care bill written by the Senate is passed, middle class Americans will be mandated to pay almost as much to private insurance companies as they do to the federal government in taxes, with the IRS acting as a collection agency for penalties of 2% of your annual income for refusing to comply.

This is just one of many recent measures that have brought liberal progressives and conservative libertarians together to join forces in opposition:

Democrat Alan Grayson worked successfully this year with Republican Ron Paul to pass legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, with 317 cosponsors as diverse as Dennis Kucinich and Michelle Bachmann.
On December 3 , the liberal Campaign for America's Future wrote a letter to the Senate opposing the reconfirmation of Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke until such an audit has been conducted. The letter was signed by James Galbraith, Robert Weisman, Chris Bowers and myself on the left, and Grover Norquist, Phillis Schlafly, and Larry Greenley on the right. Financial blogger Tyler Durden and young organizer Tiffiniy Cheng joined them.
Also on December 3 , conservative Jim Bunning joined liberal Bernie Sanders in placing a hold on the Bernanke nomination until the Fed had been audited.
On December 15 , CAF again sent a letter to the Senate Banking Committee, asking them to delay the vote on the Bernanke confirmation until Audit the Fed received a stand alone vote in the Senate. It was signed by Matt KIbbe of Freedomworks, John Tate of the Campaign for Liberty, and Grover Norquist on the right, and David Swanson of AfterDowiningStreet, Dean Baker and Robert Borosage on the left.
On December 21 , a letter was written opposing the mandate in the health care bill. It was signed by Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, Howie Klein of DownWithTyranny, Brad Friedman of Velvet Revolution, Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America on the left and Grover Norquist, Jim Martin of 60 Plus Association, Duane Parde of the National Taxpayers Union on the right.
On December 23 , Grover Norquist and I sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling for an investigation into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's conflicts of interest before the White House could lift the cap on the commitment to them from $400 billion to $800 billion with no Inspector General in place.
The individuals on both sides of the political spectrum who signed these letters agree on very little, but they do share both a tremendous concern for the corporatist control of government that politicians in both parties seem hell-bent on achieving.

In 2003, the Democrats railed in opposition when the Republicans passed Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage that didn't allow for negotiated drug prices. And in 2006 when Democrats took over Congress, one of the hallmarks of their first hundred days was passing legislation allowing Medicare to do so, supported by both Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. Of course, it had no chance of passing with George Bush in the White House.

Candidate Barack Obama said the ability to negotiate for drug prices would save $30 billion a year in medical costs. Yet when President Obama got to the White House, one of the first things he did was negotiate a secret deal with PhRMA that prevented drug price negotiations in exchange for $150 million in political advertising to help vulnerable Democrats in the House and in support of the health care bill.

In the Senate, Tom Carper said that because PhRMA had paid for the deal with political advertising, they were obligated to abide by it.

Jeff Sessions railed against the corrupt PhRMA deal that didn't allow for prescription drug price negotiation. He didn't mention that he voted for the 2000 bill without it, and when he had the chance to vote for it in the Senate in 2006, he voted "no" himself. Both parties are equally blameworthy - the only difference is who is in power and taking PhRMA's money.

The PhRMA deal is one of many negotiated by the White House this last summer which formed the underpinnings of the health care bill . From then on, it just became a matter of which member was going to extract what deals for their votes, and who was going to take the blame for cutting popular elements from the legislation that the corporate "stakeholders" didn't want.

As FDL's Jon Walker wrote recently , if the ability to cut health care costs hadn't been auctioned off to private corporations in exchange for political patronage, there would have been no government subsidy necessary to make insurance coverage affordable.

We are ceding control of the government to private corporations, not figuratively but literally. When the Senate Finance Committee bill was released earlier this year, the "author" was a former VP of Wellpoint . Liberals, conservatives and independents alike are all justifiably alarmed at what this represents.

It is tragic that health care for the poor is being held hostage to the corporatist agenda, a fig leaf to buy public support and disguise this bill for what it is. As blogger Marcy Wheeler noted in a piece called Health Care and the Road to Neo-Feudalism:

I understand the temptation to offer 30 million people health care. What I don't understand is the nonchalance with which we're about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance in doing so.

Just as those on the libertarian right were demonized by the Republican establishment for opposing the Iraq war during the Bush years, so progressives on the left are being pilloried for "damaging the cause" by joining with Republicans to oppose these extreme measures. It's ironic that the most virulent supporters of a President who ran on "bipartisanship" should reject it so vehemently when it becomes critical of the policies pursued by his White House.

This "right-left wraparound" is happening because politicians in both parties have become so unresponsive to popular sentiment: public support for stifling investigation of the bank bailouts just to protect the President are infinitesimally small, and fortunately Dennis Kucinich announced today that he would commence an investigation into the Fannie/Freddie bailout. But it's a testament to the extreme nature of what is happening to our government that such traditional political foes could find common cause in opposing it.

It's foolish to say that only those who agree with you on every issue are allowed to share your opinion when it comes to opposing something like the mandated bailout of Aetna - it isn't necessary to achieve health care reform. As Jon Walker notes , removing the mandate would reduce the CBO score and its inclusion in the health care bill with no government alternative is unacceptable for moral, political and policy reasons .

Candidate Obama himself opposed the mandate . Keith Olberman and Howard Dean concur.

As Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos said, "remove the mandate or kill this bill." We've opened a "war room" at Firedoglake with information about calling your member of Congress to demand that this provision to bail out the insurance industry be removed from the health care bill before they agree to cast their vote in favor of it.

And nobody needs to pass an ideological purity test before they can use it.

Join us to oppose the mandate. Enter the war room .

How The Left Serves the Corporatocracy

2009-12-13T04:30:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-The-Left-Serves-the-Co-by-John-Jonik-091212-155.html

December 12, 2009
How The Left Serves the Corporatocracy
By John Jonik

How Progressives and Liberals Can Hand the Nation's Public Health Care System Over to the Private Insurance Industry

Fourteen easy steps, requiring little or no effort

1) Never mention that private insurers have motive and duty to charge as much money as possible, indefinitely, and to deliver the least level of services as possible, indefinitely.

2) Ignore the fact that top for-profit insurers invest billions of what was ostensibly our health care money into the top health-damaging industries on Wall Street, including cigarette manufacturing, easily the most popularly-despised industry. Do not mention that those in certain income brackets, even anti smokers, may be compelled to provide insurers with revenues for insurers to invest in cigarette manufacturers and even tobacco pesticide suppliers.

3) Ignore that those insurers also invest billions in environmentally-destructive industries such as logging, oil, natural gas fracking, mountaintop removal coal mining, pesticides, genetically engineered crops, and so forth. Proper broadcasting of this info would inconveniently bring environmentalists and toxics activists and the like into Single Payer activism.

