Computer vote count warning from Election Defense Alliance

Two warnings on the security of the 2010 vote--with so many close races Election Defense Alliance provides these hair-raising reports on the hackability of electronic voting machines. Check out the second video for a look at some of the specific vulnerabilities of both touch screen and optical scan voting machines.

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Statements from October 20: Bill McKibben

Climate activist and author Bill McKibben sent this congratulatory statement to mark the Monahan brothers arrival in DC. McKibben was arrested with Granny D and the other 32 members of the 4th AfD John Muir Democracy Brigade of April 21, 2000. The Brigade members entered The Rotunda of the Capitol and read statements calling for an end to endangerment of the earth by the oil, coal and nuclear industries.

The Monahan Brothers are walking in giant footsteps! Good for them for carrying on the work of my old friend Granny D—this witness has never been more necessary, as we face an election awash in corporate cash, and a country literally being sold down the river. Across America people are repulsed by this spectacle, but we need leaders to remind us what united citizens (as opposed to Citizens United) really looks like!

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Statements from October 20: Laird Monahan

Here's Laird Monahan's remarks at the Lincoln Memorial, as he and his brother finished a five-month walk across America to educate and inspire its citizens to end corporate personhood:

This is not the end.  Today doesn’t even represent the beginning of the end. This is not even the end of the beginning. We can only thank the Roberts Supreme Court for their arrogance in that it gave momentum to this movement that has been languishing in the country’s apathy for so many years.  All the effort that Granny D. accomplished was overturned by five arrogant men.  “Granny D.” Doris Haddock, was most effective and instrumental in helping to get the McCain/Feingold bill passed that limited corporate influence in our elections.  At 89 she started walking across the United States. She had two more birthdays before she finished.  I hope this walk will  honor her memory.  Let us pause for a moment of silence to remember the strength of purpose and dedication she gave to her country.
 
On Sunday, Robin and I spent the afternoon at the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of American History. Among the vast number of exhibits was the acknowledgement that:
 
"Though the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, race, religion, ethnicity, class and gender limited the rights of many Americans to participate in the Constitution's promise of democratic government. African Americans and women struggled throughout the 19th century for rights that only white male property holders had been granted in the 18th century."
 
This led me to reflect on the Constitution and it’s strength. That whenever people were recognized as included in the meaning of "The People", the Constitution itself was already inclusive. However imperfect it might be, it didn't need any more than the14th and 21st amendments to give Black Americans and Women the right to vote.
 
We are now faced with another problem, unanticipated by the founding fathers; that of the insidious inclusion of corporations as legal persons without the benefit of a Constitutional Amendment. Why would real human persons need Constitutional Amendments to be included in Constitutional benefits and protections but corporations do not?
 
The fact is that corporations never will be real people and would never be able to enjoy a two thirds vote by the Congress, for personhood and inclusion in Constitution as "The People", let alone a 3/4 majority of the states to ratify such a preposterous Amendment.
 
But the Supreme Court of the United States acting on a precedent established surreptitiously in 1886, 124 years ago, took it upon themselves to circumvent any public debate on the subject and decreed, from the bench, a proclamation of such audacity that 80% of the American People would reject it in a moment if they had a chance. These five men; Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Alito, Thomas,  Kennedy and Scalia, have violated over two hundred years of the court’s tradition of judicial restraint; that of addressing an issue that had not been brought before them in a legal case. They took a simple case about a question of accounting and told the litigants that it was a case about free speech and corporate personhood. This was unprecedented judicial hubris.
 
That decision has legalized the intimidation and bribery of our representatives that has been going on behind closed doors for years. It made mockery of our Constitution and turned it into a fraud. The Supreme Court does not care whether the people consent to be governed by corporations or not.

This is the defining issue of our time.  It holds sway over all other social agendas.  It is fundamental to the civil rights of all U.S. citizens and we must engage with everyone regardless of their ideologies.  That means we must talk with Republicans and Tea Partiers.  We must also talk with young people, whose government we are in the process of building and inspire everyone to action.

It is up to us. The footprints that Granny D. left in the dust must be renewed again and again. The people are only dimly aware of the seriousness of this crime against "We the People". We stand today, appointed by our own awareness of our patriotic duty and what we are called to do. We must wake the entire nation and battle against the tyrants who would steal our taxes and representation in our own government. I ask you all to look inward at the patriotic citizen inside and devote your own footsteps to this cause.

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The Loaded Chamber

Part 1 of a GritTV expose by the US Chamber of Commerce, by Harry Handbury. This big-business lobbying outfit has used the Citizens United decision and its 501 c 6 trade association status to swiftboat any candidate who tries to regulate their top funders, say the experts interviewed here.

Whether or not we see part II of this report depends on whether the filmmakers can raise enough money before Election Day. See the video website to find out more.

Take a look at USChamberWatch for more information on the US Chamber of Commerce, including facts on funding and how local chambers of commerce are publicly distancing themselves from the national group's partisan political activities.

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The Supreme Court Sold Out Our Democracy—How to Fight the Corporate Takeover of Our Elections

Citizens United didn't simply strike five guys in robes as a really good idea. Tom Hartmann lays out the history of corruption that led to this most damaging decision.

by Joshua Holland. Posted October 25 on Alternet

Election 2010 is being fought on a wave of campaign dollars unleashed on the American people by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United v. FEC decision. The court, led by a majority of staunch right-wingers, struck down limits on third-party “electioneering” ads based on a tortured interpretation of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

Thomas Mann, a Brookings Institution scholar, wrote that the decision “will likely go down in history as one of the Supreme Court's most egregious exercises of judicial activism.“ Rep. Peter Fazio, D-Oregon, told the Huffington Post last week that “the Supreme Court has done a tremendous disservice to the United States of America… They have done more to undermine our democracy with their Citizens United decision than all of the Republican operatives in the world in this campaign.” DeFazio said he is “investigating articles of impeachment" against Chief Justice John Roberts for committing perjury when he promised he wouldn't be a judicial activist during his Senate confirmation hearings.

The floodgates are open, and American democracy is at risk. But the decision didn’t emerge out of thin air. Rather, it was the culmination of the development, over more than a century, of a bizarre theory of jurisprudence that holds that corporations enjoy the same Constitutional rights as human beings.

For years, it was believed the concept was enshrined in the law by the Supreme Court in 1886, but in his groundbreaking book, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People -- And How You Can Fight Back, (ed note: get it from the library, or buy it and give it to your library when you're done) historian and radio host Thom Hartmann revealed that the principle was in fact the result of what may be the greatest corporate fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.

With the first post-Citizens United election looming -- and the release of Unequal Protection in paperback -- AlterNet caught up with Hartmann to discuss how corporations bought themselves a perverse regiment of civil rights.

Joshua Holland: I'd like to start with a very brief kind of bumper-sticker explanation of ‘corporate personhood.'

Thom Hartmann: Sure. From the sixth-century English law until today there have been two types of persons under the eyes of the law. The first are natural persons, human beings, and the second are artificial persons -- corporations, churches, unions and governments. The reason why there has to be artificial persons is because you have to have some sort of status as a person to be able to own property, pay taxes, enter into contracts, and sue or be sued.

The concept goes back to the sixth century, but it's only in the last 100 years of the United States that anybody has had the weird idea that those artificial persons should be entitled to human rights under the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.

JH: So BP and Goldman Sachs have the same constitutional rights that you and I enjoy?

TH: Somewhat. They have not yet claimed their Second Amendment rights.

JH: That's a good thing.

TH: But we're waiting. You got Blackwater, actually.

JH: Yes. I would think they’d be the first on that boat.

