Olbermann and Bernie Sanders on the New Amendment Drive to Overturn Citizens United

By Sarah Seltzer | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at December 10, 2011

There's no question that the political tide is turning thanks to Occupy Wall Street--because there's actually a political push to ensure that corporations are NOT people, to overturn the "free speech rights" given to corporations by the Supreme Court's troubling Citizens United decision.

ThIt comes in the form of the "The Saving American Democracy Amendment" sponsored by Bernie Sanders in the senate, and Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida in the House-- a similar measure has been introduced in Colorado. 

It reads:

Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people.

Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.

Corporations may not make campaign contributions.

Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.

Last night Sanders appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss this new amendment, how difficult it will be to pass, and how important it is to get all Americans behind the effort.

Watch the video below.

How Corporations Became "People"

Thanks to Corrupt Courts Working for the 1%

Occupiers could direct their energy not only at Wall Street, but also at its enablers, in Congress, and ultimately, at the high court. 

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on November 25, 2011

Perhaps there were truly free markets before the industrial revolution, where townspeople and farmers gathered in a square to exchange livestock, produce and handmade tools. In our modern world, such a market does not exist. Governments set up the rules of the game, and those rules have an enormous impact on our economic outcomes.

In 2007, the year of the crash, the top 1% of American households took in almost two-and-a-half times the share of our nation's pre-tax income that they had grabbed in the 40 years folliwing World War Two. This was no accident – the rules of the market underwent profound changes that led to the upward redistribution of trillions in income over the past 30 years. The rules are set by Congress – under a mountain of lobbying dollars – but they are adjudicated by the courts.

The Supreme Court (SCOTUS), with a right-wing majority under Chief Justice John Roberts, has become a body that leans too far toward the “1%” to be considered a neutral arbiter. So whether they know all the ins and outs of the court's profound rightward shift or not, those protesting across the country as part of the Occupy movement are motivated by its corruption as well.

While conservatives constantly rail against judges "legislating from the bench," it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That's what a 2005 study by Yale University legal scholar Paul Gewirtz and Chad Golder found. According to the scholars, those justices most frequently labeled "conservative" were among the most likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress, while those most frequently labeled "liberal" were the least likely to do so.

A 2007 study by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein looked at the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies, and found a similar trend. The Supreme Court's "conservative" justices were again the most likely to engage in this form of "activism," while the "liberal" justices were most likely to exercise judicial restraint.

The most notorious case of activism by the Roberts court was its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, which overturned key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, rules that kept corporations -- and their lobbyists and front groups (as well as labor unions) --- from spending unlimited amounts of cash on campaign advertising within 60 days of a general election for federal office (or 30 days before a primary).

At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

To arrive at their ruling, the court’s conservative majority stretched the Orwellian legal concept known as “corporate personhood” to the limit, and gave faceless multinationals expansive rights to influence our elections under the auspices of the First Amendment.

“They wanted to hear the possibility that that’s the way the constitution would read to them,” said Grayson. “So they picked an issue out of the air that nobody had conceived of [as a First Amendment case] because 100 years of settled law meant that corporations cannot buy elections in America, and they not only allowed corporations to buy those elections, but they made it a Constitutional right.”

Early on, the plaintiffs themselves had decided not to base their case on the First Amendment. It was the conservative justices themselves who ordered the case re-argued fully a month after a ruling had been expected, asking the lawyers to present the free speech argument they’d earlier abandoned.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens noted that it was a highly unusual move, and that the court had further ruled on a Constitutional issue that it didn’t need to consider in order to decide the case before it -- the diametric opposite of the principle of “judicial restraint.” He charged that the conservative majority had "changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law."

That's nothing new. The Citizens United decision simply advanced a bizarre legal doctrine, developed during the last 150 years, that effectively codifies the power of corporate interests.

Corporate personhood's origin in English law was reasonable enough; it was only by considering companies “persons” that they could be taken to court and sued. You can’t sue an inanimate object.

During the 19th century, however, the robber barons, aided by a few corrupt jurists deep in their pockets, took the concept to a whole new level in the United States. According to legal textbooks, the idea that corporations enjoy the same constitutional rights as you or I was codified in the 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. But historian Thom Hartmann dug into the original case documents and found that this crucially important legal doctrine actually originated with what may be the most significant act of corruption in history.

It occurred during a seemingly routine tax case: Santa Clara sued the Southern Pacific Railroad to pay property taxes on the land it held in the county, and the railroad claimed that because states had different rates, allowing them to tax its holdings would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th  Amendment. The railroads had made the claim in previous cases, but the courts had never bought the argument.

In a 2005 interview, Hartmann described his surprise when he went to a Vermont courthouse to read an original copy of the verdict and found that the judges had made no mention of corporate personhood. “In fact,” he told the interviewer, “the decision says, at its end, that because they could find a California state law that covered the case ‘it is not necessary to consider any other questions’ such as the constitutionality of the railroad’s claim to personhood.”

Hartmann then explained how it was that corporations actually became “people”:

In the headnote to the case—a commentary written by the clerk, which is not legally binding, it’s just a commentary to help out law students and whatnot, summarizing the case—the Court’s clerk wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The discovery “that we’d been operating for over 100 years on an incorrect headnote” led Hartmann to look into the past of the clerk who’d written it, J. C. Bancroft Davis. He discovered that Davis had been a corrupt official who had himself previously served as the president of a railroad. Digging deeper, Hartmann then discovered that Davis had been working “in collusion with another corrupt Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field.” The railroad companies, according to Hartmann, had promised Field that they’d sponsor his run for the White House if he assisted them in their effort to gain constitutional rights.

Hartmann noted that even after the ruling, the idea of corporate personhood remained relatively obscure until corporate lawyers dusted off the doctrine during the Reagan era and used it to help reshape the U.S. political economy.

Nike asserted before the Supreme Court . . . as Sinclair Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from discrimination —the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the slaves after the Civil War—and that communities that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products. With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively helpless and fragile human beings.

Such is the power of a corrupt judiciary.

Returning to the present, while Citizens United is arguably the Roberts court's most widely criticized ruling, it was not the only time the majority has bent over backward to protect the interests of corporate America and the 1%. Legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick, writing on Slate, condemned the court's “systematic dismantling of existing legal protections for women, workers, the environment, minorities and the disenfranchised.” Those who care about spiraling inequality, she wrote, “need look no further than last term at the high court to see what happens when—just for instance—one’s right to sue AT&T, one’s ability to being a class action against Wal-Mart, and one’s ability to hold an investment management fund responsible for its lies, are all eroded by a sweep of the court’s pen.”

The takeaway is that those camping out in town squares across the country must direct their energy not only at Wall Street, but also at its enablers, in Congress, and ultimately, at the high court.
 

Congressman McGovern Introduces the People's Rights Amendment

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT BILL TO OVERTURN CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

‘Corporations Are Not People’ 28th Amendment

‘PEOPLE’S RIGHTS AMENDMENT’ WOULD REPEAL CITIZENS UNITED RULING AND THE CORPORATE RIGHTS DOCTRINE

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced today a constitutional amendment bill to overturn the US Supreme Court’s January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and to make clear that corporations are not people with rights under the US Constitution. The introduction of the bill – the “People’s Rights Amendment” -- marks a major breakthrough in the growing movement across the country to end corporate personhood and restore democracy to the people.

“Corporations are not people,” said Congressman McGovern. “They do not breathe. They do not have children. They do not die in war. They are artificial entities which we the people create and, as such, we govern them, not the other way around.”

“The Citizens United ruling,” McGovern continued, “marks the most extreme extension of a corporate rights doctrine which has eroded our First Amendment and our Constitution. Now is the time for a 28th Amendment that lifts up the promise of American self-government: of, for, and by the people.”

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC swept away a century of precedent barring corporate political expenditures and unleashed a torrent of corporate spending in US elections. The ruling applied the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, a doctrine which corporations have used in recent years to strike down various federal and state laws designed to protect the public interest.

“We are proud to stand with Congressman McGovern at this historic moment,” said John Bonifaz, the co-founder and director of Free Speech For People, a national non-partisan campaign launched on the day of the Citizens United ruling which authored the People’s Rights Amendment and has been mobilizing support throughout the nation for its enactment. “For the first time, the United States Congress now has the opportunity to debate a constitutional amendment bill that raises the fundamental question of whether people or corporations shall govern in America.”

“The nation is ready for this debate,” Bonifaz added, citing public opinion research that Free Speech For People commissioned showing widespread support across the political spectrum for a constitutional amendment like the one Congressman McGovern has introduced. “Americans understand that our democracy is at stake and that we must fight to preserve it. We see Congressman McGovern’s proposed amendment as another important strike on behalf of the 99 percent.”