4) Remain Silent about for-profit insurers' massive investments in military contractors across the board---Lockheed, Boeing, GE, Halliburton"you name it. After all, if that info got out there, next thing you know, anti-war peace activists would join the move against Private Insurers and for Single Payer. Can't have that.

5) Refuse to address the matter of private insurer's huge contributions of what was supposedly our health care money to political candidates that we may oppose. Though this use of premium money undermines voting, election, and democracy principles, and possibly existing law, progressives and liberals must remain silent on this matter for the sake of insurance profits.

6) Do Not address the matter of private insurers providing massive funding, of what was supposed to be our health care money, to lobbying---for legislation we may oppose.

7) Never criticize or expose the health-care-for-all or universal health care groups that are all too happy to give all citizens no option but "affordable" private insurance health coverage. The thought that income-tax-funded health coverage is automatically affordable to all, not to mention less expensive by miles, is not to be tolerated.

8) Avoid any mention of the fact that for-profit insurers invest heavily in pharmaceuticals, even the ones that produce tobacco pesticides, in spite of the conflict of interest that cannot help but result in the insurers' promoting their own investment properties' drugs over others that may be safer, cheaper, and more effective.

9) Avoid questions about how chemical industry-linked insurers will simply not work to provide proper studies or patient diagnoses that may lead to indictment or exposure of their investment-properties' chemicals or other industrial health harming substances. Funding for patients' body-burden checks for industrial toxins and carcinogens is nowhere to be seen in current health care legislation even though such checks are imperative for a patient's medical diagnosis.

10) Never expose or mention that many health insurers invest in firms that conduct cruel animal experiments. Such progressives do not want energetic and active Animal Rights groups messing with the push towards privatization of public health insurance.

11) Do Not Mention that current health care legislation focuses on personal behavior, and exercise, diet, obesity, tobacco plants, and alcohol, but utterly ignores any and all industrial causes of sickness and death, such as pesticides, dioxin-producing chlorine, radiation, worker safety violations, food contamination, industrial pollution, vehicle exhaust, and so on.

12) Never raise a question about mandates being in violation of Constitutional Protections against Compulsory Speech---as so many in certain income brackets will be forced to speak, with words and money, to private insurers. The only ways to opt out would be a) leave the country, b) deplete assets to poverty level, or c) die.

13) Dare not mention that any government-subsidized health care involving private insurers means that everyone's tax money will, in significant part, go to a) private insurer's campaign contributions, b) insurers' lobbying, c) CEO bonuses, d) corporate jets, e) advertising, f) business conventions, g) and brass and furniture polish at corporate headquarters. None of that rises to anywhere near the level of a Public Interest justification to mandate patronage of private insurers, or to justify government subsidies to that industry.

14) And, Do Not Mention that those in income brackets where the mandate kicks in will be paying TWICE to private insurers---once directly, and again on April 15, to pay for those government subsidies for private insurance coverage of lower income brackets. The middle classes don't know how generous they are.

Upper classes can opt out via self insurance---as if a year's worth of health insurance can't be paid by income from the last day or two---or the last ten minutes. No sweat off their collective brow.

A need to 'dig beneath the corporate surface'

2009-12-01T12:51:00.001-08:00

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00415

A need to 'dig beneath the corporate surface'
COMMENTARY | November 10, 2009
By John Hanrahan
Hanrahan@niemanwatchdog.org

Simon Johnson of MIT says reporting like Ida Tarbell's of 100 years ago is badly needed today. One suggestion: the press should take on the financial institutions that helped cause the financial collapse, and are even benefiting from it.

Economist Simon Johnson wants to see modern-day muckrakers take on the nation’s economic collapse and the financial institutions that helped precipitate -- and are even benefiting from -- the collapse.

In an interview with Nieman Watchdog, Johnson, professor of global economics and management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, emphasized that he believes there are many fine journalists doing a good job of covering the economic news on a day-to-day basis. What’s largely missing from the mainstream press coverage of the last year, though, is “the long, in-depth, comprehensive dissection of a financial institution, going through all the nuances and details of how the institution is run, taking a skeptical look at the people who run it, and investigating how we got to where we are today.”

“I would like to see serious journalism, blow-by-blow exposes of these [financial institutions], in the manner of Ida Tarbell,” he said of one of the most prominent of the early 20th-century muckraking journalists, a group that also included Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Jacob Riis.

Tarbell, writing for McClure’s Magazine, published between November 1902 and October 1904 a 19-part series exposing the monopoly powers and collusive practices of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. With the help of an assistant, she began in 1900 to research the series that formed the basis for her book, “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” Her investigation was credited as the main underpinning of the federal antitrust action that led to the 1911 Supreme Court decision ordering the breakup of Standard Oil.

In 1999 a 36-person panel of prominent journalists, under the aegis of New York University’s journalism department, selected Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil as fifth in a list of the top 100 works of American journalism in the 20th century.

Tarbell’s methodology remains as valid for investigative reporters today as it was 100 years ago when there were no computers, no Internet, no shortcuts to obtaining information. As described in Columbia Journalism Review, Tarbell investigated Rockefeller and Standard Oil “by using documents – hundreds of thousands of pages scattered throughout the nation – then fleshing out her findings through well-informed interviews with the company's current and former executives, competitors, government regulators, antitrust lawyers, and academic experts." The dramatic story of Tarbell’s historic expose is vividly recounted by longtime investigative journalist and author Steve Weinberg in his book “Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.”

Unlike Tarbell who was given so much time by McClure’s to do her monumental, in-depth research, most of today’s good financial journalists, Johnson said, are under daily pressures to produce stories. He said these reporters should be given the time and resources to step back and investigate the major financial institutions involved in the economic crisis. Johnson urged reporters to approach their task with a skepticism that was often lacking in the run-up to the financial collapse. Too often before the collapse, Johnson said, some financial journalists became enamored of the heads of financial institutions they were covering and didn’t dig beneath the corporate surface.

In addition to the lack in the daily news media of in-depth investigations of the major financial institutions, Johnson said that this economic crisis thus far has not produced books equivalent to those from the “greed-is-good” era of the 1980s – books such as “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco” and “Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street.”

“Barbarians at the Gate,” by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, was characterized by Jon Friedman of MarketWatch in October 2008 – as the economy was collapsing – as “the best business book ever published.” Friedman said the book chronicled “the wild and crazy 1988 takeover battle for RJR Nabisco” – the biggest in U.S. history. He commented that it was “especially relevant today” as the nation suffers the consequences of economic excesses such as the 1980s signified

“Liar's Poker,” by Michael Lewis, was described by one reviewer as a partly autobiographical account that traces “the rise and fall of Salomon Brothers, mainly focusing on the mortgage bond department whose fortune closely traced the speculative bubble in various mortgage backed securities in the 80s.” The reviewer deemed the book as relevant today because the “current subprime crisis indeed echoes some of the themes in that book.”