TH: The point is that through various claims and cases before the Supreme Court, corporations have explicitly claimed First Amendment free speech rights, Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, Fifth Amendment rights against taking and against self-incrimination, and 14th Amendment rights against discrimination.

JH: Now, although it's been with us for a very long time, it wasn’t until the 1980s that corporate starting breaking it out with increasing frequency. Can you give us just a couple of examples of where corporations asserted these constitutional rights?

TH: Sure. In short form, in 1874 I believe it was, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were passed to free the slaves. The 14th Amendment says that everybody has equal rights under the law.

I think it was clear to the authors, and pretty much to everybody, that they were talking about human beings -- natural persons. But in the 1880s, a decade later, the railroad corporations, which, as a result of the Civil War were the largest corporations in America, started bringing a series of cases before the Supreme Court ... they all started in the 9th Circuit Court in California under Judge Steven J. Field, asserting that because the word "natural" does not exist in the 14th Amendment, that corporations should be considered persons.

JH: Now let me just interrupt you here. If I were to go down to a law school and get out the kind of textbook that maybe a first-year law student would read, it would say that the courts had in fact decided that in the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Is that right?

TH: When I first wrote Unequal Protection --the first edition came out I think in 2000 or thereabouts -- I was invited to the Vermont Law School to give a talk on it, and I spoke to about 300 law students, professors and history teachers. And I said raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, corporations were given the rights of persons under the reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution? And pretty much everybody in the room raised their hand and I think the few who didn't just hadn't gotten to that point in their studies. And then I proceeded over the course of the next hour to demolish it basically by reading from the case.

There was a case before the Supreme Court in the 1980s, called First National Bank of Boston v. Belotti, which was one of the first cases in the modern era that really gave corporations the right to participate in political elections. Massachusetts had this law that said corporations could only give money to ballot initiatives that affected their businesses. But the case involved a ballot initiative to regulate gay marriage (say what? The referendum was actually on instituting a graduated personal income tax), and the banks had no rights to spend money on that -- the stockholders' money. And the First National Bank of Boston had broken that law. The Attorney General sued them and won in Massachusetts, and it was taken to the Supreme Court. And in that case, Justice Rehnquist -- who, regardless of what you think of him, was one of the most brilliant jurists of our time -- wrote a dissent in Boston v. Belotti. And in that dissent -- what I'm giving you is my bad paraphrasing of it -- Renquist said, "Back in 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, this Court, without the benefit of public debate or discourse, decided that corporations have equal rights under the 14th Amendment." Then he went on to say how he thought that it was a wrongly decided case.

Well, it turns out, it wasn't wrongly decided. And even Renquist didn't know it! Forget the law students in Vermont Law School!

JH: Now let’s recap the story. You went down to a dusty Vermont courthouse -- I don't actually know if it was dusty, I'm just making that up ...

TH: The book was dusty! I don't think anybody had pulled it off the shelf in 100 years.

JH: And you found that what the real deal was. Tell me about that, and also tell me who JC Bancroft Davis is.

TH: Yes. Jack Chandler Bancroft Davis is his name. I started out writing a book about Thomas Jefferson's view of America and how we went off track. How we got off the rails. And I wanted to primary source everything in the book, like a good historian would do. And when I came to the 1800s -- when corporations became a major force in America, and led right to the massive accumulations of wealth that were marked the ‘Robber Baron Era’ -- there was a lot of material about how this case had been decided in 1886. And so I thought I ought to read the case so I could quote the exact language. Because nobody was quoting the exact language. Everybody was saying it was decided, but even Renquist in his Belotti dissent didn't quote the exact language. So I went into Montpelier, Vermont’s, old law library and spoke to Paul Donovan, the librarian there. And I said I'm looking for that 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern District Railroad. And he said, ‘Oh, the one where corporations became people?’ And I said ‘Yeah, that one.’ And so he finds the book of Supreme Court proceedings from the term of 1886. He pulls it out, blows the dust off the top, and opens it on the table. This was before they started putting acid in paper in the 1930s, so the pages were still in pretty good shape. And he flipped through it, and he found the case, and he said, ‘Here's the head note. You can ignore that-- that has no legal status.’

And so I sat down and I just read it, all the way through, looking for those magic words that I could put in my book. And they weren't there. In fact, what the case was about was Santa Clara County was charging property tax to the Southern Pacific Railroad. And the way that they calculated property taxes for right of way was by fence posts along the railway. So X number of dollars for every 100 fence posts. And because Santa Ana County was charging a lower rate than Santa Clara County, the railroad was screaming foul, and in fact refused to pay the tax. And this ended up before the Supreme Court. And the railroad made a whole bunch of different arguments. And one of those was that this was illegal discrimination under the 14th Amendment, that they weren't being treated equally under the law by two different counties in the same state.

But the argument that I just described to you was not even referenced in the decision. Because there was a clear and explicit part of California law that gave each county the right to determine their own property taxes. The California law and the California Constitution backed it up.

And at the very end of the case, it basically said that the Court did not feel the need to address those federal Constitutional claims because they were able to find remedies within the California law and in the state Constitution.

JH: So they didn't even consider those arguments, they didn't need to, because they were able to decide the case based on other issues.

TH: Right. One of the core concepts of jurisprudence is minimalism. You always try to-- it's called "judicial restraint" -- you always try to decide a case as narrowly as possible, and if within that narrow band, you can find the remedy, then you don't go beyond that.

And so I read that, and I went back to Paul, the librarian, and I said "I'm not finding in this case what I thought I'd find. I'm baffled." And he said, "Well, did you read the headnote? Maybe that will give you a clue where to find it." You know, as if I'd overlooked something. So I said, "What's a headnote?" And he said, "Well, a headnote is basically Cliff notes -- you know, cheat sheets for lawyers to understand what a case is about without having to read the whole case." They're written by the Clerk of the Court. And so we went back and he found the headnote in the book, and I read the headnote. And there, a couple of paragraphs into the headnote, was this language where the author of the headnote, the Clerk of the Court, said he was quoting the Chief Justice of the Court, saying that corporations are persons and entitled to rights under the 14th Amendment.

So I take my 75 cents, or whatever it was, and my copies of the book, and we very carefully copied it on the copy machine there and Paul put it back on the shelf. Then I went around the corner to an old friend who was a lawyer in Montpelier, Jim Deville, and I laid out my copies on his table. And I showed him the language toward the end of the decision. I said, "Okay, here's the argument, here's the argument, here's the argument, here's the language at the end of the decision." And he goes, "Wow! That's not what we learned in law school!"

And so I went back to the headnote, and I highlighted that sentence in the headnote, and I said, "Well, this is probably what you learned in law school, right?" And he goes, "Holy shit!" And I said, "What do you think?" And he said, "Well, this is why they tell you in law school: don't cut corners and just read the headnotes."

Because occasionally the headnotes are wrong! He said in this case, not only was the headnote wrong, it actually contradicted the decision! And I asked him whether it had any legal status. And he said, "No, there was a 1909 Supreme Court decision that explicitly ruled that headnotes have no legal status."

JH: Now the Clerk ... let's get back to the Clerk just briefly.

TH: Sure.

JH: So this is JC Bancroft Davis.

TH: That's correct.

JH: Tell me a little bit about what you found out about him when you dug into his story?

TH: Well, that was pretty hard to find. Because to the best of my knowledge nobody had ever done anything about him, or looked into him, other than Davis himself -- he had published a number of books. He was quite the dandy. And he was the son of a very wealthy family. His father was the governor of Massachusetts. He had been one of the original incorporators of the New York and Newburgh Railroad, and so he was a railroad guy.

JH: Okay, so basically we're seeing that a lot of what we have taken for granted as legal corporate power, is in a sense a result of what may be the greatest fraud in history.