Why Republicans Are Acting So Crazy

Follow the Money

by SAM SMITH

 

Not every change in national policy and events is announced with a new conference or presidential speech.

A case in point is the rapid rise of apparent mental instability in the Republican Party. You used to just disagree with Republicans; now you have to worry whether your children will be safe in their proximity.

Historians may peg 2008 – with Sarah Palin chosen to run for vice president – as the beginning of the GOP breakdown. But in the past year things have moved from individually ridiculous to generally irrational.

The explanations vary. David Sirota, for example, calls it sadism, but where did it come from and why so suddenly?
 
The best rule of thumb is to follow the money.

And that, rather quickly, takes you back to a little over a year ago to January 21, 2010 when the Supreme Court declared that corporations were free to buy our elections at will. As Justice Stevens noted in his dissent:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Of course, as Stevens suggested, the ability of corporados to buy politicians was already well underway. Twelve years earlier, for example, I had given a speech at a rally at the US Capitol in which I said:

My final objection [private campaign financing] is biologic. Elections are for and between human beings. How do you tell when you’re dealing with a person? Well, they bleed, burp, wiggle their toes and have sex. They register for the draft. They register to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they have babies and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.

“Now this may seem obvious to you, but there are tens of thousands of lawyers and judges and politicians who simply don’t believe it. They will tell you that a corporation is a person, based on a corrupt Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment from back in the robber baron era of the late 19th century — a time in many ways not unlike our own.

“Before this ruling, everyone knew what a person was just as everyone knew what a bribe was. States regulated corporations because they were legal fictions lacking not only blood and bones, but conscience, morality, and free . .

“Corporations say they just want to be treated like people, but that’s not true. Test it out. Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation just like they exercise theirs in your election. You’ll find out quickly who is more of a person. We can take care of this biologic problem by applying a simple literary solution: tell the truth. A corporation is not a person and should not be allowed to be called one under the law.”

Further, you don’t always need to buy a politician directly, as Source Watch explained:

In an April 9, 2009 article, Lee Fang reports that the principal organizers of Tea Party events are Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, two “lobbyist-run think tanks” that are “well funded” and that provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. Media Matters reported that David Koch of Koch Industries was a co-founder of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of FreedomWorks. David Koch was chairman of the board of directors of CSE. CSE received substantial funding from David Koch of Koch Industries, which is the largest privately-held energy company in the country, and the conservative Koch Family Foundations, which make substantial annual donations to conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, etc. Media Matters reported that the Koch family has given more than $12 million to CSE (predecessor of FreedomWorks) between 1985 and 2002. .

Media Matters also lists the Sarah Scaife Foundation as having given a total of $2.96 million in funding to FreedomWorks. The Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation is financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune. The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, also controlled by the Koch family, has donated more than $3 million to Americans for Prosperity.

That said, there is a moment when confusion turns into chaos or assault turns into murder. For the American political system that moment was the Supreme Court decision on corporations a year ago. Historians – if such people are permitted to exist in the future – will probably see this as one of the great tipping points in the collapse of America.

Further, what has happened in the last year – including the Tea Party surge in the 2010 election – is not so much the result of an intrinsic mental breakdown in the GOP as it is the conscious selection of candidates who would once have been considered absurd, but now can be safely used to carry out corporatist goals because the public no longer has the power to defeat the money.

A Scott Walker or Paul LePage can say and do anything that their campaign contributors want because it is assumed by the latter that money now inevitably trumps public will.

Yes, Scott Walker may be a sadist and Paule LePage a dumb bully, but they are merely tools of those who fund them. All they have to do is be pluto pimps for the corporate agenda.

This is scheme wouldn’t work so well if their funders mainly wanted something, but what they really want is the absence of something -namely a government that might stand in their way. So long as Walker and LePage are destroying things, their backers are quite content.

These Republicans are wrecking trucks for the big businesses that want to tear down the neighborhood we call America.

It’s working for them right now. Whether it will continue to do so remains to be seen. For example, for the working class to even think about supporting Republicans is an idea only about three decades old.

A short list of constituencies that Republicans have recently offended include supporters of 9/11 responders, the AARP, Americorps, black men, cchildren with pre-existing health conditions, college students, cops, disabled people, aarthquake warnings, employed women, EPA, ethnically mixed couples, gays, ill people who need medical marijuana, immigrants and their children, jobless people, journalists, latinos, Medicaid recipients, Methodists, minimum wage workers, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NPR & PBS, the Postal Service, public school students, public workers, scientists, supporters of separation of church and state, Social Security recipients, state workers, and women generally.

That’s not a bad base around which to build an electoral rebellion.

Liberals could rediscover the working class and start showing it some respect in their policies. Issues could become more important than icons in our politics. Youth could rediscover their collective power once they turn off Facebook and their Ipods. The drive for a constitutional amendment ending corporate personhood could become a major issue.

And, as I noted at the Capitol back in 1999:

The people who work in the building behind us have learned to count money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the money changers out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress to adopt publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would suggest that while fighting this difficult battle there is something we can do starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent organization and individual in communities all over America — the churches, activist organizations, social service groups, moral business people, concerned citizens — and begin drafting a code of conduct for politicians. We do not have to wait for any legislature. If we do this right, if we form true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians will ignore us only at their peril.

At root, dear friends, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.

In the meanwhile, it is best to keep in mind that the Republicans destroying our land are doing so not so much because of some new mental problems. They had them before and you just didn’t hear about them.

They are tearing down the nation because their problems are extremely valuable to the corporados who have put them into office and don’t want government to work at all.

Our battle, thus, is not with Walker and LePage but with the big bucks that put them where they are. Follow the money.

The Corporation as Crime

by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

 

Richard Grossman says that Occupy Wall Street activists need to go beyond greed and corruption and focus on usurpation.

As in – illegal seizure of power.

As in – the corporation has usurped – illegally seized – power from the people.

He quotes Thomas Hobbes as saying that a corporation is merely a “chip off the old block of sovereignty.”

Grossman, the father of the “no to corporate personhood” movement, says the first step in taking back the power is to criminalize the corporation.

To that end, he has drafted a four page law – “An Act to Criminalize Chartered Incorporated Business Enterprises.”

“As of 12:01 a.m. on July 4, 2012, no incorporated business shall exist or operate within the United States and its territories, or with any State or municipality,” the draft law reads.

“As of 12:01 a.m. on July 4, 2012, all existing business corporation charters granted by the United States, and by all States, shall be null and void.”

“If people want to go into business, fine,” Grossman said. “But this law would strip away 500 years of Constitutional protections and privileges. No more limited liability for shareholders. No more perpetual life. No more Constitutional protections.”

Those local, state or federal officials “who fail to implement and sustain the prohibition – and criminalization – of chartered, incorporated business entities after 12:01 a.m. July 4, 2012, shall promptly be indicted and speedily tried for the crime of villainous usurpation – perfidious, felonious, illegitimate rule exceeding their proper authority – as well as for the crime of dereliction of duty.”

In a footnote to the draft law, Grossman writes that “in a corporate state, law, culture, contrived celebration and tradition illegitimately clothe directors and executive officers of chartered incorporated businesses in governing authority.”

“This is usurpation,” he writes. “A corporate state nurtures, enables and expedites such illegitimate governing authority by violence enforced by courts, jails, police and military force and by historians. Less-overtly ferocious institutions – for profit and non profit – routinely reinforce that reality.”

What is ‘corporate personhood’ and why does it matter?

What is a corporate person? Do they eat? Do they ever die? Go to Jail? Get sick? Get Sad?

• Posted on 08.16.11 - Russia Today
• By Stephen C. Webster

In his broadcast Monday night, Russia Today’s talk show host Thom Hartmann explained the history of how the legal theory of corporate personhood came to exist, and why you should care.

“This is what we need to return to: re-regulate the corporations and say, ‘Sorry, you are not people, corporations. You do not have First Amendment rights of free speech. Get out of our political lives and our political world.’ It’s time to bring politics back of, by and for — to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln — we the people.”

This video is from The Big Picture, broadcast Monday, August 15, 2011.

Big City Gang Bang Productions - Corporate Personality Crisis

Corporations Are People? So Was Hitler

The Rich Are Different
By KEVIN CARSON

Watching two intellectually challenged Ken dolls with "executive-style hair" -- Mitt Romney and Rick Perry -- preparing to fight it out reminds me how much I miss Dan Quayle.