As one prime example among many that would be worthy of the Tarbell treatment, Johnson cited the banks’ credit card companies. How, he asked, did we get to the point “where these companies can take such advantage of their customers? Where are the detailed stories that put a human face on this? Who are the people who run these companies? How can they justify what they do?” And who are the customers who suffer “because of the credit card industry’s practices.”

And, we would add, who are the credit card lobbyists and how do they operate? Which politicians protect the industry and benefit most from its largesse?

Johnson is not the only economist we talked to recently who raised the credit card issue. Harvard School of Government Professor Linda J. Bilmes told Nieman Watchdog that she would also like to see the mainstream press pursue in-depth investigations of credit card companies. In an interview, Bilmes said that her students, as well as other citizens who phone in when she appears on television or radio call-in programs, all ask the same thing, namely:

Why are credit card rates so high? At a time when banks can borrow money from the U.S. Treasury at the lowest rate possible -- zero percent as set by the Federal Reserve -- how can credit card companies charge their customers interest rates of 30 percent and possibly even more? Why are we, the consumers, not getting any advantage from those low interest rates that benefit the banks?

Students and callers to the call-in shows likewise flag another issue that Bilmes said merits more investigation by the press: What benefits are we consumers getting from the TARP (troubled asset relief program) funds? The implication of the questions is that the answer is none.

“This is a subject that requires the press to connect the dots -- how did consumers benefit from the bank bailouts?” Bilmes said. Also, “what was the effect of the decision not to nationalize the banks? These are questions I get all the time.”

Earlier this year, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (or Credit CARD Act) that imposed new restrictions on credit card companies. These included prohibitions on raising rates on outstanding card balances (still allowing rate changes for new purchases); prohibitions on rate increases in the first year an individual has a new credit card; limits on when rate increases can occur; requirements of fuller disclosures of card terms and conditions; and a requirement of 45 days’ notice to cardholders of interest rate, fee and finance charge increases. Most of these consumer protection provisions of the new law -- which was signed by President Obama in May -- will not take effect until February 22. Some provisions will not be phased in until late next year.

Although the Credit CARD Act does afford greater protections for consumers, an industry-oriented web site creditcard.com noted: “The new law does not cap how high interest rates can go. Nor does it limit when APRs [annual percentage rates] can be hiked on future purchases.” Additionally, the new law applies only to consumer credit cards, so “People with business or corporate credit cards will not have the same protections as people with personal credit cards...”

Separate from the Credit CARD Act, Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) has proposed legislation to cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent to halt what he calls “loan-sharking.” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has proposed legislation with a much higher cap -- 36 percent -- on credit card interest rates. Although some states have usury laws, a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision defanged those laws by allowing the law that applied in the state where the credit card company is headquartered to apply to all of the other states where the company does business. Consequently, most credit card issuers base their operations in those states -- Delaware and South Dakota -- with no (or lenient) usury laws.

Given a nine-month grace period from the date the new law was signed, the credit card companies immediately began “rushing to raise rates and tack on extra fees ahead” of the February 22 effective date, according to a recent Associated Press article. “In some cases,” the article continued, “rates are doubling to as high as 30 percent or more, even for people who pay their bills on time.”

Although the mainstream press has reported these rate increases, it has not delved deeply into how the credit card companies can justify such usurious rates. Perhaps profits are their ultimate justification. Banks generated $19 billion in 2008 from credit card interest charges and late fees and penalties. An industry analyst estimated that figure will climb to $20.5 billion for this year.

Recently introduced legislation to move the effective date for the credit card law from February to December 1 is pending in the House Financial Services Committee. But as the Associated Press reported recently, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, “while acknowledging that change would benefit consumers, rejected the idea. He said it would force the Fed to implement provisions of the new law without adequate public comment and could lead to ‘unintended consequences’.”

All of this and more make the credit card industry ripe for investigative journalists, said Johnson and Bilmes.

We’ll let Ida Tarbell have the last word on the philosophy of business ethics that reporters should apply in investigating financial institutions today:

“There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.”

One does not have to wonder what Tarbell and other muckrakers of the progressive and trust-busting era would have made of our modern-day, would-be financial titans.

Clunkers: Taxpayers paid $24,000 per car

2009-10-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6453268/Council-bans-parents-from-play-areas.html

Clunkers: Taxpayers paid $24,000 per car
Peter Valdes-Dapena
CNN
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:17 EDT

Auto sales analysts at Edmunds.com say the pricey program resulted in relatively few additional car sales.

A total of 690,000 new vehicles were sold under the Cash for Clunkers program last summer, but only 125,000 of those were vehicles that would not have been sold anyway, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the automotive Web site Edmunds.com.

Still, auto sales contributed heavily to the economy's expansion in the third quarter, adding 1.7 percentage points to the nation's gross domestic product growth.

"It is unfortunate that Edmunds.com has had nothing but negative things to say about a wildly successful program that sold nearly 250,000 cars in its first four days alone," said Bill Adams, spokesman for the Department of Transportation. "There can be no doubt that CARS drummed up more business for car dealers at a time when they needed help the most."

In order to determine whether these sales would have happened anyway, Edmunds.com analysts looked at sales of luxury cars and other vehicles not included under the Clunkers program.

Using traditional relationships between sales volumes of those vehicles and the types of vehicles sold under Cash for Clunkers, Edmunds.com projected what sales would normally have been during the Cash for Clunkers period and in the weeks after.

Edmunds.com's estimate of the ultimate sales increase generally matches what industry experts had thought, said George Pipas, a sales analyst with Ford Motor Co. But that misses the point, he said.

"The whole purpose of the program was to provide some kind of catalyst to kick-start the economy," he said, "and by all accounts the extra production that was added this year was a boost to the economy."

Ford was one of the biggest proponents of the Cash for Clunkers program and several Ford models were among the top sellers under the program.

While auto sales in September were hurt because auto dealership inventories were drained of products by the program, sales this month are already back on track or better, Pipas said. "I think the October sales results will show Clunkers is behind us and there's no more payback or inventories issues."

Hillary Clinton Gives 'Shameless Pitch' for Crooked Corporation in Russia

2009-10-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

http://rebelreports.com/post/217215838/hillary-clinton-gives-shameless-pitch-for-crooked

October 19, 2009 by Rebel Reports
Hillary Clinton Gives 'Shameless Pitch' for Crooked Corporation in Russia
by Jeremy Scahill

On a recent visit to Moscow, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was there to deliver a "shameless pitch" to the start-up Russian airline Rosavia to sign a major contract with Boeing to purchase a new fleet of aircraft from the US aerospace giant.