TH: That's right. And so when I started digging into this, not only did I find out that Davis was questionable-- kind of a dicey character -- but that this was one of a series of cases, tax cases, that all originated in the 9th Circuit in California, with Steven J. Field, and got kicked up to the Supreme Court, in which every single one of them argued that the 14th Amendment gave corporations personhood.

And in the first few, the Court just rejected out of hand. And that was until 1886. And so we started digging into it, and wondered, who the hell was this Steven J. Field guy?’

Field had basically two allies on the Supreme Court, plus Davis, who had no vote. And so we started digging into the Steven J. Field collection at the National Archives, and we found correspondence between him and the railroads that I don't think anybody had looked at in 100 years, if ever. In some of them, the railroad barons were in some cases implicitly, and in one case rather explicitly saying that if he could get them this corporate personhood, they would sponsor him to run for President of the United States in the election of 1888, I think it was, or maybe 1892.

And he didn't actually succeed. In fact, Steven J. Field actually wrote a dissent in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which he loudly complained about the fact that they hadn’t established corporate personhood. And you'd think somebody would read the damned thing!! You know?

JH: So we have this ...

TH: What you had was a corrupted Supreme Court, and it had been corrupted by these very, very wealthy and powerful guys who ran the railroads and who were the richest men in America. And you know, that led to what we have now, which is this kind of corporate aristocracy. And there's a direct line between the two.

JH: So let's bring it from the 19th century into the late 20th and 21st. I just want to kind of get a brief sense, if you can give me a couple of examples of how modern multinationals have used this principle in recent years to push back on regulation, etc.

TH: Sure. Nike argued that they had the right to lie in advertising, because they had a 1st Amendment right of speech. That was ultimately, I guess, arguably decided in Citizens United. There was a chemical company that argued that the EPA invaded their 4th Amendment right of privacy by photographing them -- from the air -- making illegal chemical discharges. There had been a number of cases where giant agricultural operations, toxic waste operations, and large chain stores have argued that keeping them out of a neighborhood or community is the same thing as telling a black person he can't sit at a lunch counter. In other words they claimed their 14th Amendment rights. There have been a number of cases over the years where corporations have claimed that they have the right against self-incrimination.

You know, the original corporate laws, when corporations were created in the early 19th century, their books had to be totally public for the mid part of the 19th century, they had to be totally available to the Secretary of State in each state in which they were incorporated. But since the early 20th century they have been able to claim 4th Amendment privacy rights.

JH: Now, a quick aside. Did you catch a story about the town of Monroe, Maine, rejecting corporate personhood? They passed a local ordinance?

TH: Yes. There have been over 100 communities in the United States that have done this. So yes, there have been a lot of communities that have done this. There has not been a case where a community has made this law and it has been challenged and it has been taken to the Supreme Court. What happens more often is that the communities pass the laws, the corporation comes in and says "Okay, we're going to fight you in court." The community looks at what the legal costs are going to be, and the community then repeals the law. And it's happened numerous times.

JH: Now in your book, you have a chapter on restoring government of, by and for the people. And I think you take a fairly optimistic tone.

TH: I do.

JH: Tell me, what is the basis for that optimism? What are you hoping to see happen? How might we restore government of, by and for natural people?

TH: Right. For natural persons. Well, we had a time in this country when African Americans were not fully people. In fact what's so ironic is that in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled the persons were property. And that was the mirror image of the 2010 Citizens United decision, which ruled that properties can be persons. But over time the idea that African Americans should not have full rights has become unthinkable.

In the early 20th century, if a woman's husband died, she could not dispose of his assets or her assets ... in fact she didn't even have the legal right in most states to decide what religion to raise her child in, or even necessarily to keep her child. A male executor had to be appointed who made all those decisions for her.

And then on top of that there have been times like the late 19th century when the vast mass of working people in the United States have been victims of oppression -- we had kind of descended into a Victorian era kind of serfdom, and the response to that was the rise of the Progressive Movement in the 1880s and 1890s. And the labor movements, and the Wobblies, and all this stuff. Which led to the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt, and then to, again, after the Crash in 1929, the Progressive Era of Franklin Roosevelt.

So what I see when I look at the arc of history in the United States is that we're continuously moving upward towards a more egalitarian, healthier, more (small d) democratic republic. And also that there have been a lot of hiccups along the way -- lot of setbacks. For example, early in the 20th century, there were a number of cases where the Supreme Court actually struck down minimum wage laws, child labor laws, maximum hour laws -- struck all that stuff down, and said that it was a violation of the Commerce Clause.

And I think it was in '36 or '37, when finally enough people on the Supreme Court changed, and Roosevelt was able to start getting into law the things that the Supreme Court, just a generation earlier, had declared unconstitutional. So we've had some major setbacks as a result of the Supreme Court, and as a result of just general public sentiments.

But I think that (small d) democracy ... freedom ... these words are in our DNA as Americans. They're just burnt in there. They're not going to go away. And this oppression of working people by trans-national monopolies--I'm not even going to use the word "corporation" -- is I don't believe something that will stand. I think eventually the pain is going to get so bad that the average American is going to say "Now I understand!" We have a long history in this country of people figuring out that something's wrong, and then figuring out how to fix it. So I'm very optimistic actually.

There are a lot of people who are trying to solve this problem today. And one of the solutions has been legislative, for example trying to just deal with the First Amendment right of free speech stuff, that was addressed in Citizens United. But I think that that's very dangerous, because it doesn't address the real issue of corporate power. It doesn't address the corporations using the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the 14th Amendment. Similarly, there's a movement by some very well intentioned progressives to amend the Constitution, to specifically say corporations don't have First Amendment free speech rights. And I think that that's dangerous also. Because it not only leaves intact the Fourth, Fifth and 14 Amendment rights that corporations are claiming ... and arguably Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendment rights ... but it implicitly recognizes them.

And so I believe that the only way to address this is to amend the Constitution clearly and explicitly to say that the 14th Amendment was intended to free slaves who are natural persons ... and that only natural persons, human beings, have rights under the Bill of Rights, and that corporations are merely the creation of governments. Because they are. They are legal fictions, and they have only those rights and privileges that the individual states decide to give them.

I think if we don't do the whole thing, if we only do it part way, we might end up, at least over a short period of time, worse off than we were, even though we'll think that we had a victory.

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A forthcoming film on the financial crisis looks at the planned implosion of US prosperity

How do the rich get richer? Paradoxically, they collapse the economy, according to the in-the-works documentary "Heist," which says there was nothing accidental about the current global financial crisis. Its roots are in Reaganomics and financial industry deregulation, and beginning in the 1970s it started decades of wealth transfer to the US's top 1% asset-holders from everybody else.

From the website:

The collapse of America's economy is the result of conscious choices made over thirty five years by a small number of other Americans: mostly leaders of corporations and their allies—the ones who “make things happen”—people like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, Phil Gramm, Larry Summers—and the biggest lobbying interest in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. To this small group, our country’s economic collapse is not a catastrophe, but rather the planned outcome of their long, patient work. Their just reward. For the rest of us, it is merely the biggest heist in American history.

Heist tells the story of how corporations and their political allies in Congress orchestrated the greatest theft in history -- the robbery of Americans' prosperity, savings, and retirement security.

The website features a video trailer which we were unable to embed here, but is worth watching, plus background info and links to action groups.

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More photos and media from the Monahans' walk into Washington

(Updated Wednesday, October 27) Jeff Malet, a photojournalist and performing arts photographer and a regular contributor to TalkingPointsMemo, the Huffington Post, Salon, and DC-area publications, was at the October 20th events welcoming Laird and Robin Monahan to Washington, and took these photos.

John Leonhard took these photos (some are also in the slideshow in our post on the event).