Oddly enough, just before I heard about Romney's latest blooper, I was reading about a study by psychologist Dacher Keltner. The life experience of the rich, he says, makes them less empathetic and more selfish than ordinary people. Part of this is willful obtuseness; legitimizing ideologies not only inure the exploited to getting the shaft, but enable the expoiters to sleep at night by reassuring themselves that the poor really deserve it.

The rich justify their relations with other social classes with the help of the Americanist ideology, whereby they exaggerate their own perceived rugged individualism and see their wealth as the result of character: "They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic ..."

In other words, fake "free market" ideology -- as opposed to the real thing -- is the opiate of the elites. It frees them from guilt over their privilege and makes their existence bearable. The neoliberal ideology -- as it appears on the CNBC talking head shows, the WSJ editorial page, and puff pieces from FreedomWorks -- defends the existing model of corporate capitalism and its great concentrations of wealth as if they resulted from superior virtue in a competitive market ("that's how our free market system works"). It deliberately obscures the central role of government intervention -- artificial scarcities, artificial property rights, subsidies -- in the current distribution of wealth and economic power.

Back to Romney: In response to a heckler, he quipped that "Corporations are people. ... Everything that corporations earn also goes to people." Faced with audience laughter, he asked "Where do you think it goes?" "Into their pockets!" replied the heckler. "Whose pockets?" Romney came back. "People's pockets! Human beings, my friend."

That's technically true, of course. The money a corporation makes at the expense of consumers and workers through state-enforced unequal exchange is all distributed to people.

But so what? Unless David Icke's right and we're secretly ruled by alien lizard invaders, every system of class exploitation in human history has served the interests of some group of human beings. In every society in history, no matter how brutally exploitative, of course the ill-gotten gain was consumed by "people." Roman patricians who lived off the sweat of slaves were people, and so were feudal landlords who gouged rents from the peasantry. I suspect it was "people" -- evil people -- who profited from the gold teeth extracted at Auschwitz.

The question is, which people? To whom does the wealth of monopoly corporations disproportionately flow? To the same people the profits of slave labor and the rents of feudalism went to, the people described by Adam Smith: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

Fortunately for them, the masters have the mythology of "people's capitalism" -- in which corporate profits all go to 401k's and pension funds and the economy's owned by regular folks day-trading on the Internet -- to reassure themselves they're really not overgrown tapeworms at all. All that talk about injustice and unearned wealth is just "class warfare," the "politics of envy." Or as Romney sniffed, "There was a time in this country when we didn't attack people based on their success."

Romney's own success bears some looking into. He's running as the former CEO who -- unlike Obama -- understands "how the economy works." See, he knows firsthand about the needs of the heroic businessmen who "create jobs."

But in reality, Romney did everything by the same MBA playbook as Chainsaw Al and Bob Nardelli: Gut human capital, strip assets, hollow out long-term productive capacity to goose this quarter's numbers and jack up share prices, then game your own executive compensation and dump the hollowed-out shell on some other scavenger. Romney, as an executive, was to downsizing what Typhoid Mary was to typhoid.

It's natural that Romney should clutch at any pretext to see himself as something besides just another upper class twit who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Thanks to the gospel of Success, Achievement and Prosperity, the vile masters of mankind can keep telling themselves they're not parasites after all; they're just getting their due.

Whatever Happened to Corporate Patriotism?

If They're Not Loyal to Us, Why Should We be Loyal to Them?
By RALPH NADER

The fireworks and celebrations that mark Independence Day are over. But the need for a national conversation on corporate patriotism has never been more timely.

For more than 125 years the courts have been awarding corporations most of the constitutional rights possessed by human beings. Corporations — as artificial entities — now almost have rights equal to "We the people," even though the words "corporation" and "company" are not mentioned in the Constitution.

Under the current 5-4 conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, "corporate personhood" is spreading. The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case allows unlimited independent corporate expenditures for or against any political candidates.

Since large corporations keep unleashing their corporate attorneys to push the domain of corporations as "persons," it is way overdue to judge them by the same yardsticks as we judge real persons.

U.S. corporations, chartered (born) in the U.S., rising to great size and profits because of American workers, saved or succored repeatedly by taxpayer subsidies and bailouts in Washington and state capitals, and sometimes rescued by U.S. Marines or protected by the U.S. fleets when they are in trouble abroad, owe the American people and our country some measure of loyalty and duty.

Instead of extending patriotic gratitude, large U.S. corporations increasingly are sending the opposite message. "We're outta here, with your jobs," their behavior says. Unfortunately, some CEOs appear to have no problem with dictatorial communist regimes like China or oligarchies like Mexico that know how to oppress impoverished workers. Workers in China cannot start independent unions or uniformly use independent courts to recognize their health, safety and economic rights.

Products from foreign sweatshops are exported back to the U.S. where abandoned factories and communities proliferate.

Corporations say they love their country, especially when it comes to manufacturing modern weapons systems for the Pentagon. So let's extend this love and see how they measure up patriotically.

Is it patriotic for drug companies to leave our country without any production facilities for ingredients used in penicillin and other key drugs because they have shipped production rapidly in the past decade to China and India which lack the inspection standards we have here? Leaving America defenseless and so dependent in this critical area is especially galling. Remember Big Pharma accepts billions in tax credits and valuable free research, development and clinical testing by the National Institutes of Health for many important pharmaceuticals.

Is it patriotic for CEOs to continue using public services and gobs of corporate welfare while they move their corporate headquarters to a small office in the Bahamas or other tax havens to escape paying their fair share to the Treasury? Such tax escapees burden ordinary taxpayers further.

Is it patriotic for CEOs to demand and use taxpayer dollars to facilitate moving abroad with their industries? The latest version of this lack of fealty is taking large federal subsidies for solar energy research and development and then moving the production facilities to China. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, has written critically of this ominous, job-draining trend.

Is it patriotic for General Motors to be saved from bankruptcy by taxpayers and still keep billions in taxpayer-paid reserves and credits, yet lobby against the Obama administration's proposed overdue safety and fuel economy standards?

In 1996, I sent letters to the CEOs of the largest hundred U.S. chartered corporations, urging them at their annual shareholders meeting, in the name of their corporation (not their boards of directors or officers) to pledge allegiance to the flag.

For example, the CEOs would stand up, and on behalf of General Motors, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, Pfizer or Bank of America, "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The many responses were instructive. Only Federated Department Stores thought it was a good idea. The other companies either said that they would take the suggestion under advisement or they misinterpreted my letter as asking for pledges by corporate officials and shareholders, no matter what their nationality. Ford Motor Co. flatly declared "the concept of corporate allegiance is not workable." In high dudgeon, O. George Everbach wrote back declaring "Kimberly-Clark believes that it has an inalienable right to choose when, where and how it wishes to display its patriotism."

Well at least Kimberly-Clark recognized the concept. Now it is time for American workers and taxpayers to say to corporate America that companies can't always have it both ways — to receive all the benefits of American corporate personhood and avoid all the expectations of patriotic behavior and the responsibilities that go along with those privileges and immunities.

This is not a left-right divide. For as Pat Buchanan has said, if these U.S. corporations are not loyal to us, why should we be loyal to them?

Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction

Friday, July 1, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap 

 

In the year and a half since the Citizens United decision, Americans from all walks of life have become concerned about corporate dominance of our government and our society as a whole. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court (in an act of outrageous “judicial activism) gutted existing campaign finance laws by ruling that corporations, wealthy individuals, and other entities can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

Throughout the country people have responded by organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings.

The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. S. Constitution abolishing corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.

At the forefront of this movement is Move to Amend, a national coalition of hundreds of organizations and over 113,000 individuals (and counting). Move to Amend is committed to building a grassroots movement to abolish corporate personhood, to hold corporations accountable to the public, and ultimately to fulfill the promise of an American democratic republic.

Boulder is not alone in this fight, nor is it the first community to consider such a resolution. In April, voters in Madison and Dane County, WI overwhelmingly approved measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Similar resolutions have been passed in nearly thirty other cities and counties. Resolutions have also been introduced in the state legislatures of both Vermont and Washington.

Despite the momentum, Move to Amend organizers know this won’t be an easy fight. Corporate America controls traditional media, and has invested heavily in politicians, lobbyists, and extremist groups to oppose our efforts. We can’t expect Congress to act, nor can we depend on the courts to solve a problem of their own making. We draw our strategy and inspiration from the great social movements of history. 

The abolition of slavery, the struggle for women’s suffrage, trade unions, and the civil rights movement all started with grassroots organizing. The ruling elites denounced these movements as un-American, and they will make the same accusation against this effort. Others claimed that those movements went “too far,” and were unrealistic. Thankfully, folks before us did not quit or give up. They gained traction with solid strategy, unwavering commitment, and moral authority.