"This has been a consistent commitment on the part of the United States Government here in Moscow to promote this, because it really does illustrate very powerfully what we can do together," Clinton said during an October 13 visit to Boeing Design Center Moscow. She said the Export-Import Bank of the United States "would welcome an application for financing from Rosavia to support its purchase of Boeing Aircraft, and I hope that on a future visit I'll see a lot of new Rosavia-Boeing planes when I land in Moscow."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attends a news conference in Moscow, October 13, 2009.
(REUTERS/Ivan Sekretarev/Pool)Boeing is the leading aerospace company in the world and a major US defense contractor. Overall, it is the third largest US government contractor with some $24 billion in annual federal contracts. The company does more than $60 billion in annual sales.

Boeing is also a major recidivist corporate crook.

Since 1995, Boeing has paid $1.5 billion in fines to settle more than 30 instances of misconduct, according to the non-partisan Project on Government Oversight. According to POGO, these include multiple violations of the Arms Export Control Act, including selling defense technology to Russia and China showing "blatant disregard" for State Department directives. According to POGO, Boeing settled cases with the US government for:

In 1995-96, violating the Arms Export Control Act, involving the transfer of rocket data to China.
In 1998, violating the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations by exporting technical data and defense services to Russia, the Ukraine, Norway and Germany "without the required approvals from the Department [of State] and, in other circumstances, violated the terms and conditions of approvals that were provided by the Department."
In 2001, violating the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations in connection with its involvement in the Australian military's Wedgetail project "by violating the express terms and conditions of Department of State munitions license and other authorizations, by exporting defense articles and defense services without a munitions license or other authorization, and by omitting material facts from its applications for munitions licenses or other authorizations."
Between 2000 and 2003, violating the Arms Export Control Act. According to the State Department, Boeing sold to China and other countries 94 commercial jets with the gyrochip embedded in the flight boxes without obtaining an export license and in "blatant disregard" of State Department directives.

Other misconduct by Boeing, according to POGO, includes "unauthorized possession of defense information," gender discrimination, violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, the False Claims Act and anti-trust laws, water pollution in California, contaminating thousands of homes in Colorado with radioactive waste from the Department of Energy's Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, radioactive and toxic contamination near Los Angeles, over-billing and illegal hiring of government officials.

In Moscow, Clinton said: "During his last visit to Moscow in July, President Obama said that when our economies grow more intertwined, all of us can make progress. And I can't think of a better illustration than what we see here at the Boeing Design Center." Perhaps Boeing's victims and the prosecutors that pursued the company's repeated violations of US laws may have a different perspective from Clinton on that comment. But when said she was engaged in a "shameless pitch," Clinton was telling the truth: A shameless pitch for a shameless corporation.

The Widening Gap In America’s Two Tiered Society

2009-09-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/the-widening-gap-in-americas-two-tiered-society/

The Widening Gap In America’s Two Tiered Society
September 6, 2009

Emily Spence
Thomas Paine’s Corner
September 7, 2009

Americans, particularly ones from the middle class, need to realize that there are no core entitlements imparted by their government representatives, nor any other sources. They have none and should adjust their expectations accordingly.

If the U.S. populace somehow imagines that its members are viewed any differently than any other populations across the world that are used to produce maximal profits for the top economic class, there’s a rude awakening in store ahead. Further, most legislators simply do not care whether middle and lower class interests are or aren’t well served as long as they, themselves, can somehow make out well in the times ahead.

Besides, why should any Americans feel that they deserve to be treated more favorably by the transnational moneyed elites and their government backers than their counterparts across the rest of the world? As A. H. Bill reminds: “The richest 225 people in the world today control more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people. And… the three richest people in the world control more wealth than the poorest 48 nations.”

Occasionally someone making a staggering amount of money in a crooked sort of way might raise a few officials’ eyebrows or induce a mild reprimand. In addition, he might, occasionally, be singled out as the token fall guy so as to be made into a warning example as was Bernie Madoff. Most of the time, though, no action is usually undertaken to correct the situation when directors of major companies carry out activities that are, obviously, right on or over the edge of fraudulent practices.

As Barack Obama, perhaps hypocritically, chastened, “Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productive and sound business practices. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales.”

Yet, he, himself, showed no hesitation during his election campaign over collecting $40,925 from the bailout fund recipient and nearly bankrupt investment house Bear Stearns, $161,850 from the bailout fund recipient and mortgage underwriter Morgan Stanley, as well as benefits from countless other institutions that have received government favors at taxpayers’ expense. As such, it’s hard in actuality to deliver more than just a mild verbal rebuke about these organizations’ modus operandi if one picks up a personal windfall from not meddling. Thus, the financial corruption continues at all levels of government.

A case in point is the self-serving oil trader Andrew Hall. His relationship with Citigroup’s (C.N) Phibro energy-trading unit brought him approximately $100 million in 2008 despite that his parent company registered a net deficit of $18.7 billion for the same year and received $45 billion in TARP funds.

However, it’s been pointed out that he could moderately adjust his current level of gain and continue to maintain the same procurement pattern if he manages to stay out of the limelight. If he follows this plan in the near future, his earnings and bonuses won’t likely duplicate the $250 million personal compensation that he’d received in the past five years. Yet, he could still make out quite well all the same!

In any event, one has to question such lavish rewards considering that Citigroup suffered a 95% loss of its share value since 2007 in relation to which Phibro “occasionally accounts for a disproportionate chunk of Citigroup income.” At the same time, the U.S. government will shortly be the owner of 34% of this company. Put more bluntly, is Andrew Hall’s personal prosperity and propensity to add to his private art collection the best use of taxpayers’ funds?

As long as he’s a lavish beneficiary, would he care if they weren’t? As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once suggested: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.” Naturally, Andrew Hall aims to keep such a cozy arrangement intact.

Besides, his personal take is relatively inconsequential. It’s a mere pittance contrasted to the almost two and a quarter billion dollars grand total — roughly $2,217,800,000 — that the top ten U.S. business moguls collectively grossed as their own recompense in 2008. [1]

At the same time, it cannot not be expected, in a market based economy, that political influence is not also a purchased commodity. Clearly, opinions are bought and sold just as easily as are any other products and services with payment being campaign funds, such as Obama’s, from big industry; offers of high paying future jobs and other lavish advantages dangled as bait.

On account of this kind of shady deal, tax subsidies connected to executive pay amounted to $20 billion in 2008 according to United for a Fair Economy (UFE) and Institute for Policy Studies. (Imagine if this money, instead, were allocated towards improvements in public education, provision of a universal heath-care plan or any number of other programs that could uplift the American public as a whole.)

During the same period, average CEO pay, at $10.54 million, was 344 times higher than typical worker pay. This disparity, also, is generally indicative of a trend that increasingly funnels wealth upward rather than having it more equitably distributed across class lines.