This photo of the event wound up in the Seattle Times, above an editorial on attorney James Bopp, who filed the lawsuit that led to the Citizens United decision and is now aiming at overturning campaign contribution disclosure laws in several states.

Laird's climb up the Lincoln Memorial Steps made "The Caucus Click" on the NYTimes Caucus blog.

Ambreen Ali wrote an article about Laird and Robin's walk and their arrival in DC on Congress.org.

David Swanson spoke at the event, and his remarks are posted here.

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Maine's Clean Elections law survives an 11th hour attack

Maine will still be a clean elections state, at least for now, after a decision by the Supreme Court last Friday to deny an injunction to overturn the state's twelve-year-old public campaign funding law. About 300 Maine candidates are running Clean Elections campaigns this season, according to WABI tv, including gubernatorial candidate Libby Mitchell.

The Maine Clean Elections Act, which limits private contributions while providing matching public funds, was challenged by a group called the Respect Maine Political Action Committee and Republican State Representative Andre Cushing. Cushing said he objected to the extra funds Clean Elections candidates can tap if they're opposed by "non-clean" candidates, and the suit also targeted contribution caps and disclosure rules.

Maine's voter-approved clean elections law has been a plus for the state, Ann Luther, co-chair of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, told WABI. "We have more women, more people from diverse backgrounds, more young people seeking office. We have more challengers facing incumbents, fewer uncontested races, we've kept campaign spending down, it's just been a huge success."

Cushing and Respect Maine PAC will have their day in a lower court, for the judge there to hear the merits of their suit. The Court's two-paragraph order simply cited the lateness of the request and the high burden for granting an injunction in denying emergency relief, according to Demos Foundation, which, with co-counsel, including the Brennan Center for Justice and Portland attorney John Brautigam, filed a 47-page amicus brief in support of the state before the Court's decision.

The Court's action means that Maine's Clean Elections system has been preserved intact for this upcoming election - an important victory for public financing of elections since other states, like Arizona, Florida and Connecticut, have seen portions of their programs halted this year.

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Political animal takes stand against corporate personhood

Five Supreme Court judges couldn't figure it out, but Hobo can't be fooled.

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Video from Portland AfD's teach-in on the Korea FTA

The Alliance's Portland (OR) chapter recently held a teach-in on the Korea Free Trade Agreement--video from the event is posted at their website, along with video of an edition of the public affairs program, A Growing Concern, featuring chapter president David Delk. David talks mostly about trade, and especially about the investor protection clauses of so-called free trade agreements with a specific focus on the Pacific Rim Mining Corporation claim again El Salvador, but he also discusses the need to end corporate personhood by amending the US Constitution.

Here's the first video in the teach-in series to get you started--good viewing!

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The end of a march and the start of a movement

by Jim Tarbell, editor, Justice Rising
Alliance for Democracy enthusiasts, in coalition with other Move to Amend coalition partners, facilitated a media-savvy welcome for Robin and Laird Monahan to Washington DC Wednesday, October 20.

The brothers trekked 3100 miles across country to support Move to Amend and call attention to Citizens United v. FEC, the disastrous Supreme Court decision allowing spending of unlimited corporate money on our elections. The Alliance knew these two dedicated Viet Nam vets and democracy advocates deserved a great hurrah!

The all-day event started with a march from the Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial, featuring the Backbone Campaign's massive replica of the Preamble to the US Constitution, which was carried across the river on the shoulders of supporters, who then boldly marched up the Lincoln Memorial and cascaded the 200-foot banner down the fabled marble steps. The gathering crowd then joined this evolving festival of human-based democracy and individually signed the great scroll with flamboyant feather pens. Laird and Robin spoke, joined by brief statements from Move to Amend coalition partners, and congratulations sent by Bill McKibben, read by AfD co-chair Nancy Price

Another standout in front of the Capitol and Supreme Court building featured a giant "For Sale" sign, assembled the night before (and into the early morning hours) by the Backbone Campaign's Bill Moyer, and AfD co-chair Nancy Price.

A fun and festive evening reception at Washington's renowned Busboys and Poets wrapped up the day with a gathering that included some of this country's most dedicated and active citizens determined to bring an end to the devastating power of corporate money in politics.

AfD Co-chair Nancy Price spent weeks arranging the event and then spent much of the day holding flabbergasted police agencies at bay by explaining the multiple permits she had obtained from their institutions.

Thanks to creative and hard work by various coalition partners, including Bill Moyer of the Backbone Campaign, the event received major media coverage, including photos in the Washington Post, on the New York Times website and in various blogs across the country, spreading the word that there is a growing popular movement to end corporate corruption of our elections.

See the slideshow here! Thanks to photographers Barry Student of Electric Communications, John Leonhard, Jim Tarbell and Barb Clancy.

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The Nation: Democracy for Sale

A moneyed elite has exerted disproportionate influence on politics since the early days of the nation, and while campaign finance law has kept them in check, or at least insist on some level of disclosure, a new wave of secret big-money donations from corporations--now legal thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision--threaten citizens with a corporate oligarcy and a return to the bad old days of robber barons and economic inequality.

Editorial posted on The Nation October 14.

On October 6, amid the tidal wave of corporate cash flooding the 2010 campaigns—which could attach a $5 billion price tag to the most expensive midterm election in history—Bill Moyers told Common Cause that money in politics is "the dagger directed at the heart of democracy." He had just warned that "the activist reactionary majority on the Supreme Court...has opened the floodgates for oligarchs and plutocrats to secretly buy our elections and consolidate their hold on the corporate state."

What is happening this fall is not just about parties and candidates or television attack ads or a media fantasy of "the grassroots Tea Party movement." We are witnessing an assault on democracy by multinational corporations that, freed by the Citizens United ruling, are out to get the best government money can buy. Who's buying? Billionaire businessmen with a stake in energy, finance and telecommunications policy debates—like Trevor Rees-Jones, Robert Rowling and Jerry Perenchio—are writing checks for as much as $1 million each to Karl Rove's American Crossroads project. What's more, Crossroads GPS, an allied group that's pouring tens of millions into Congressional races, is organized under tax laws that allow Rove to hide the names of donors. But we do know the targets: by early October, the group had spent $14 million on ads attacking senators Barbara Boxer in California and Patty Murray in Washington, as well as a handful of other Democrats in races that could decide which party controls the Senate.

The Crossroads campaign is part of a broader push from corporations to buy not just Congress but a guarantee that there will be fewer challenges to corporate abuses, bankster speculation and free-trade policies that allow multinational corporations to shutter American factories while exploiting the world's poorest workers.

Fronting this corporate campaigning is the US Chamber of Commerce, which, according to the Center for American Progress, collects and deposits money from US-based multinationals and groups from India and Bahrain that ends up "in the same 501(c)(6) account the Chamber is using to run an unprecedented $75 million attack campaign, mostly against Democrats." The Chamber joins Crossroads and other Republican-friendly groups in refusing to reveal its sources of funding.

Reformers are under attack from Rove's apparatchiks for demanding enactment of the DISCLOSE Act, which Democracy 21 president Fred Wertheimer says "would carry forward a forty-year-old principle of campaign finance laws that campaign contributions and expenditures should be disclosed." That's a start, but transparency is not enough. Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a target of the Chamber's attack ads, is right when he says the central issue is corporate power. Democrats should pick up on Feingold's theme, in this campaign and in the next Congress. They must push responses ranging from public funding of campaigns to amending the Constitution so that it guarantees that legislatures can regulate corporate campaigning. More is at stake than House and Senate seats. "Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck," warns Moyers. If the dagger of corporate money pierces the heart of democracy this year, we may not have the strength to pull it out afterward. The 2010 election is a watershed for America. It is money versus democracy. We dare not let the money win.