Move To Amend proudly identifies with this tradition of engaged citizen participation. Building momentum with local organizing and resolutions is our best chance of driving a constitutional amendment into Congress. Recent events in Boulder provide an example of this strategy in practice. Months of education, organizing, and advocacy by Boulder Move to Amend empowered Councilman Cowles to provide political leadership and prepared the community to respond.

Awareness of corporate personhood in Boulder is now higher than ever before. It is widely viewed as a mainstream issue, having earned the support of local Democratic Party leaders. Answering critics of the measure, Boulder County Democratic Party Chairperson Dan Gould recently told the Daily Camera that corporate personhood is an issue that must be addressed locally. "This is as important as municipalization, this is as important as school bonds," he said. "This is immediate."

Move to Amend is gaining momentum rapidly in communities throughout the country precisely because the problems of corporate power are most evident locally. Developers seeking special favors pour money into elections. Big polluters avoid investigations and litigation by hiding behind their illegitimate “rights.” Bad employers lie to the public about unfair labor practices with no legal consequences. People see it every day. They get it and they’re ready to fight back. Move to Amend is here to help them do that with a strategy for long-term success.

How Wal-Mart Is Terrorizing the Country With its Corporate 'Personhood'

If Wal-Mart is a person, as per the Supreme Court, it's a behemoth terrorizing the countryside. But when it comes to workers' rights, it remains curiously immune from lawsuits.
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The American Prospect
Posted on April 29, 2011

What is Wal-Mart -- in a strictly taxonomic sense, that is? Based on size alone, it would be easy to confuse it with a nation: In 2002, its annual revenue was equal to or exceeded that of all but 22 recognized nation-states. Or, if all its employees -- 1.4 million in the U.S. alone -- were to gather in one place, you might think you were looking at a major city. But there is also the possibility that Wal-Mart and other planet-spanning, centi-billion-dollar enterprises are not mere aggregations of people at all. They may be independent life-forms -- a species of super-organisms.

This, anyway, seems to be the takeaway from the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court, in a frenzy of anthropomorphism, ruled that corporations are actually persons and therefore entitled to freedom of speech and the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. You may object that the notion of personhood had already been degraded beyond recognition by its extension, in the minds of pro-life thinkers, to individual cells such as zygotes. But the court must have reasoned that it would be discriminatory to let size enter into the determination of personhood: If a microscopic cell can be a person, then why not a brontosaurus, a tsunami, or a multinational corporation?

But Wal-Mart's defense against a class action charging the company with discrimination against its female employees -- Dukes v. Wal-Mart -- throws an entirely new light on the biology of large corporations. The company argues that with "7 divisions, 41 regions, 3400 stores and over one million employees" (in the U.S., as of 2004, when the suit was first launched), it is "impossible" for any small group of plaintiffs to adequately represent a "class" in the legal sense. What with all those divisions, regions, and stores, the experiences of individual employees are just too variable to allow for a meaningful "class" to arise. Wal-Mart, in other words, is too big, too multifaceted and diverse, to be sued.

So if Wal-Mart is indeed a person, it is a person without a central nervous system, or at least without central control of its various body parts. There exist such persons, I admit -- whose brains have lost command over their voluntary muscles -- but they are in a tiny minority. Surely, when the Supreme Court declared that corporations were persons, it did not mean to say "persons with advanced neuromuscular degenerative diseases."

For those who have never visited more than one Wal-Mart store, let me point out that the company is not a congeries of boutiques run by egotistical retailing divas. True, there are detectable differences between stores. Some feature Wal-Mart's indigenous "Radio Grill," famed for its popcorn chicken; others offer McDonald's or Subway. But other than that, every detail, from personnel policies to floor layout, is dictated by corporate headquarters in Bentonville.

An example: In 2000, I worked for three weeks in the ladies' wear department of a Wal-Mart in Minnesota. (Full disclosure: This makes me part of the class now suing Wal-Mart for sex discrimination, though the possibility of an eventual payout in the high two-figure range has not, I think, influenced my judgment on these matters.) In the course of my work, I made a number of sensible suggestions to my supervisor -- for example, that the plus-size women's jeans not be displayed at what was practically floor-level, where plus-size women could not reach them without requiring assistance to regain altitude. Good idea, my supervisor said, but it was up to Bentonville to determine where the jeans, like all other items, resided.

Much has changed since my tenure at Wal-Mart. The company has struggled to upgrade its image from sweatshop to a green and healthful version of Target. It has vowed to promote more women. But one thing it hasn't done, as far as anyone knows, is to reconfigure itself as an anarchist collective. Bentonville still rules absolutely, over both store managers and "associates," which is the winsome Wal-Mart term for its chronically underpaid workers, some of whom report that they are still being forced to work off the clock, for no pay at all, just as I found in 2000.

So if Wal-Mart is a life-form, it is an unclassifiable one, at least in ordinary terrestrial terms. It eats, devouring acre after acre and town after town. It grows without limit, sometimes assuming new names -- Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the U.K. -- to trick the unwary. Yet in its defense in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart suit, Wal-Mart claims to have no idea what it's doing. This could be a metaphor for capitalism or perhaps a sign that a successful alien invasion is in progress. The only thing that's for sure is, should the Supreme Court decide in favor of Wal-Mart, we'll have a lot more of these creatures running around: monstrously oversized "persons" who insist that they can't control their own actions.

Let’s Admit the Truth About American Royals

Thursday, April 28, 2011 by GRITtv

by Laura Flanders

 

According to polls, only about 6 percent of Americans are following with any close attention the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.  But that's not stopping the media fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with American's supposed fascination with Britain's royals.

“Royal wedding reminds us why we tossed Brits,” ran one letter to a local paper recently. That exorbitant $80 million spent on a medieval style ritual in time of 21st century austerity. It's shameful. It's old world. It's just what Americans fought a revolutionary war to throw off.

And then there are the folks like Rupert Cornwall at the UK Independent who argue hat people in the US love British royals precisely because they don't have their own real thing.  Gary Younge at the Nation noted that even his liberal friends wanted to know what he, a British citizen, thought of the prince marrying a "commoner." Oh please.

The only serious and in fact actually quite insidious part about this is that it re-inscribes the notion that the US has no  class.

Really? When the top one percent of wealthiest Americans own 34 percent of the country's wealth and enjoyed 80 percent of the total increase in wealth here between 1980 and 2005? No class?

As for ruling class? In the UK the commoners keep their royals on welfare. Here we do the same with our corporations. Billions in tax dollars keep them afloat and keep CEOs in mansions. Why not just give them palaces? At least we could keep them open for tours.
Since the Supreme Court has given corporations free speech rights and personhood -- how about marriage equality next?

Then, we could string up Bunting flags for the next monopolistic coupling... At the Comcast and NBC nuptials we'd all throw money while they stroll down the aisle. And -- with a nod to Jim Hightower -- instead of aristocrats with coats of arms, the paid off politicians would express their heritage -- in corporate logos on their lapels. At least then we'd know who owns whom.

The trinkets from a corporate marriage might be dreary. And the offspring, who can say? But at least we'd get a day off and one hell of a party. Plus we'd move out of denial.  The more I think about it the more I like it. Monarchies or Megacorps? Why not declare them royal?

Economic Entropy as Revolutionary Redistribution

Let the Free Market Eat the Rich!
by Jeremy Weiland
Anarchy and Distribution

Civil society has become so confused with the institution of the State that anarchists often find it difficult to extricate one from the other when positing a voluntary society. The effects of privilege permeate our culture, our infrastructure, our economic relationships, and our thinking. Therefore, the ability to describe a coherent and distinctive picture of a post-state, post-privilege world is crucial in that it throws contemporary constructs of privilege into stark relief. While disputes about proper means towards a stateless society abound in the anarchist milieu, the most striking distinctions can be discovered by examining the varied predictions of the likely ends of anarchism. Perhaps nothing sets these approaches apart and divides efforts more than competing visions of just property distribution.

A long running debate among anarchists, especially between the individualist and collectivist schools, centers around the justice of wealth disparities. Certainly the existence of the State serves to enrich particular interests at the expense of others, but in anarchy would the rich dominate society - just as they do with the State? Should private property be abolished altogether to force an egalitarian society into existence? Or will private property be the basis for a new, voluntary order where the wealth gap will no longer matter? Even if we could immediately switch off the institutions that forcibly manipulate society, many fear that the legacy of privilege and accumulated wealth could persist for some time, distorting markets and continuing the frustrate the balance of power between individuals.