Another sign of this ascendant drift can be found in the change between the first Forbes 400 report (1982) and its 2008 version. In 1982, an entrepreneur only needed slightly more than $100 million dollars to get on the list. By 2008, he wouldn’t be in the top 400 unless he’d garnered at least $1.3 billion. In other words, so much more wealth shot upward in the last twenty years that $100 million now is almost viewed as chump change in comparison to the new top gains.

In addition, Congressional reports have indicated that widespread tax avoidance tricks, like use of overseas banks that do not report amounts to the IRS, have cost taxpayers more than $2 billion annually. Certainly, these lost moneys could well be used to help people less fortunate. For example, the hidden $2 billion could be used to create job training programs for any of the one in nine Americans currently forced to rely on food stamps as an alternative to starvation.

To be eligible for such aid, a family of four, for example, has to have no more than $2,389 as its gross monthly income or 130% of the official poverty level and no more than $1,838 net monthly income or 100% of the poverty level. (There are few deductions and exceptions to the requirements allowed, along with limits for owned property value imposed, that further determine whether one meets qualifications.)

In other words, a typical household of four cannot receive this help if the gross income for the foursome exceeds $28,668 annually and, for an individual, the gross not to be surpassed is $14,088. Additionally, recipients cannot have a great deal of assets with a clearly defined, too high level of worth.

As such, they have to be nearly broke across the board. Meanwhile, it’s clearly disgraceful that more than 27,651,388 Americans are so extremely poor they require food assistance to try to make ends meet.

Even that help, though, is often not enough to prevent further poverty and many folks are unable to avoid outright destitution across the so-called wealthy U.S.A. So next, they lose their homes… and they lose them in droves.

The huge portion of Americans who do so are staggering: While the number of U.S. foreclosure filings climbed by more than 81% in 2008, the total is still sharply rising in 2009. In relation, 300,000 homes foreclosed per month from March to May in 2009 and 1.8 million homes represented the anticipated total for the first half of the year. With such a backdrop, one out of every 398 homes received a filing in April and a whopping 6.4 million homes are anticipated to be in foreclosure by mid-2011. Simultaneously, a record number of individuals, also, applied for bankruptcy.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t
In a similar vein, the jobless rate, despite some minor dips downward, is still seemingly on the rise. Therefore, the current number of out of work adults could well exceed 20% if all of the hopeless ones, who are no longer collecting unemployment benefits and who gave up looking for opportunities, are added into the mix.

Moreover, they will not be able to jumpstart the economy so long as they cannot find work, and especially work at a living wage. After all, how can anyone make lots of purchases or take out bank loans if he has no reasonable income? So it follows that even more retail and wholesale stores, along with banks, will go belly up.

At the same time, the supply side of the market, itself, has created labor troubles. This is because goods have been overproduced. Consequently, there is overstock piled high in warehouses and shipping containers across the world ready to resume its path to the market once the spending reinitializes. However, spending cannot resume as long as the money has largely flowed to the top economic tier and away from average former and low wage workers, who can not expect to have decent paying jobs to create more goods until the current product glut diminishes.

In other words, consumers can’t buy much when money’s tight and work won’t be provided when there’s an oversupply of merchandise largely produced in second world sweatshops whose workers are paid so little that they hardly can put food on their own tables let alone make many more extravagant purchases — ones like toothpaste, soap and shampoo. Besides, they, too, face employment opportunities diminishing because worldwide sales are down for many of the products that, previously, their companies too copiously produced.

Concurrently, the bailouts, oriented towards fixing the credit side of the equation, are not addressing these sorts of supply side problems. Therefore, they will not keep the financial collapse from worsening.

Alternately put, TARP and other payoffs to the self-serving, unconscionable banksters and Wall Street high rollers largely responsible for the downturn will not produce an abundance of jobs. So the reasonable salaries, ultimately needed to buy the wares to cause industrial output to resume, won’t materialize any time soon.

It’s rather simple to understand, really. So why don’t Ben Bernanke and his colleagues seem to notice that massive job loss, itself, needs to be addressed posthaste? Why hasn’t a public works program been initiated? Why don’t they grasp that the act of offshoring all kinds of American jobs to maximize profits at the top tier does not ensure that products will be avidly snapped up by a greatly unemployed and underemployed public?

Since they, apparently, don’t understand, the downturn, with a few small upward twists, will remain in its plunging slide, which in turn will create further layoffs. All the while, the über-wealthy and their corporate supporters, such as most members of Congress, will continue to pamper themselves with capital largely derived from struggling taxpayers and massive loans that raise the federal deficit.

More to the point, how could the slump not last when the affluent elites gamble away huge fortunes comprising of their own and others’ money while manufacturing bubbles and Ponzi schemes in the process? How could anything change when they keep amassing more and more assets for themselves while indifferent to their impact on society as a whole?

Such practices as theirs, obviously, cannot sustain the American middle and under classes and it cannot buoy up the utmost bottom rung either. On account, scores of individuals of all ages continue to wind up in tent cities or ensconced on public park benches. (Supposedly, families with children represent the fastest growing subset of the homeless population in the U.S.A. at present and the average age of a homeless person is nine years old.)

When the upper-crust keeps getting richer by taking an ever greater portion of the overall wealth and government schemes assure that the process continues, nearly everyone else becomes increasingly cash poor. When every now and then big investors suffer hefty losses, the government steps in to shore them up again and again. However, this practice, clearly, does not help the populace in general. The evidence that it does not can be seen everywhere across the American landscape and the entire world.

It follows, then, that, “in the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2004, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.3% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.3%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.2%…”, according to G. William Domhoff, a sociology professor at University of California at Santa Cruz. [2]

Another way to measure the shift in wealth is by noting some of the corporate trends, themselves. As Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, at the Institute for Policy Studies, point out:

Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).

The Top 200 corporations’ sales are growing at a faster rate than overall global economic activity. Between 1983 and 1999, their combined sales grew from the equivalent of 25.0 percent to 27.5 percent of World GDP.

The Top 200 corporations’ combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10.

The Top 200s’ combined sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) living in ‘’severe” poverty.

While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the world’s workforce. [3]

Especially exemplifying this type of corporate immensity is the Wal Mart company. For example, the Walton heirs have a collective worth of around $65 billion and over 1.7 billion shares, or 43%, of Wal Mart stock in addition to earning $29 billion off the stock price rise alone from November 2007 to June 2008.

Meanwhile, the Waltons pay their jean laborers in Nicaragua approximately $1.50/ day. Simultaneously, their average U.S. workers are given wages of about $12,000/ annum causing a full one half of Wal Mart’s 720,000 employees to qualify for food stamps.

At the same time, the clearly exploitive Wal Mart business model is considered an unqualified success — one that should be more often duplicated across the board. After all, it shows the capitalistic free market with its best possible outcome — profits beyond imagination and the American Dream come true (for the few who manage to take unfair advantage of the actual wealth producers)!