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Water: The New Oil?

Corporations tout the "invisible hand" of the market as the best way to meet global water needs, but at what price to those who can't pay for private water, or to the ecosystems from which fresh water is removed? And will the "winners" in a new global water market have the resolve to push for recognition of a human right to water, when there's money to be made?

by Jeneen Interlandi. Published by on Newsweek October 8.

Sitka, Alaska, is home to one of the world's most spectacular lakes. Nestled into a U-shaped valley of dense forests and majestic peaks, and fed by snowpack and glaciers, the reservoir -- named Blue Lake for its deep blue hues -- holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it requires no treatment.

The city's tiny population -- fewer than 10,000 people spread across 5,000 square miles -- makes this an embarrassment of riches. Every year, as countries around the world struggle to meet the water needs of their citizens, 6.2 billion gallons of Sitka's reserves go unused. But that could soon change.

In a few months, if all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally used for transporting oil -- and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East.

The project is the brainchild of two American companies: True Alaska Bottling, which has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka's bountiful reserves, and S2C Global, which is building the water-processing facility in India.

If the companies succeed, they will have brought what Sitka hopes will be a $90 million industry to their city, not to mention a solution to one of the world's most pressing climate conundrums. And they will also have turned life's most essential molecule into a global commodity.

The transfer of water is nothing new. New York City is supplied by a web of tunnels and pipes that stretch 125 miles north into the Catskills Mountains; Southern California gets its water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Colorado River Basin, which are hundreds of miles to the north and west, respectively.

The distance between Alaska and India is much farther, to be sure. But it's not the distance that worries critics. It's the transfer of so much water from public hands to private ones. "Water has been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years," says James Olson, an attorney who specializes in water rights. "Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous."

Everyone agrees that we are in the midst of a global freshwater crisis. Rivers, lakes, and aquifers around the world are dwindling faster than nature can possibly replenish them; industrial and household chemicals are rapidly polluting what's left. Meanwhile, global population is increasing. Goldman Sachs estimates that world water consumption is doubling every 20 years, and the United Nations expects demand to out-strip supply by more than 30 percent by 2040.

Proponents of privatization say that markets are the best way to solve that problem: only the so-called "invisible hand" can bring supply and demand into balance, and only market pricing will drive water use down enough to make a dent in water scarcity. But the benefits of the market come at a price: By definition, a commodity is sold to the highest bidder, not the customer with the most compelling need.

As the global water crisis worsens, companies such as True Alaska that own the rights to vast stores of water (and have the capacity to move it in bulk) won't necessarily weigh the needs of water-starved communities in Phoenix or Ghana against those of wealthy, water-guzzling companies like Coca-Cola or Nestlé -- privately owned water utilities will charge whatever the market will bear, and spend as little as possible on maintenance and environmental protection.

Other commodities are subject to the same market dynamics, of course. But with food or energy, customers have options: They can eat switch from beef to chicken, or from oil to natural gas. But there is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola. "Markets don't care about the environment," says Olson. "And they don't care about human rights. They care about profit."

In the industrialized world -- and America especially -- it's easy to take water for granted. Turn on any tap and it comes rushing out, clean and plentiful, even in the arid Southwest, where the Colorado River Basin is struggling through its 11th year of drought; in most U.S. cities, a month's supply of water still costs less than premium cable or a generous cell-phone plan.

Many of us have no idea where our water comes from, let alone who owns it. In fact, most of us would probably agree that water is too precious for anybody to own. But the right to divert water -- from a river or lake or underground aquifer -- are indeed sellable commodities; so too are the purification plants that process that water and and the pipes deliver it to our taps.

As demand for water increasingly outstrips supply, those commodities are set to appreciate precipitously. According to a 2009 report by the World Bank, private investment in the water industry is set to double in the next five years; the water-supply market alone will increase by 20 percent.

Unlike the villain in James Bond's 'Quantum of Solace', who hatched a secret plot to monopolize Bolivia's fresh-water supply, the real water barons cannot be reduced to a simple archetype. They include a diverse array of buyers and sellers -- from multi-national water giants Suez and Veolia, which together deliver water to some 260 million taps around the world, to oil convert T. Boone Pickens, who wants to sell the water under his Texas ranch to thirsty cities like Dallas.

"The water market has become much more sophisticated in the last two decades," says Clay Landry, director of WestWater Research, a consulting firm that specializes in water rights. "It's gone from parochial transactions --back-of-the-truck, handshake-type deals -- to a serious market with increasingly serious players."

Eventually, Olson worries, every last drop of water around the globe will be privately controlled. And when that happens, the world will find itself divided along a new set of boundaries: those with water on one side, and those without water on the other.

The winners -- such as Canada, Alaska, and Russia -- and losers (India, Syria, Jordan) will be different from those of the oil conflicts of the 20th century, but the bottom line will be much the same: Countries that have the means to exploit large reserves will prosper. The rest will be left to fight over ever-shrinking reserves. Some will go to war.

Until recently, water privatization was an almost exclusively a "developing world" issue. In the late 1990s the World Bank infamously required scores of impoverished countries -- most notably Bolivia -- to privatize their water supplies as a condition of desperately needed economic assistance. The hope was that markets would eliminate corruption, and big multinational corporations would invest the resources needed to bring more water to more people.

By 2000, Bechtel -- the U.S. multinational that had leased Bolivia's pipes and plants -- had more than doubled water rates, leaving the tens of thousands of Bolivians who couldn't pay without any water whatsoever. The company said the price hikes were needed to repair and expand the dilapidated infrastructure, but critics insisted they served only to maintain unrealistic profit margins.

Either way, Bolivian citizens took to the streets in a string of violent protests, and eventually sent the company packing. By 2001, the public utility had resumed control.

These days, global water barons have set their sights on a more appealing target: countries with dwindling water supplies and aging infrastructure, but better economies than Bolivia's. "These are the countries that can afford to pay," says Olson. "They've got huge infrastructure needs, shrinking water reserves, and money."

Nowhere is this truer than China. As the water table under Beijing plummets, wells dug around the city must reach ever-greater depths (nearly two thirds of a mile or more, according to a recent World Bank report) to hit fresh water. That has made water drilling more costly and water contracts more lucrative.

Since 2000, when the country opened its municipal services to foreign investment, the number of private water utilities has skyrocketed. But as private companies absorb water systems throughout the country, the cost of water has risen precipitously. "It's more than most families can afford to pay," says Ge Yun, an economist with the Xinjiang Conservation Fund. "So as more and more water goes private, fewer and fewer people have access to it."

In the U.S., federal funds for repairing water infrastructure -- most of which was built around the same time that Henry Ford built the first Model T -- are sorely lacking. The Obama administration has secured just $6 billion for repairs the EPA estimates will cost $300 billion. Meanwhile, more than half a million municipal water pipes burst every year, according to the American Water Works Association, and more than 6 billion gallons are lost to leaky pipes.

In response to the funding gap, hundreds of U.S. cities -- including Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Santa Fe, NM -- are now looking to privatize their municipal water systems. Elected officials hope to use the profits from selling them off to balance city budgets, while off-loading the cost of repairing and expanding aging infrastructure (and the politically unpopular rise in water rates to fund it) to companies that promise both jobs and economy-stimulating profits.

But reality usually intrudes. "Because water infrastructure is too expensive to allow competing providers, the only real competition occurs during the bidding process," says Wenonah Hauter, executive director of non-profit group Food and Water Watch. "After that, the private utility has a virtual monopoly. And because 70 to 80 percent of water and sewer assets are underground, municipalities can have a tough time monitoring a contractor's performance."