Individualist anarchists have had a variety of responses to the problems of historical property and wealth maldistribution. Even anarcho-capitalists who see large scale social coordination as the natural direction of society have different views, such as Hans Hermann Hoppe's theory of a natural elite and Murray Rothbard's support of syndicalist takeover of State-supported corporations. On the other side of the coin, left-leaning individualists also entertain a variety of approaches: from agorist advocacy of revolutionary entrepreneurship as a leveling force to mutualists such as Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson speculating about the possible need for short term State sponsored redistribution and reform.

At the root of all these competing theories, the key question for anarchists remains: what does a stateless society look like? What exactly are we working towards? It is this difference of vision that divides the efforts of anarchists much more than purely strategic differences. Is a more ecumenical anarchism possible - one that can bring the schools together, at least for activist purposes, not by fighting over predictions and visions but by agreeing on the means by which a voluntary society is achieved?

In the midst of all this theorizing, it is easy to forget that anarchy is - anarchy becomes defined by - however humans naturally interact, not how we wish they would interact. In other words, true anarchy is an empirical reality, and we have only to discover it by removing privilege. Arguing over what it shall be and shall not be presumes we can dictate how humans interact, a positively authoritarian concept. Whatever human nature might be, any anarchism worth pursuing starts there, and the kernel of proportionality and balance that could inform this matter may be sought there as well. Given this approach to anarchism, what can human nature tell us about distributive justice?

In any statist society, those who benefit from the status quo rely first and foremost on the stability and security of the social order. How they achieve this defines politics as we experience it. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how large scale aggregations of wealth require an outside stabilizing force and defensive agency to maintain, and how in a free, dynamic market there are entropies that move imbalances back to equilibrium. There is also a proposed basis for a relative equilibrium among people once privileges are abolished. This investigation will identify two main institutions that arise from state intervention in capitalist society: corporations and personal estates.

The Modern Corporation

The modern corporation is a legal entity chartered by the State. Corporations benefit from an arsenal of privileges, such as fiat entity status, personhood and limited liability, which serve to set the rules of the market on terms favorable to corporate investors and managers. The trend has always been to correct any perceived problems with big business by large, top-down regulation, rather than to reexamine the legal constructs that give these institutions such outsized power in our society.

For instance, it is conceivable that a firm could argue effectively in front of a judge for certain of the rights of being a human citizen on a case by case basis, but current established law mandates a clumsy legal equivalence between living human beings and abstract organizations of people and assets (which is historically dubious). The benefit to big business, of course, is to regularize and simplify business legal proceedings, setting aside the legal advantages this gives corporations over individual humans. In the United States, for instance, the ability to exercise first and fourth amendment rights as if the firm were a human being results in corporate campaign contributions and protection from random inspections. It is interesting to see the framers' document limiting government prerogative used to defend not merely the rights of human beings but those of the government's own abstract inventions.

Yet while human rights are invoked, privileges granted by the State to corporations that no human can claim, such as limited liability, represent a fiat subsidy. Imagine the cost of privately insuring the value of the total market capitalization of the world's corporations! But the utility of the subsidy goes even further, because it allows investors to hire managers who have a legal mandate to pursue profits while maintaining a distance from the way the profits are pursued. Highly capitalized firms, who by their sheer size wield far more potential for harm than any single individual, essentially obfuscate the way decisions are made so that if third parties to the stockholder-manager relationship are harmed, stockholders cannot lose more than their investment.

The imbalance of responsibility this enables cannot be underestimated, for it goes to the very heart of corporate economic behavior. What would be different about business, socioeconomics, and politics if stockholders knew that their managers' activities would leave them fully liable for the actions of the corporation and could lose their savings, their car, their house? Limited liability and corporate personhood make possible a way of doing business in a far riskier way than normal people would. How do we know this? Because few people, anarchist or not, would limit the liability of regular human beings, knowing that it is the consequences of undesirable behavior such as violence or theft that helps prevent it.

In a free market, corporations would not be able to rely on the State for their very existence. Any ability to do business as an entity would come from the consent and cooperation of the market - customers, suppliers, contractors, service providers, banks, but most importantly management. Without a Securities and Exchange Commission and intrusive reporting requirements, oversight, and regulatory enforcement, it would be very hard to protect the shareholders at firms of any appreciable size and organizational complexity from outright fraud in a variety of ways. The well-understood legal relationships that govern so much capital finance and business activity would become much more ad hoc and peculiar. Shares in corporations would become even less uniform constructs from business to business, since their terms could vary wildly and they couldn't simply be traded as almost fungible commodities. Unpredictability and risk would skyrocket, which is a much more favorable environment for the small-time entrepreneur than the big, clumsy, bureaucratic corporation.

Think about the huge stabilizing effect of the federal government for making big business anything less than a total ripoff for investors right from the start. Think about the ways government regulation rationalizes markets to make them safe for large industries to exploit and oligopolize. Think about how much leeway the modern CEO is afforded to run the business in pursuit of short term gain, with stockholders often supporting them even as they engage in questionable activities. Enron's reckless destruction of shareholder value is hardly remarkable, when you think about the level of complexity in which they schemed and strategized - the fact that it doesn't happen more often is (until you check your tax bill and realize you're subsidizing the stability and security of others' investments!).

The Personal Estate

Obviously the most direct way in which people benefit from the institutional character of our statist society is through direct ownership. While there are few (if any) rich people who aren't heavily and diversely invested in corporate capitalism and share in its redistribution of wealth and special favors from the government, there are additional State provisions to benefit individuals. Unlike corporate privileges, those which govern the stability of personal estates arguably serve the interests of more modest individuals, especially the middle class. However, I intend to show that the rich benefit far more from fiat stability and socialized security than the rest of us.

The biggest subsidy enjoyed by the wealthy lies in government regulation of finance. By regulating banking through inspections, audits, and the centralized monetary maintenance practiced by the Federal Reserve System, depositors enjoy a level of stability in the system that is quite unrivaled in history. Of course, regular joes like you and I prefer our current experience to frequent crashes and bank runs, but there's a catch: we don't pay for this "service" in proportion to our deposits (or the interest we earn!). Instead, we help subsidize the regulation and maintenance of the financial system from which the elite depositors benefit disproportionately.

Rich depositors are more likely to invest in instruments and accounts which yield higher interests rates. Plus, they're more likely to earn a greater amount of their income directly from the interest on their deposits. The barriers to entry in banking prevent individuals from forming their own mutual banks and force them to rely on the aggregated wealth of big depositors at some level of the hierarchical financial establishment. And because the rich can afford to pay for maintenance of their wealth by managers, accountants, and brokers, they are more likely to anticipate and capitalize upon market shifts than us.

Keep in mind that central regulation and maintenance of markets, groomed and rationalized by the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and other departments encourages the sort of investment patterns that count on steady profits and interest - phenomena much more likely to benefit the wealthy than those of us investing in 401-Ks and IRAs. By lowering risks, any entrepreneurial profit opportunities for the little guy that regulation kills translate into the stability of markets and the steadiness of investment income. Of course, that benefits those who've already accumulated capital much more than those of us who've yet to achieve our fortune.

However, the extent of State intervention to benefit the rich extends beyond finance into the very real area of asset security. The rich depend on the stability and predictability of systems that ensure and protect their title to their property, but again their benefit from these phenomena dwarfs ours. For example, they count on the government keeping a central repository of property titles to justify excluding others. This takes property off the market and thus raises the value of their property. While it is true that middle class homeowners benefit from these systems, it does not benefit them to nearly the degree it does the rich. Socializing the costs of kicking people off one's land necessarily favors those who have more land to guard.

Police patrols of moneyed neighborhoods provide an example of socialized security, where defense and sentry costs are not paid directly by the beneficiaries. Sure, many wealthy types hire security guards, but they would have to hire many more - and pay much higher insurance premiums - if it were not for public law enforcement at least helping to defend their property, nor the extensive, expensive system of socialized criminal investigation that makes it less likely property will stay stolen and criminals remain at large.

The Entropy of Aggregated Wealth

As I stated earlier, we may find the answer to the problem of persistent wealth imbalances in human nature. Two aspects of that nature are greed and envy. In a market without socialized regulation, stockholders are in constant danger of management and employees siphoning off profits and imperiling the long term viability of the business. Rich individuals face similar uncertainties of theft and fraud by those they employ to maintain and protect their assets. Because the lack of a State would force these costs to be internalized within the entity rather than externalized onto the public, it is highly likely that the costs of maintaining these outsized aggregations of wealth would begin to deplete it.