Perhaps, though, the best way to look at the new arrangement between citizens, State and the rising corporate structures is through this superlative summation by Benito Mussolini:

The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. [4]

Even if Benito Mussolini’s position has an alarmingly familiar ring to it, no one still should expect U.S. legislators to create laws any time soon that would enact tax code changes in order to remove subsidies that encourage overpayment to executives and that cost taxpayers $20 billion a year. Indeed, nobody should expect any major changes at all that would level the financial playing field, remove a sense of economic injustice or bring back jobs and reasonable wages to the American people.

As Joel H. Rassman, Toll Bros. CFO in 2006, explained about CEO Robert I. Toll’s $20 million compensation while shareholders were suffering a 22% loss: “I have yet to meet the person who has enough money.”

Like Toll, a majority of Congressional representatives, of whom many are multi-millionaires, apparently imagine that they never have quite enough for themselves and justify their dodgy choices accordingly. They, also, know who butters their bread and it surely is not the increasingly impoverished average U.S. citizens, who continue to be the indirect victims of corporate rapacity and pathetic corporate oversight by executives and Congressmen alike.

In relation, one wonders when a significant number of Americans will, finally, recognize that they’ve been had. Put another way by Andrew Greeley: “It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do.”

This explanation in mind, we need not worry as much about the terrorists from abroad as the terrorists from above and the duped voters who repeatedly fall for political candidates pandering to this broadly malignant upper class. The latter bunch and their sycophantic legislative admirers, more than any foreign guerrillas, are leading the world’s wealthiest nation into ever deeper ruin.

REFERENCES:

[1] Top CEO collected $702 mln in 2008: US survey – Yahoo! News
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090813/ts_alt_afp/usbusinessexecutivepaypolitics_20090813190411).

[2] Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html).

[3] CorpWatch : Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power (www.corpwatch.org/article. php?id=377).

[4] Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome, ‘Ardita’ Publishers. pp. 133-135.

Corporatizing Social Security to Wal-Street

2009-08-20T15:17:00.001-07:00

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/

THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2009

GOP STILL Plans to Steal Your Social Security
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The ascension (apotheosis?) of every GOP 'President' is inevitably accompanied by much GOP salivating over the prospects of getting their greedy, crooked mitts on your Social Security. Thus it was just over eight years ago when George W. Bush assumed (and I do mean 'assumed') the highest office in the land. Rest assured, despite the financial implosions of late, the GOP still plots to rob you blind, screw you silly and leave you a worthless slug on the night stand!

The GOP licked its greedy chops as the stupidest man, the grossest idiot since Warren Harding raised his hand and dared to swear on a holy book! The same gang of mendacious robber barons who made fortunes short-selling stocks on 911, profited from mass murder, and, later, plunged this nation into a new 'Great Depression' saw in the rise of George W. Bush another opportunity to steal your Social Security and buy Baltic Avenue with it!

Unlike GOP's 'trickle down' theory --pie in the sky but only if you are already very, very wealthy --Social Security did precisely what it was intended to do! It lived up to its billing, perhaps exceeded it! It is endangered not because it failed but because it succeeded! It is targeted now because the upper one percent of the population which owns more that about 95 percent of the rest of us combined is eager to seize control of ALL of the nation's wealth. Keep in mind --these are the arrogant bankers and snot nosed whiz kids who short sold stocks on 911!

Social Security is the bright spot. It has maybe some mild financial problems, several decades out, and here we are—he [Bush] wants a crisis there, partly to distract from the very real crises in other places, and there you go.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Krugman, can you explain how Social Security works? Because it’s not just President Bush. If he was raising questions about it with a little megaphone on the steps of the White House, it would not have the kind of effect it was having without all of the media, it seems, amplifying the idea that Social Security is broken. It’s bankrupt.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right. And of course, that’s really a question about the media, not about Social Security. Social Security is a program which has been traditionally run. It looks like a retirement fund, and it is not exactly. What it really is is a government program with a dedicated tax. We take the payroll tax and it’s used to pay benefits to retirees. And 20-plus years ago, the commission led by Alan Greenspan said, you know, we are going to have this problem as the baby boomers reach retirement age. We will have a higher ratio of retirees to workers, and we better get ready for it. Social Security, the payroll tax was increased. There were some other things, a small rise in the retirement age set in motion. So that Social Security would run a surplus, which would be used to accumulate a trust fund, and this would tithe us over, some ways into the aging of the population. And that on its own accounting is working just fine. I mean, one of the things that we need to know is that the estimates of the day at which the trust fund runs out, just keep on receding further into the future, because the program is doing so well at running surpluses.
--Paul Krugman, Economist, Published Comments on Democxracy Now

It was not sufficient that GOP policies had enriched only the very, very rich. As a result, just one percent of the nation now owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined! But the greedy bastards wanted to own all of it! They wanted your retirement! They wanted the monies you paid into Social Security over the course of your lifetime! Joe the Plumber recently called Social Security a joke --not because he understands why it is coveted by the GOP. He is merely the recipient of the 'memo'. Stealing your Social Security is still very high on the GOPs list of great things it wants to fuck up permanently! We should take Joe and Palin seriously. The world is endangered by its idiots.

Joe the Plumber may be the GOP 'plug in' du jour! They act in consort like the Borg. They are set up in 'cells' like the 'terrorists' they would have us believe they hate so much. The GOP is not loyal to the principles of our founding; GOP attack dogs attack 'liberals', progressives, and the just plain ornery folk--like ME! And for all the wrong reasons! Because of this 'backward thinking', these misplaced values and priorities we keep losing unwinnable wars of naked aggression, wars that should never have begun in the first place. Because of it, we are now financially and morally bankrupt! Now --the GOP wants a bailout: YOUR Social Security!

Now --what if the GOP had succeeded already? Simply --the Social Security trust fund would be collapsed and millions of seniors would be lucky to find a place to set up a tent!

Let's put the GOP's fraudulent scheme to steal Social Security into perspective.

Social Security routinely runs a surplus, call it a profit if you will! It is this 'surplus' that is coveted by Wall Street! They want to plunder your monies as Bush plunder the taxes you pay every year as a good citizen! The GOP and Wall Street barons want to 'speculate' with the only retirement that millions will ever have! They want to enrich themselves on the interest and/or returns! Do you really think these greedy, latter-day Gordan Gecko's have your interests at heart? Not a frickin' chance!

During George W. Bush's first term I wrote and posted the following on NPR's infamous 'How's Bush Doing' board:

The crisis in 2015 -2018 won't be Social Security! It will be, rather, the utter bankruptcy of the United States and the profligate, incompetent policies of George Bush!