According to some reports, private operators often reduce the workforce, neglect water conservation, and shift the cost of environmental violations onto the city. For example, when two Veolia-operated plants spilled millions of gallons of sewage into San Francisco Bay, at least one city was forced to make multi-million-dollar upgrades to the offending sewage plant. (Veolia has defended its record.)
Even as many U.S. cities look to sell their water infrastructure to private interests, others are waging expensive legal battles to get out of such contracts. In 2009 Camden, N.J., sued United Water (an American subsidiary of the French giant Suez) for $29 million in unapproved payments, high unaccounted-for water losses, poor maintenance, and service disruptions.

In Milwaukee, a state audit found that the same company violated its contract by shutting down sewage pumps to save money; the move resulted in billions of gallons of raw sewage spilling into Lake Michigan. And in Gary, Ind., which canceled its contract with United Water after 12 years, critics say privatization more than doubled annual operating costs.

"It ends up being a roundabout way to tax people," Hauter says. "Only it's worse than a tax, because they don't spend the money maintaining the system."

Representatives of United Water point out that 95 percent of its contracts are in fact renewed, and say that a few bad examples don't tell the whole story. "We are dealing with facilities that were designed and built at the end of World War II," says United Water CEO Bertrand Camus. "We have plenty of horror stories on our side, too."

The Gary, Ind., facility, for example, was privatized only after the EPA forced the public utility to find a more experienced operator to solve a range of problems. "Individual municipalities don't have the expertise to employ all the new technology to meet the new standards," Camus says. "We do."

The fact that water is essential to life makes it no less expensive to obtain, purify, and deliver -- and does not change the fact that as supplies dwindle and demand grows, the cost will only increase. For those reasons, the World Bank has argued that higher water prices are actually a good thing.

Right now, no public utility anywhere prices water based on how scarce it is or how much it costs to deliver, and privatization proponents argue that this is the root cause of such rampant overuse. If water cost more, they say, we would conserve it better.

The main problem with this argument is what economists call price inelasticity: no matter what water costs, we still need it to survive. So beyond trimming non-essential uses like lawn maintenance, car washing, and swimming pools, consumers really can't reduce water consumption in the same proportion as rate increases.

"Free-market theory works great for discretionary consumer purchases," says Hauter. "But water is not like other commodities -- it's not something people can substitute or choose to forgo." Dozens of studies have found that even with steep rate hikes, consumers tend to reduce water consumption by only a little, and that even in the worst cases, the crunch is disproportionately shouldered by the poor.

In the string of droughts that plagued California during the 1980s, for example, doubling the price of water drove household consumption down by a third, but households earning less than $20,000 cut their consumption by half, while households earning more than $100,000 reduced use by only 10 percent.

In fact, critics say, private water companies usually have very little incentive to encourage conservation; after all, when water use falls, revenue declines. In 2005, a second Bolivian riot erupted when another private water company raised rates beyond what average people could afford.

The company had dutifully expanded the city's water system to several poor neighborhoods outside the city. But the villagers there -- accustomed to life without taps -- were obsessive water conservers, and weren't using enough water to make the investment profitable.

The biggest winners of a sophisticated water market are likely to be the very few water-rich regions of the global north that can profitably move massive quantities across huge distances. Russian entrepreneurs want to sell Siberian water to China; Canadian and American ones are vying to sell Canadian water to the Southwestern U.S.

So far, such bulk transfers have been impeded by the high cost of tanker ships. Now, thanks to the global recession, the tankers' rates have dropped significantly. If the Sitka plan succeeds, other water-rich cities may soon follow. But in between the countries that will profit from the freshwater crisis, and those with the financial resources to buy their way out of it, are the countries that have neither water to sell nor money with which to buy it.

In fact, if there's one thing water has in common with oil, it's that people will go to war over it. Already, Pakistan has accused India of diverting too much water from rivers running off the Himalayas; India, in turn, is complaining that China's colossal diversion of rivers and aquifers near the countries' shared border will deprive it of its fair share; and Jordan and Syria are bickering over access to flows from a dam the two countries built together.

So what do we do? On the one hand, most of the world views water as a basic human right (the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously to affirm it as such this July). On the other, it's becoming so expensive to obtain and supply that most governments cannot afford to shoulder the cost alone. But by themselves, markets will never be able to balance these competing realities.

That means state and federal governments will have to play a stronger role in managing freshwater resources. In the U.S., investing as much money in water infrastructure as the federal government has invested in other public-works projects would not only create jobs, but also alleviate some of the financial pressure that has sent so many municipal governments running to private industry.

That is not to say that industry doesn't also have a role to play. With the right incentives, it can develop and supply the technology needed to make water delivery more cost-effective and environmentally sound. Ultimately both public and private entities will have to work together. And soon. Unless we manage our water better now, we will run out. When that happens, no pricing or management scheme in the world will save us.

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Wednesday, October 20: Welcome Laird and Robin Monahan to Washington

After 3072 miles and 158 days, Laird and Robin Monahan will end their historic “Walk Across America for Democracy” by crossing the Potomac River into Washington, DC, and rallying with supporters in front of the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Capitol Building.

Here's the schedule--we'll be updating you on speakers, so keep an eye on the blog or subscribe to our email list.

10:00am: Meet Laird and Robin and walk with them to the Lincoln Memorial. Starting point: The Women in Military Service for America Memorial at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery near the Arlington Metro stop.

12:00 to 1:30pm: Rally at the Lincoln Memorial

1:30 pm: Leave Lincoln Memorial- walk to the U.S. Capitol Building

3:00 pm: Rally at the U.S. Capitol Building and U.S. Supreme Court

6:00 to 8:00 pm: Celebration and reception at Busboys & Poets at 5th and K

On May 16, Laird and Robin Monahan left San Francisco to walk across America to educate people and protest the January 21st Supreme Court decision by 5 unelected Justices in Citizens United decision that overturned decades of campaign finance legislation passed democratically by Congress and state legislatures and upheld by prior Supreme Court rulings. For them letters and phone calls were no longer sufficient.

They have taken their message to people and communities across the country that a Constitutional amendment to deny corporations “personhood” and all constitutional rights is vital to restore democracy and assert the inalienable human right of We the People.

Join them and citizens coming together to speak out against excessive influence of corporations inn our elections and government policies.

Come sign the Preamble to the Constitution.” Help carry it up The Mall to the Capitol Building and the U.S. Supreme Court. Bring your own signs.

Let’s make it clear. Corporations are legal entities, not persons with constitutional rights. Money is not speech.

The Monahans walk in the footsteps of Doris “Granny D” Haddock. At age 90 she walked into DC on February 29, 2000 after a cross-country trek that brought national attention to the corrosive effect of big-money contributions on democracy and the need for substantive campaign finance reform. “Granny D” is credited with galvanizing public support that helped Congress pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold) which the Supreme Court, now eight years later, overturned with the Citizens United decision!

Alliance for Democracy built on her walk by organizing six Democracy Brigades—groups of activists whose non-violent “Speak-Outs” in the Capitol Rotunda used civil disobedience to underscore a bigger crime: political bribery by big-money campaign contributors

The Monahan’s march may be almost over, but our’s is just getting started. What can you do?

• Join us in DC to focus attention on our next Constitutional amendment—one that ends corporate personhood and corporate constitutional rights and reserves First Amendment free speech rights for humans, not corporations.
• If you’re not near Washington, forward this email to family, friends and colleagues in the DC area who could attend.
• And wherever you are, educate and agitate. Download material on corporate personhood from the Alliance website—see the articles from our Justice Rising issue on “Courts and Corporations vs. Our Common Good” and our “Corporations Are Not People” brochure. Order a bumpersticker! They're on our website. Check out WILPF’s Corporations vs. Democracy Study Guide or resources on this page of the Move to Amend site.
• Bring speakers or trainers from Move to Amend or the Alliance for Democracy to rally support in your community to pass local and state resolutions to abolish corporate personhood and support constitutional amendment. See a sample resolution here.