The balance of power between the rich and non-rich is key here. Direct plundering of wealth, though fraud or theft, threatens the rich in a crippling way. It raises their costs directly in proportion to their wealth, either through insurance costs, defense costs, or losses. They have to worry not just about outside threats, but also the threats posed by their servants, employees, and even their family members. Because the wealth is centralized around one individual or one management team, it is near impossible to find any fair way to distribute the responsibilities of stewardship without distributing the wealth itself. Having a lot of stuff becomes more trouble than it's worth.

Meanwhile, less rich people economize on these costs by banding together with other modest individuals to either hire outside defense (socializing protection on their own, voluntary terms) or by personally organizing to defend property (via institutions such as militias). Because the ratio of person to wealth is relatively greater, there are more interested individuals wiling to play a role in defense and maintenance of property. The distribution of the wealth over more people necessarily eases its protection. And since everybody has basically the same amount of stuff, nobody has an interest in taking advantage of, nor stealing from, others.

In fact, normal human greed suggests that there will always be an element of society that wishes to steal and cheat others. In anarchy, the wealthy offer themselves as easy targets to such criminals, because big estates are harder to defend and so invite more opportunities for plunder. Additionally, it is far more likely that wealthy estates will be targeted because, for instance, it is easier to steal a million dollars worth of cash or property from one location such as a bank or mansion than it is to rob a thousand or so common people. The larger the disparity in wealth, the more intensively the wealthy will be targeted by criminals.

On the other hand, normal people would necessarily be less likely to be targeted by the criminal, for a few reasons. First, since the ratio of human bodies to wealth in a modest community would be much greater, the deterrent effect would be insurmountable to all but the most stupid crooks. Second, once statist regulations and privileges stop making an honest living less of a bad deal, the criminal elements in a modest community are more likely to share in the legitimate wealth of the economy, easing their need to prey on their neighbors. Markets freed from dehumanizing, deracinated centralization imposed for corporate convenience would be fathomable, with plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurship. While by no means a utopia, a genuinely free market would ease the pressures on the lower and middle classes.

The Free Market as Egalitarian Equalizer

This phenomenon of disadvantaged rich and advantaged poor, brought about by the costs of estate and business management, suggests an interesting dynamic. It may be that in a free market there will exist a natural, mean personal wealth value, beyond which diminishing returns enter quickly, and below which one is extremely disposed towards enrichment. If this is true, then that means that normal, productive, and non-privileged people will tend to have similar estate values. This wide distribution of wealth will tend to reinforce bottom-up society and a balance of power unrivaled in history (except maybe in frontier experiences).

In a stateless society, institutions for business and personal organization must derive their permanence from their usefulness not just to an elite few, but from the respect of the entire community - customers, suppliers, neighbors, etc. An entity that can operate efficiently and deliver a steady stream of income, whether an estate or a corporate business, becomes less viable the larger it grows because internal transaction and maintenance costs start to skyrocket. This is a function not of wealth itself, but rather of the inherent difficulty in convincing those with less to honor and defend the property of those with more. The more people benefit from a body of wealth, the more people will support it.

Indeed, the State can be seen as a mechanism for acquiring the consent of the governed to sign onto a program of stabilization that is inherently artificial, precisely due to its disproportionate dividends to established elites. The State co-opts authentic community support or opposition and channels it into modes that are predictable and stable, establishing its institutional identity as indispensable mediator between the very interests in which it promotes opposition. But authentic community stability is no harder to realize in a genuine, stateless society where people participate only in voluntary organizations. Similarly, inauthentic, imposed stability usually benefits those who cannot maintain their position without outside help. Wealthy interests use the State as a way to marshal public support without yielding control or spreading the wealth, as it were.

A truly free market without subsidized security, regulation, and arbitration imposes costs on large scale aggregations of assets that quickly deplete them. I do not think they would be able to survive for very long without the State, even if "natural elites" exist or some form of social darwinism is proven correct, because natural hierarchies such as those would not need State intervention to maintain their cohesion. One can chalk this up to the fickle and often dark side of human nature, but it's a phenomenon that we cannot just wish away - indeed, we should see a place for these dynamics in the legitimate, bottom-up society.

This theory is not an ironclad prescription of how anarchy must emerge. It is merely a demonstration of how individualist and collectivist visions can both be served without compromising either's interests. Markets and egalitarian distribution of property and wealth are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Perhaps authentic libertarian means of genuinely free markets, taken to their logical conclusion, can effect far more egalitarian and redistributionist ends than we ever dreamed - not as a function of any central State, but rather as a result of its absence.

US Uncut: The New Movement against Austerity and Corporate Tax Cheats

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Brian Tierney

By Monday April 18th most Americans will have finished filing their taxes, helping to boost government revenue at a time when the only thing most politicians care to discuss is how to cut the deficit.


But a large pack of corporate citizens will probably not be worrying about paying their dues; tax day, like any other day for them, will be strictly devoted to growing their bloated profit margins.

Recent reporting that some of the largest U.S. corporations have paid little to nothing in federal income taxes in the past few years hasn’t stopped the upside-down debate in Washington. The beltway budget battle remains focused on one blunt question: how much of a beating should be given to workers and the poor in order to bring down the deficit while leaving the corporate bottom line unscathed?

Beyond Capitol Hill, however, the scope of corporate tax-dodging during a period of devastating budget cuts has inspired the ire of thousands of Americans and given birth to a new people-powered movement to hold big business and their mouthpieces in Washington accountable for the cuts. It’s called US Uncut, a campaign that has produced hundreds of direct actions targeting notorious tax cheats like Bank of America and Verizon while agitating around other major offenders like General Electric and Citigroup.

Thanks to tax breaks, creative accounting schemes, loopholes and off-shore havens, these companies are raking in billions and getting away with systematic tax-evading operations that would land ordinary people in jail.

Launched back in February, US Uncut has so far made Bank of America and Verizon the primary targets of its actions. According to US Uncut, Bank of America’s 2009 pre-tax income was $4.4 billion. As the fifth largest corporation in the world, Bank of America received $45 billion in bailout funds in 2008 and 2009 but didn’t pay a single dime in federal income taxes in 2009. In the same year, Bank of America received up to $1.9 billion in tax refunds.

How did they get away with it? Bank of America has 115 foreign tax-havens where it keeps its income in order to avoid taxes. And Bank of America is not alone. Roughly 25 percent of the largest U.S. corporations don’t pay any federal income taxes.

US Uncut has adopted a model of organizing first used in the U.K. where an organization called UK Uncut has been using hundreds of creatively-themed, non-violent direct actions targeting companies that flout their duty to pay taxes while budget crises are crippling social programs. The “flash mob”-style actions are meant to both pressure companies and galvanize the broader population through attention-grabbing and highly publicized direct actions.

According to its website, “US Uncut is a grassroots movement taking direct action against corporate tax cheats and unnecessary and unfair public service cuts across the U.S.
Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans. That’s unacceptable.”

The approach taken by US Uncut relies heavily on the use of social media and a decentralized, do-it-yourself system for organizing protest actions and posting them on its website.

George Taghi, a leading organizer with US Uncut in Washington DC, explained that US Uncut wants to change the public discourse around the budget and the deficit and engage the public with its approach to activism.

“US Uncut’s goal is to punctuate and change the narrative that says ‘we have a spending problem’ to ‘we have a revenue problem,’” Taghi says.

When asked why US Uncut is focused on tax-dodging companies rather than the lawmakers who enable them, Taghi pointed to the corporations as the real source of power in Washington:

“US Uncut has focused on bringing protests to companies’ storefronts, instead of lawmakers, because that is where the true powers lie. On the whole, for companies to claim ignorance or deny responsibility for our lopsided tax code – that legalizes off-shoring of profits and accounting gimmicks – is a farce.  These companies have lobbied Congress for such privileges and donate to representatives to enact loopholes.”

In addition to Bank of America, US Uncut is shining the spotlight on other corporations like Verizon, which reported a pre-tax income of $24.2 billion last year and was rewarded with a $1.3 billion tax refund. Citigroup has paid zero dollars in taxes in the last four years, according to US Uncut. The company also was the largest recipient of government bailout money, totaling a staggering $476 billion.

The issue of corporate tax-dodging has been pushed into the limelight in recent months. Last month, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders compiled a list of “the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.” The list included companies such as those on the US Uncut target list, in addition to Exxon Mobile, which made $19 billion in profits in 2009, paid no federal income taxes and received a $156 million tax rebate, according to SEC filings. While the official corporate tax rate is 35 percent, Goldman Sachs managed to whittle its tax obligations down to 1.1 percent of its income in 2008.