Now --if you are under 20 and still believe yourself immortal, my remarks will mean little to you. But here they are: knowing what we now now about the crookedness, the utter incompetence of an administration that I believe betrayed the people and their Constitution, aren't you glad we did NOT entrust those bastards with farming out the only retirement that millions might ever see to the greedy, shallow, mendacious liars that run Wall Street with their fascist buddies in DC?

You Give Me Real Money and I Will Give You a Worthless Piece of Paper!

It was said at the time that the Wall Street experts would actually turn a profit on YOUR money. Oh! I get it! I give you my money and you give me a worthless piece of paper! Uh Huh! I would have liked to write that time and events proved me correct but, in fact, the crash happened even sooner than I expected or predicted. Anyway --aren't you glad Bush did not steal your money?

It was said that the experts on Wall Street could 'invest' your monies. Sure! So can I Send me a check? I have lots of places I could put YOUR money! Fact is, you don't need no steenkin experts! Everyone can set up private accounts while you still have a job, that is before the GOP economy crashed and burned. My advice at the time was:
...you can still have Social Security to fall back on should GOP policies utterly destroy the stock market.

Keep in mind that I wrote that italicized sentence in 2003. I saw what the GOP had in mind and what has, in fact, come to pass. Given the global financial debacle, what logical rationale is there for incurring an additional debt of some 4.5 trillion dollars? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the truly elite (just one percent of the US population) are currently picking up the bargains and lickin' their greedy chops. They are as we write feasting upon the carcasses!

The Cure'll Kill Ya!

Right wing assaults on Social Security are of the 'stealth' kind, advertised as efforts to 'save' Social Security! As we would say in Texas: "Wah hale! The cure'll kill ya''! The assumption that the GOP wants to save Social Security or the retirement of this nation's elderly in ANY form is naive. As much was admitted by smarmy Dick Armey who admitted to Wall Street Week that he had been trying to abolish Social Security for the last thirty years.

There are several things wrong with "Privatization" in other words "corporatization":

Why 'corporatize Social Security when it is, in fact, working just fine as it is'? If I should want a 'provate account' what is preventing me from doing so? When millions have recently lost every penny in 'private accounts', what --please tell me --is the attraction they hold? What raison d'etre exists but to further enrich the cronies on Wall Street?

All government need do to fix Social Security is to rescind the profligate tax cuts since Ronald Reagan, tax cuts which failed to create a single new job, failed to increase tax revenues, failed to increase capital expenditures and expansions as promised by "supply side" bullshit!

"Privatization", in fact, 'corporatization', is just GOPSPEAK for you give me real money which will enrich ONLY Wall Street insiders and I will give you a worthless piece of paper!

Besides --Social Security may very well be the only government program that is currently turning a "profit"!
There is NO crisis!

Social Security was an easy target of conservative demagogues. (I know --that's redundant) Slimy ilk like Rush Limbaugh are not merely liars, they attack reason itself, the very processes by which fact and truth are determined. Latter day "conservatives" think differently and, therefore, arrive at false conclusions for the wrong reasons. Listening to Limbaugh, one is tempted to believe that "two" versions of the human brain have evolved. But take heart --when "God" passed out brains, "we" got the version that works. Limbaugh and his adoring ilk got the one that will be recalled, version 13.666!

Those who would make a bargain with Satan will have to live --and die --with a really, really bad deal!

During the so-called "Republican Revolution", when the GOP staged a budget stand-off with Clinton, it was clear that this new breed of so-called "conservatives", in truth, subversive radicals, viewed the long practiced art of compromise as synonymous with defeat. Their inflexibility backfired! Clinton won, leading to the eventual and much deserved disgrace and downfall of Newt Gringrich. Would that he had taken the GOP with him into hell!Someone forgot to place a convenient revolver on his nightstand! But Newt would not have done the right thing.

Rush and his ilk have popularized fallacy, celebrated anti-intellectualism, and sought to make it 'cool' to be stupid! Limbaugh wallows in sloppy thinking and appeals to our most ignoble motives. He personifies demagoguery, oozes duplicity! He is smarm itself. Hearing Limbaugh, one does one's best to suppress the urge to puke or walk on all-fours!

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.
--Werner Herzog

Herzog has not yet looked into the eyes of a gopper, more terrifying than chickens! It may sound oxymoronic to speak of 'intelligent conservatives', neither intelligent nor truly conservative. Real conservatives would never have tolerated the astronomical deficits run up by Mssrs Reagan and Bush Jr. There must surely be some conservatives still smart enough to understand that the demagogic demonization of 'liberals, liberals' leads inexorably to a one-party, fascist, totalitarian state. Therefore, we must conclude that that is, in fact, the hidden agenda. They only pretend to be stupid and, admittedly, they do a good job of it.

Conservatives prefer a one party, fascist state in which the office of President is replaced with 'Der Fuhrer'! Will they be so enthusiastic 'when the last law [is] was down' and Der Fuhrer turns 'round on them? A fanatic GOP 'fuhrer' need only cite Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes who said "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" to justify the round up, encampment and wholesale disposal of people they don't like!

Save the children
Throughout the conservative movement and the ranks of Limbaugh's mis-informed minions there is an appalling ignorance of history that betrays this nation's utter failure to educate its young. Texas is the best example and most notable. Under Bush Jr and his successor, Rick Perry, Texas now beats out Mississippi for DEAD LAST in 'high school graduations'.

Failing to graduate high school is a guarantee that you will lead a life of poverty or crime or both! It is not coincidental that Texas --thanks to the GOP --is called the 'gulag state of Texas for the growth of its corporate run prison system, in truth a fascist gulag that is paid handsomely from the public trough to warehouse the millions of children who were --in fact --left behind to starve, fail and be warehoused by the fascists in Texas. To save these children, I urge that Texas be invaded and occupied until a responsible and competent government can lock up the current fascist regime and restore the 'rule of law' there.

There is an outrageous lack of outrage about this corporate take-over and occupation of Texas. What can be said of a population so addled, misinformed, uniformed and soporific that it doesn't even notice when it has been screwed without so much as a tip on the table? Does anyone in Texas care that their state has been stolen and is now run by Nazis? Clue for Texans: the corporate fat cats in skyscrapers in New York and Houston do not give a shit about you nor Hank Williams nor Larry Gatlin! You've been had! Wake the fuck up!

The American psychologist tasked with preventing Nazi war criminals from offing themselves before they could be duly hanged, said that "evil" was the utter lack of empathy! You find precisely that throughout the GOP rank and file --Rush Limbaugh's adoring throng. These 'people' defended torture and and state-sponsored murder at Abu Ghraib! They are short-sighted. They will not understand that if anyone can be victimized by unrestrained state power, so too, can they! No one is safe as long as a fascist holds so much as the office of dog catcher!