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You ought to know... The Personhood Song!

As sung by Raging Grannies and others to the tune of "This Land is Your Land"

CHORUS:
I am a person, you are a person,
With flesh and blood and with mind and conscience.
The corporation is not a person.
That word belongs to you and me.

They rape and plunder the world's resources,
Destroying forests and killing wildlife.
The corporation must turn a profit,
Trampling over you and me.

They dump big money into elections,
Buying our Congress and Legislatures.
The corporation, a legal fiction,
Now has more rights than you and me.

The 1st Amendment protects our freedom
Of free expression and of religion.
The corporations have gone and stole it.
Those rights belong to you and me.

The 4th Amendment requires warrants
For search and seizure; but corporations
Evading health codes and regulations
And environmental laws.

Whenever Walmart destroys a Main Street
And all the people rise us in protest,
The corporate cries of "Discrimination!"
Over-ride democracy.

If "We the People" are truly sovereign
And rule the country through our elections,
Then we must take back from corporations
Rights that were meant for you and me.

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New Justice Rising on the solidarity economy--online now!

Check out the latest issue of Justice Rising, our newsletter. Each edition examines a single issue through the perspective of resistance to corporate rule, and this time we're looking at the creation and development of the solidarity economy, and how its "roots and shoots" represent the beginning of a viable alternative economic reality.

You can read and download the whole issue, or read and print individual articles (perfect for tabling, legislative visits or for sharing with fellow activists, teachers, students, co-op and union members, etc...) at this page on the AfD website (check out back issues here).

Want one or more paper copies? Email afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org and we'll send info on pricing. Members get a free subscription--join Alliance for Democracy now!

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Save the Date! Join Laird and Robin Monahan in DC on October 20

Wednesday, October 20--that's the day that the brothers will finish a seven-month walk across country protesting the Citizens United decision and calling for a constitutional amendment abolishing corporate personhood.

It has been a tremendous effort and achievement--and if you haven't been following their blog, lairdandrobin.org, you should go there and check out the pictures and the posts (you can also make a donation to support the walk, which would be very appreciated!) While major media has generally ignored the march, Laird and Robin made lots of good connections with local television, alternative and local newspapers, and radio, and you can read some of the media coverage on their site as well.

Now, 3000 miles later, they're on the verge of reaching their goal, Washington DC, and we are extending an invitation to all Alliance members and supporters to join supporters of Move to Amend and its allied organizations in Washington for rallies and a reception--the day's events are as follows:

10:00am: Meet at west end of Arlington Memorial Bridge to welcome Laird and Robin and proceed to the Lincoln Memorial

12:00 noon to 1:30 pm: Rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Speakers include Laird Monahan, David Cobb, Bill Moyer (Backbone Campaign); others to be announced.

1:30 pm: Leave Lincoln Memorial and walk to the U.S. Capitol Building for a second rally at 3:00 pm.

6:00 to 8:00 pm: Celebration and reception at Busboys & Poets at 5th and K

Get visible! The Backbone Campaign will have its giant Preamble, which we'll be setting up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and Capitol. The more people around it, the louder the call for a constitutional amendment defining "person" as "human being"--not "aggregation of shareholders into some inhuman entity that exists only to maximize profits at any cost."

Keep an eye on the Move to Amend and Alliance website, as well as this blog, for updates on speakers, etc.

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Amend the Constitution to end corporate personhood

"Proud, patriotic and pissed-off American citizen" David Cobb talks about corporate personhood and the need for a constitutional amendment to abolish it. David is a former Green Party USA presidential candidate and a member of the steering and executive committees of Move to Amend. This is part 1 of a talk he gave in Florida recently, sponsored by the Green Party of Florida and Progressive Democrats of America. More of the talk is available at the DUHC (Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County) website.

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New York Times: Clean and Open American Elections

Bagmen Without Borders... Of course, the irony is that so many millions of dollars are already being spent on the 2010 election that a few tens of thousands from overseas USCC dues-payers will cause barely a ripple. But perhaps that cynicism is what some funders are counting on, along with what this editorial rightly calls the "toothless" federal regulatory system.

Published October 5 by The New York Times

For at least 44 years, it has been illegal for foreign corporations, countries and individuals to make political contributions in the United States for any election, either directly or indirectly. It is even against the law to solicit such contributions. But in this Wild West year of political money, that longstanding ban is being set aside. The United States Chamber of Commerce — one of the biggest advertisers in midterm races around the country — is actively soliciting foreign money, and government enforcers seem to be doing nothing to stop it.

According to a report issued Tuesday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, the chamber is getting “dues” payments of tens of thousands of dollars from foreign companies in countries such as Bahrain, India and Egypt, and then mingling the money with its fund to advocate for or against candidates in the midterm races.

The chamber firmly denies the charge, saying its internal accounting rules prevent any foreign money from being used for political purposes. Money, however, is fungible, and it is impossible for an outsider to know whether the group is following its rules.

The chamber has vowed to spend more than $75 million before the November election, and it has already run 8,000 ads, most of which support Republican candidates. The ads do not urge a vote for or against a specific candidate, but when they accuse Senator Barbara Boxer of California of “destroying jobs,” or call Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut “the worst attorney general in the nation,” no one can mistake the intent. (The two candidates, both Democrats, are in tight Senate races.)

Because the United States Chamber is organized as a 501(c)(6) business league under the federal tax code, it does not have to disclose its donors, so the full extent of foreign influence on its political agenda is unknown. But Tuesday’s report sheds light on how it raises money abroad. Its affiliate in Abu Dhabi, for example, the American Chamber of Commerce, says it has more than 450 corporate and individual members in the United Arab Emirates who pay as much as $8,500 a year to join.

Because of a series of court decisions that culminated in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling earlier this year, these and similar 501(c) nonprofits have become huge players in the year’s election, using unlimited money from donors who have no fear of disclosure. (Not surprisingly, the chamber has been a leading opponent of legislation to require disclosure.) One such group, American Crossroads, organized by Karl Rove, announced on Tuesday a $4.2 million ad buy to support Republican candidates, bringing the group’s total spending to about $18 million so far.

The possible commingling of secret foreign money into these groups raises fresh questions about whether they are violating both the letter and spirit of the campaign finance laws. The Federal Election Commission, which has been rendered toothless by its Republican members, should be investigating possible outright violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act by foreign companies and the chamber.

The Internal Revenue Service, which is supposed to ensure that these nonprofit groups are not primarily political, has fallen down on the job. Last week, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, demanded that the I.R.S. look into whether the tax code was being misused for political purposes, and, on Tuesday, two watchdog groups made the same request of the agency.

The government needs to make sure that the tax code — and American control of American elections — is not being violated.

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Health insurers pour money into GOP campaigns, hoping to limit new regulations

The money you pay for your health insurance coverage may very well be spent by your insurance company on campaign donations, in the hopes of buying a Congressional rewrite of regulations mandating broader coverage--but not the regulation that says you have to have health insurance.

by Noam N. Levey. Posted October 5 on The Los Angeles Times

The insurance industry is pouring money into Republican campaign coffers in hopes of scaling back wide-ranging regulations in the new healthcare law but preserving the mandate that Americans buy coverage.

Since January, the nation's five largest insurers and the industry's Washington-based lobbying arm have given three times more money to Republican lawmakers and political action committees than to Democratic politicians and organizations.

That is a marked change from 2009, when the industry largely split its political donations between the parties, according to federal election filings.