In March, the New York Times published a front-page article describing how General Electric, the second largest corporation in the world, paid nothing in federal income taxes last year while it reported $14.2 billion in profits. On top of that, GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
“Its extraordinary success,” according to the Times article, “is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

Add to all of this GE’s anti-worker policies – which include plant closures that have eliminated a fifth of GE jobs in the U.S. since 2002 and the company’s drive to cut the wages and benefits of its mostly unionized workforce – and you have what President Obama lauds as a “model” for American business.

On Wednesday that model was the target of a hoax executed by the same activists of US Uncut, in partnership with the “Yes Men,” an anti-corporate group notorious for pulling pranks that parody corporate propaganda. The two groups put out a fake GE press release that announced GE’s plans to return all of its $3.2 billion tax refund in response to public outrage. The stunt brilliantly put GE into an awkward public relations situation in which the company was forced to openly admit that it in fact had no intention of paying anything back. 

Given GE’s relationship with the White House, the egregiousness of its tax-dodging helps to contextualize the willingness of the Obama administration to inflict such harsh cuts like the ones that went through Congress last week to avert a government shutdown. Instead of being sanctioned for its tax cheating, GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was awarded a top position in the Obama administration as chair of the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

So when it comes to spending and budget cuts, forget hope and change. Compromise and capitulation is the catchphrase of this administration, and this should surprise no one who knows the company that Obama keeps. In fact, the president’s “compromise” last week with Republican House Speaker John Boehner cannot even be called that. Democrats and the White House conceded even more in spending cuts than what Republicans themselves originally proposed at the beginning of the year. And it was a “compromise” that Obama applauded as the largest annual spending cut in U.S. history.

On Wednesday Obama delivered a speech in which he seemed to be changing course and finally turning back to the progressive ideals that inspired millions during his campaign. His argument for progressive tax policies, making the wealthy pay more and preserving critical programs like Medicare and Social Security was a rhetorical departure from what we’ve seen from his administration over the past several months of budget wrangling.

Following the speech, liberal commentators voiced their exuberance and suggested that Obama’s disillusioned base can again find some cause for excitement. Others were not as impressed.

“[Obama] has given so many great speeches before, only to disappoint. Unfortunately, he stills adheres to the right’s narrative that spending cuts on domestic programs has to happen to the tune of nearly $1 trillion over ten years,” said Taghi from US Uncut.

The speech also left the door open to unspecified reforms to Social Security and Medicare that will play into the hands of the right-wing tea party-backed Republicans in Congress who want to privatize and destroy those programs.

Last week Congress voted to chop $38 billion dollars from the budget with cuts that will affect health programs, heating assistance to the poor, education programs, the Environmental Protection Agency, and food safety. Funding for essential women’s health services provided by Planned Parenthood just barely made it passed the GOP’s ideological chopping block, but Obama and the Democrats still traded away money for those services for residents of the District of Columbia.

And while the let-them-eat-cake budget cutters are using the deficit to justify these cuts at the federal level, they have also been on the attack at the state level where budgets are being slashed and unions are under assault.

The campaign against unions has helped breathe some life back into the labor movement. But what started as an anti-union crusade in Wisconsin – inspired and funded by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers – has spread to other states, and it’s not just Republicans who are out to make union workers scapegoats for the deficit. Democratic governors in California, New York, and Illinois are using the deficit as an excuse to force major concessions from public sector unions.

In response, unions and labor activists have been mobilizing and fighting back. A national day of action last week on April 4th saw over a thousand union rallies and other actions for labor across the country.

In the midst of this labor upsurge, US Uncut is another component of the progressive fightback, and it’s a campaign that goes directly to the corporate tax-dodgers who are materially and ideologically feeding the narrative about a deficit crisis that can only be solved through budget cuts. A unified progressive fightback – including labor, environmentalist and consumer rights groups – is needed in order to push back against austerity and fight to rebuild the tattered social safety net that Washington is poised to shred altogether.   

The right yearns for capitalism unfettered, and to get there they are relying on a structure in Washington that can only be described as plutocracy. And neither party is willing to consider serious cuts to the massive Pentagon budget. Unpopular wars abroad and unpopular tax cuts at home for the wealthy are all evidently worth the resultant suffering inflicted on millions here in the U.S. under the budget ax.

In Wisconsin and other states where workers have been fighting back, an important example has been set. This class war no longer needs to be asymmetrical. Working people can and must fight back, not just against the budget cutters in Washington, but against their corporate paymasters whose anti-worker and tax-dodging practices have helped set the stage for ruthless austerity.  

We simply cannot defeat the high-powered corporate lobbyists on their own turf. If ever there was a time for progressives and the left to abandon the tired and feeble strategies of lobbying, letter-writing, and petition-signing, that time is now. We need to exert pressure where it will be felt – on the streets and in the workplace through mass mobilizations, strikes, and yes, militant direct actions.

US Uncut called for national days of action on “Tax Weekend,” April 15th to the 17th, and on Friday there were over 130 actions across the country posted on its website through tax day.
It’s time to go directly after the corporate powers using creative direct action and other forms of protest to expose their dirty war against workers and the poor.

Corporations Aren't People, So Why Do They Have the Power of Citizens?

Two anti-corporate activists discuss the abuses of corporate personhood and how we can shake their grip of power off of our democratic process.
By Adrienne Maree Brown and Dani McClain, AlterNet
Posted on January 29, 2011


This conversation is a compilation of talks and emails between two writer-activists. We welcome other voices in the conversation - we decided to share this because we want answers and dialogue in our communities about this issue. There are more questions than answers here, but they feel like crucial questions.

Dani McClain: You've been thinking a lot about corporate personhood and your belief, as you put it, that "the threat is the control of the new world by corporations, who are 'people' and have rights." I want to understand the full implications of what happened a year ago (1/21/10) when the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling -- a decision that unlimited corporate dollars are allowed to influence political campaigns and that money = speech and so is protected by the First Amendment.


Adrienne Marie Brown: Me too! Though I can’t shake the suspicion that the ruling was just formalizing the way things already are. Dick “Halliburton” Cheney is a great example of what a myth it is that corporations and our government are necessarily two separate bodies. Maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if the language was more honest - “corporate democracy,” or “corporate governance.” But, corporate personhood seems incredibly dangerous and unjustifiable.


McClain: I also want to get better acquainted with the 14th amendment. I'm just learning that corporations have always turned to the 14th amendment (which I've always thought of broadly as the amendmentthat gave formerly enslaved people rights as citizens) to make claims that they have rights on which the government can't trample.


Brown (jaw drops): See, this is why I avoid the news. I adamantly feel like it’s useless to engage in the news cycle unless there’s something I can do. I don’t want to live a reactionary life - our movements spend so much time trying to become overnight experts on the latest scandal or tension, whatever corporate media has decided to focus our attention on. But this is the kind of news that makes me feel like things are happening that deeply impact my future, and even though I am a informed, political person, I am out the loop.


In terms of the ruling, when it happened it wasn’t a surprise. Capitalism is all about individuals competing to amass more than they need (profit) at the expense of humankind and the earth, and corporations are the institutions for that shady behavior*. This feels like a major advance on our rights, one of those foundational rulings that will ultimately reframe politics, from food justice to environmental struggles to joblessness. But how can I approach it in a creative, impactful way?


McClain:I’m glad you bring up your desire to be on the offense rather than reactive. You and I have talked a lot about the importance of giving people a vision that ultimately moves them beyond whatever paradigm the status quo (e.g., the greedy, the exclusionary) set up. Do you think the answer to fighting corporate personhood is passing aconstitutional amendmentto reverse Citizens United? Or is it some psychospiritual or human development response that's outside the realm of policy, legal battles and lobbying in a traditional sense? Instead of looking at the Supreme Court ruling as some "evil" thing that we should mobilize against, do you see it as just another challenge pushing us to evolve and see the issues through a new lens?


Brown: I absolutely see this as a place to practice both/and strategies, with more energy in the realm of developing viable alternatives. Actions speak louder than words, no matter how constitutional the words are, so the majority of our actions should be visionary - building the world we want to see. But there are a lot of people who feel it is irresponsible to not hold the line against the advances of corporate power, and I hear that. I just don't think a constitutional amendment matters that much if most of the people in the country don't understand what's going on. There's such an imbalance of corporate vs. community influence in our government at this point, so it feels like we need a cultural campaign that really highlights for people the potential benefits of elevating human/earth rights in their own lives, and ways to challenge this corporatization of government, of society. People forget that they matter, that their voices should be what’s represented in decisions around their lives.