Tomorrow Belongs to Me!
People have an unrealistic idea of "evil"! Apparently, evil is a cartoon caricature --gleaming eyes, horns, pitchfork, snarls, drooling, and incantations to Satan, Bush Jr, or the Skull and Bones. No! Evil is Reinhard Heydrich conducting a gourmet luncheon meeting of Reich bureaucrats about how best to make legal the mass murder of European jews! Evil is Dick Cheney having a meeting with this 'Energy Task Force' and carving up the oil fields of Iraq before Bush's 911 would give them the pretext to invade! On both occasions, I believe, a quite civilized lunch and coffee were served amid veddy, veddy witty conversation! As Hannah Arendt said, evil is banal!

Had Heydrich and his Nazis succeeded, they would have gloated, patted each other on the back! What jolly good fellows they all were! They would have shared a few brews and toasted the 'Final Solution'. Heil Mein Fuhrer! They might have sang: Deutschland Uber Alles, The Nazi National Anthem or Tomorrow Belongs to Me! They were, after all, just good ol' boys ridding the world of 'vermin'. Or --they were all just good ol' boys hoping to get the terrorists from between them and 'all that oil!"

The GOP celebration of shortsighted, pyrrhic victories will in the longer term destroy America if it has not does so already.

Certainly --the America that I knew is already destroyed. The Bill of Rights means very little even now with Obama's victory. I have yet to hear a resounding denunciation from this administration with regard to Bush's assault upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. America without the Bill of Rights is nothing! Without the Bill of Rights, the US is just another huge, unfeeling, corporate dominated bureaucracy!

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it!
--Georges Santayana, American Philosopher

We are, thus, condemned! Humankind has been at war since our evolution beyond the "hunter/gatherer" stage. Since someone decided that the land upon which he grew a crop was his, war has been incessant. Because "winners" procreate, the "war" gene is reinforced over generations. That explains why history repeats itself and 'facts' mean very little or nothing at all! DNA will trump reason and facts every time. Those most enthralled by inherited and irrational war mongering are of the same demographic segment who would discount evolution on religious or superstitious grounds.

The 'conservative' hostility towards intellectuals is blind to obvious parallels with other fascist states past and present.
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
--H. L. Mencken

And Voltaire said:
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities!
--Voltaire

Voltaire's statement is not just a well-phrased aphorism chosen because it sounds 'literary'. It could be stated as a mathematical formula when 'atrocities' are actually counted and made a 'statistic', when popular myths and/or outright lies and falsehoods are identified and correlated demographically! Think of it! With such a formula, an enlightened state could identify those states and territories most likely to nurture a state-sponsored mass murder, a state sponsored torture, a state sponsored war of naked aggression as we have most recently witnessed by the United States of America. My country! May God help us all!

At last, I recommend one read Voltaire. When Voltaire learned of Catholic atrocities in Toulouse, he literally papered Europe with his polemics --so outraged was he! Voltaire was no effete 'scholoar'. Today, he would be a kick ass blogger, an activist, a gonzo, counter-culture journalist like Hunter Thompson, or, more likely, an acerbic latter-day H. L. Mencken pooh-poohing fundies down in Dayton! He would be a thorn in the GOP's sorry hide. He would skewer the liars on K-Street and Wall Street! He would laugh at the devil himself and wither him with a phrase!

Weight of government’s hand on capitalism’s scale

2009-08-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/116460.html

Weight of government’s hand on capitalism’s scale
By John Buell

To advocate a new, robust stimulus package, as in my last column, invites some predictable comments. Government is inefficient, politically motivated in its choice of winners and losers, and out to pad its own wallets.

Of course, those who make these criticisms assume the market economy will do better. I have been told repeatedly that although private business makes mistakes markets are always “self-correcting.” In my critics’ vision, numerous businesses compete. Consumers have a relatively good understanding of the products they are purchasing. All share a willingness to abide by property relations and a commitment to economic growth.

One might call this model farmers market capitalism. This is the world in which Adam Smith’s invisible hand works to allocate resources efficiently. Lazy or inefficient farmers don’t survive and the quest to make more money serves a larger social good.

Whether this model ever worked as advertised is an open question. Some see in Smith’s invisible hand the will of a beneficent and omnipotent God. They regard the model as fundamentalist theism by other means. Even in its own idealized terms, this model, with its insistence on numerous competitors, may forgo some of the large-scale technologies that advance long-term economic growth. Even the idealized model may harbor some tensions of its own.

The larger question today, however, is whether a model that so dominates the American political psyche has anything to do with most economic activity today. Consider recent headline items. Asked by Nancy Pelosi to explain from where the billions to bail out AIG and other financial megastars was coming, Ben Bernanke argued than any attempt to assess where and under what conditions its money was flowing would amount to “a takeover of monetary policy by the Congress.”

Along similar lines, the White House has recently come under fire for assuring the drug industry it will oppose a House proposal to allow the government to negotiate drug prices and extract additional drug company savings. The White House may eventually have to back down, but the mere negotiation of such a secret agreement speaks volumes.

Had a reader arrived from Mars or from a Milton Friedman text, he or she might assume our government was standing up for the principles of the free market. The Fed should regulate interest rates absent any evil political intervention — like cheapening the currency to help debtors. Drug companies should negotiate with individual consumers, just like tomato lovers.

The only problem is the government has already intervened massively in both industries — on the side of corporations. Drugs are already priced well above the cost of production thanks to government patents. Purchase of these overpriced drugs is subsidized through Medicare’s prescription drug program. The resulting corporate windfall is defended as encouraging research on new drugs. Most of the money, however, goes to misleading ads and development of generally superfluous me-too drugs. As several orthodox economists have pointed out, the U.S. would get more for its drug dollars through increased funding of basic research and by offering prizes directly to pioneering research scientists.

Thanks to the Fed’s secrecy, we know less about its largess, but research on Goldman Sachs by Nomi Prins shows that the firm is profitable only by virtue of loan guarantees and other subsidized assets from the Fed. Business Week has also recently exposed the ways many large investment banks are now gambling with taxpayer money to resume the high-risk strategies that landed them — and U.S. taxpayers — in deep trouble.

Both industries in turn recycle some of the vast profits into campaign contributions (hundreds of millions in the last quarter). Key legislators in rural states, where media buys are relatively cheap, are the biggest beneficiaries.

So much for “capitalism” as an alternative to the wasteful government. Most government programs, at least by measure of size, aren’t the child of grass-roots or populist uprisings. They are a collaborative effort of government and the corporate sector. Corporations are the senior partners. The results have been harshly inegalitarian and wasteful.

I value farmers markets, but we should not return to an economy modeled on them. If we want justice and efficiency, our responsibility is not to end government’s role but to embrace the complicated, perpetual tasks of limiting corporate power and renegotiating a more democratic and transparent government.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers may contact him at jbuell@acadia.net.