McClain: But is it possible that democracy has run its course? Between this ruling, the influence corporations have long had on our news media, and the fairly recent practice of threatening filibuster in the Senate to force legislation into a dead end, I'm starting to wonder. What next steps do we need to take to make people feel like they have a role in governance?


Brown:Provocative…I believe that corporate democracy is going to destroy the human race and planet, and if it won't die through global financial crisis then we have to evolve past it. But this is the crux of the issue - democracy is supposed to be government by the people. There's a reasonable argument to be made that we have never actually practiced democracy in the US - we've always had a representative version here, where the decisions are truly made by an “informed”/elite body, not by the people. Grace Boggs always talks about how this is a society where the masses have primarily been seen as a labor force for the elite bodies of this nation, through both agricultural and industrial eras. The people have not been engaged and educated to truly be interested, active participants in the governance of the nation. Now corporations are a new electoral college - they have unlimited capacity to influence elections. "The people" have every reason to feel less and less engaged.


McClain:I wonder whether that’s the case. It’s easy to think that one reason more people aren’t up in arms over the growing influence of corporate power is that they don’t yet see it as a problem. They’re not educated to be engaged, as you suggest. But a few weeks after the Supreme Court issued its ruling, an ABC-Washington Post poll showed that 80% of those surveyed opposed (and 65% strongly opposed) the Citizens United decision. So people are aware and concerned. What can we do with that awareness? How can we harness and direct it?


Brown: Something I learned at Ruckus is that awareness isn't enough. We have to connect people's awareness to their behaviors, to their own lives and choices and the struggles they experience. We have to move people past the inertia of their fear or sense of powerlessness by uplifting the viable alternative. There are so many people who are interested in the process of actual government by the people, but their relationship to it is that of a consumer, watching and reading about what is happening without feeling empowered to engage. The root of that potential power is education. Democracy relies upon education appropriate to the cultural make-up of the country, education that yields a population who can participate in governance, education that grows the capacity of people to thrive.


McClain: I know you find a lot of inspiration in science fiction and that you look to that genre to help generate new thinking around solutions. What would Octavia Butler say about the way corporate power is growing? What solutions would she write into a novel in which people who had for generations gained citizenship by virtue of their humanity and place of birth are slowly edged out of citizenship because they lack access to money?


Brown:Oh, she foresaw this. In the Parables she knew this was coming and warned us, in her way. Her solution was to rethink our purpose as human beings, and change how we live - even if that means leaving what we perceive as safety. Part of why we held the Octavia Butler Symposium at the Allied Media Conference** last year was to explore how we connect ideas like hers to how we are living and organizing in the world. I feel like she did a powerful job, for instance, of challenging the idea that our future lies in the struggle to act as a nation, when our destiny might actually be something much more global, or universal. In her stories, our way to evolve is to leave behind the right-wing politics and struggles of earth and go to space. And that truly makes me pause - is corporate personhood even something to address through national organizing? Are we thinking too small? Look at how much energy we spend now demanding humane policies and programs in a country that still defaults towards borders, prisons, segregation and poverty.


McClain: It’s interesting that a year after the Supreme Court confirmed an interpretation of citizenship that’s broad enough to include corporations, right-wing forces are attempting to narrow its interpretation to exclude natural born citizens who are the children of undocumented immigrants. This is a real fight that’s heating up now, with the new Republican chair of the judiciary committee launching hearings to figure out how Congress can strip the children of some immigrants of their citizenship. So in that context, you raise a really provocative question: Does fighting to retain certain rights as US citizens open us up to the same criticisms that segments of the LGBT movement have faced because of their focus on gaining access to institutions like the military and marriage? Are we fighting our way into retrograde, static spaces? Are there more meaningful battles we should be waging? Or are these questions naive and offensive in the face of people’s immediate needs?


Brown:I tend to believe that struggles for human rights - or living rights which would include people, animals and the planet - are more important and foundational than struggles for national rights, aka citizen privileges. To me there is behavior that we need to root more deeply than national pride, more than something that can be given to you (or taken from you) based on where you are born. Human is what we ARE, our rights are what we grant to each other on the basis of being born, anywhere, period. These national struggles to have equal access to the institutions of the ruling class don't seem to demand that we evolve our own behavior and beliefs.


But I am also aware that I’m always resistant to getting deeply involved in nearly impossible struggles. Corporations can never truly experience the violations of human rights that they inflict on the world…there’s very little accountability. When shamed, they just rebrand. How do we fight that?


McClain: The widespread public concern regarding the Citizens United ruling -- like the groundswell of opposition to the bank bailout -- seems like a clear opportunity to join forces with members of the Tea Party and stand against corporate interests. Should that be a priority? And why are the Republicans so good at convincing (mostly white) people without wealth that their interests are aligned with the wealthiest Americans?


Brown:Ah the Tea Party…these questions posed together are great, getting to the root flaw in us/them thinking. The Tea Party does seem to consist mostly of folks not so different from those on our side - poor to lower middle class, community oriented, even interested in decentralized organizing models (I heard they call The Starfish and the Spider their bible). This is why we must battle ideas and not people. If we start our organizing from the mindset that irresponsible corporations claiming the rights of individuals is bad for all people, we are allowed to see that those are our people - all people are our people. What separates us is ideas, not race, not class (which both grew from ideas into a tangible experience we must call reality), but ideas. Finding the ideas we can align around opens up the space to really evolve beyond a partisan population, only half of whom are voting anyway, where we’re all getting taken advantage of by the same people.


McClain: You’ve mentioned the connection between the corporate personhood debate and the fight for net neutrality. Could you say more about that?


Brown: Yeah that connection occurred to me as I’m learning about the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. They believe “communication is a fundamental human right”, which got me thinking about where that right is being challenged. The internet is what the town hall or town square used to be - a place to discuss policy and politics and to develop and shape a shared governance and a common culture. It’s multidirectional and open, unlike previous forms of news. The net neutrality debate is ultimately about whether individuals have the right to communicate with each other or not, and whether we have equal access to practice that right. It’s appalling that our government would allow corporations - as corporate persons - to control (or have majority influence over) not only our policies through their unchecked lobbying and political contributions, but also control over who has access to communicate. These plans of fees to access certain sites, monopolies between the largest of those sites/businesses, and profit driving the development of the internet, its just the new colonization.


Fortunately there are warriors in that battle - folks building open source tools, meshed wireless networks that liberate internet access - folks showing us that the internet is another ground of the commons, an unlimited space we can approach with an outlook of abundance that actually isn’t possible when we look at land and the earth’s resources. If we can maintain access long enough, it’s possible that we can carve out a space beyond the reach of corporations. And there are folks fighting corporate personhood, I support their work even as I dig in deeper here in Detroit trying to see what I can build.


McClain:Our conversations remind me to imagine what I’d like our world to look like, rather than focusing solely on which established victories we can’t afford to see chipped away. That’s where my day-to-day focus is -- not losing ground. So thanks for drawing me back to the big picture. It helps give meaning and context to the small steps.


I’ve been reading a book called "The Warmth of Other Suns," a narrative history of the Great Migration, and in some ways it’s reinforcing this idea that you promote: That people’s experiences are much bigger than what policy dictates, and that true self-determination lies in this awareness.


I’ve often thought of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) and the Voting Rights Act (VRA) as mid-20th century legislation that confirmed and gave teeth to the 14th and 15th amendments. And I’ve thought of the CRA and VRA as providing the necessary path for black Americans to live with dignity and full citizenship. But reading the book has made me realize that even before that landmark legislation passed, black people were determined to find a way to live safely and with as much freedom as possible in their country of origin. And if that meant they needed to leave places where Jim Crow was the law of the land and brave some unknown frontier, they often did so. As early as the period following WWI, they did it. They didn’t wait on civil rights legislation or the movement organizers who made the CRA and VRA possible, they voted with their feet and went north or west.


The connection, for me, is the importance of a do-it-yourself, or DIY, culture. The thread through so much of what I hear you say is that a focus on policy and lobbying -- convincing people who control the levers of power to do the right thing -- is not enough. And that even when those tactics achieve a desired goal, they don’t fundamentally change people’s sense of what’s possible or their ability to think beyond the established terms of debate.


Brown:I feel like this exchange is helping me understand why the work I am doing with food justice, digital justice and birth justice needs to be as creative and communal as possible, strengthening non-corporate networks to be resilient in any possible future. We who don't have resources or run institutions are continuously pit against each other, played against each other, Cains and Ables forgetting we are brothers and equals and our very existence is divine. This circles me back around to the power of relationship. We have to build relationships to build communities strong enough to evolve past these omnipotent institutions.