The largest insurers are also paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists with close ties to Republican lawmakers who could shape health policy in January, records show.

"The industry would love to have a Republican Congress," said Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna Corp., one of the country's biggest insurers. "They were very, very successful during the years of Republican domination in Washington."

Many Republican leaders have enthusiastically embraced the call to revise the healthcare legislation, vowing to "repeal and replace" the law in the next congressional session. But that call to repeal poses a delicate issue for the budding GOP/insurance industry partnership. The Republican Party thinks it has a winning position in denouncing the unpopular mandate that will require Americans to get health insurance starting in 2014, while insurers and independent healthcare experts see the requirement as crucial to controlling costs for everyone by spreading the risk.

The healthcare law will penalize Americans $95 in 2014 if they fail to get insurance. The penalty rises to $695 in 2016.

"The one thing that insurance companies would love to see are penalties that are actually stronger," said Jeff Fusile, a partner at consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The insurance industry, attracted by the prospect of millions of new customers as a result of the coverage mandate, initially backed President Obama's campaign to overhaul the healthcare system. And insurers scored a key victory when Democrats abandoned plans to create a government insurance plan, or "public option."

But insurers are increasingly balking at the myriad new directives in the healthcare law.

Among other things, the law prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to sick children and canceling policies when customers become ill. The law bars insurers from placing lifetime caps on how much they will pay when their customers get sick.

Many consumers will also get new rights to appeal denied claims and win access to preventive care without being asked for co-pays.

"The health reform law did not deliver the uninsured in the way that insurers wanted," said veteran healthcare analyst Sheryl Skolnick, senior vice president at CRT Capital Group.

Some insurers have said recently they will stop selling some policies rather than comply with the mandate to insure sick children.

Insurers are also fighting efforts by the Obama administration to expand federal oversight of premiums. And many industry leaders worry about new regulations that will set minimum standards for the scope of benefits they offer.

America's Health Insurance Plans President Karen Ignagni, one of the industry's leading Washington lobbyists, said several of the new requirements would exacerbate skyrocketing healthcare costs.

"The underlying problem is still with us," Ignagni said. "What we have to do now is focus on how we get to this issue of affordability."

Ignagni warned that the problem would worsen in 2014, when insurance companies faced a new tax and were forced to limit how much they could vary premiums based on a customer's age. The industry is looking to Republicans for relief.

Cigna's head lobbyist, G. William Hoagland, a former senior Republican Senate aide, said the company hoped to get a more receptive hearing next year. "This is all political now," he said. "Once we get beyond the election, maybe cooler heads will prevail."

Insurers in the past have been able to count on the GOP, which often helped shape the market to the industry's specifications.

Republicans expanded Medicare's use of commercial insurance companies to administer benefits, which has been very profitable for insurers. With the help of GOP legislation, insurers also have increasingly shifted costs to consumers through high-deductible plans.

And Republicans have pushed to allow insurance companies to sell their plans across state lines, avoiding state regulations. Party leaders have made that a centerpiece of their 2011 healthcare agenda.

"We generally support candidates whose views align with our business and healthcare interests," said Aetna Inc. spokeswoman Anjie Coplin.

Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna, which gave more to Democrats in 2009, has given nearly three times more to Republicans this year. Louisville, Ky.-based Humana Inc. has done the same.

And Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc., which was vilified by Democrats for proposing huge rate increases in California, has given nearly nine times as much to Republicans this year.

WellPoint's lobbying team includes a former senior aide to Wyoming Sen. Michael B. Enzi, who would chair the Senate health panel should Republicans take the chamber. Enzi is a leading proponent of less state regulation of health plans.

Aetna and Humana have hired former Republican aides to the Senate Finance Committee, which would also play an important role in modifying the healthcare law.

Cigna's team includes the former Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, another key healthcare panel.

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Our Defending Water for Life Campaign weighs in on the Cascade Locks project

Here's our letter, sent September 28, to Oregon's Water Resources Department, commenting on Nestlé's proposed water swap in Cascade Locks, Oregon. You can read more about the project at this post on our blog.

Dear Sirs:

We are writing with regard to the request from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) to exchange water rights with the City of Cascade Locks for 0.5 CFS between water from the city’s well and water from Oxbow Springs currently used by ODFW for the state’s fish hatchery. It is quite astounding to us that nowhere in the application is there any mention of the real reason for this exchange. The fact that the spring water would then be made available by the city to Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) is never mentioned. Yet we know that indeed Nestlé intends to bottle the spring water, in addition to the town’s well water, and sell it to consumers in the Pacific Northwest.

The application states: “this exchange would result in a benefit to the hatchery, the environment and the people of the State of Oregon because the exchange as envisioned will allow better utilization of the hatchery facilities while enhancing stream flows.”

This dissimulation is indeed shocking.

We do note that in the letter from the City of Cascade Locks to Oregon Water Resources Department attached to the application there is mention that “the acquisition of a small amount of ODFW’s spring water right would allow the city to potentially attract a new large commercial customer with a significant benefit to our town.” We also note that the letter is cc’d to Nestlé’s representative, David Palais.

This application must not be considered without simultaneously examining the impact of Nestlé’s intended use of the spring water and of the town’s well water.

Furthermore, Nestlé’s study of the impact of the well water on the fish in the state hatchery is a diversion from the real issue of whether the state should protect the spring water for the benefit of the ecosystem and the people of the state.

We are further shocked by the regulatory dissimulation.

We have reviewed the application from ODFW. The application masks the fundamental issues at stake by making it seem like all ODFW has to do is to fill in the blanks and then the unnamed party, Nestlé, can get a green light from the state. Is the map properly drawn with the correct arrows? Nestlé doesn’t even have to do anything, just sit back and let the state do the work for them! Nestlé doesn’t even have to pay the $1600 fee.

ODFW’s statement that the exchange of spring water from Oxbow Hatchery for well water from the City of Cascade Locks “would result in a benefit to the hatchery, the environment, and the people of the State of Oregon because the exchange as envisioned will allow better utilization of the hatchery facilities while enhancing stream flows” frankly does not even pass the smell test. First they are actually talking about eight months from April through November. Second, there are other ways the hatchery can supplement its water supply, e.g., by digging its own well or by paying the town of Cascade Locks for some of its municipal water which would keep the water in the watershed. Most important, if there is already so much concern about the adequacy of the spring for the hatchery, what will happen if Nestlé begins bottling and exporting large quantities of spring and well water?

Further let us be clear that Nestlé does not want to set up a bottling operation in Cascade Locks for a “small amount of ODFW’s spring water.” Something on the order of 100 million gallons a year is not a small amount by any stretch of the imagination.

If the purpose of this swap of water rights is really to enhance environmental protection as the application proclaims, then it should include a clear ban on Nestlé or any other bottled water company mining the water for export from the watershed.

The time has long past when groundwater flow was a mystery. It is now well known that groundwater and surface water are interconnected. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the groundwater source for the wells in Cascade Locks is separate from the groundwater feeding the spring. In fact the TEC map clearly shows the town well pump station within the Herman Creek watershed which is also the source for Oxbow Spring.

We know what has happened in Fryeburg Maine. Lovewell Pond (really a lake) is no longer fed by cold spring water due to Nestlé’s pumping from the spring feeding the lake and the lake is becoming seriously degraded. Nestlé adamantly denies the degradation which riparian landowners have observed. They will likewise deny that pumping large quantities from the spring will have any impact whatsoever on Herman Creek which is fed by the spring or on any other part of the watershed.

There is also an underlying issue of how the state should act to serve as a steward of the water which is fundamental to all life. Six towns in New Hampshire and Maine have responded to the threat from the bottled water industry by passing local ordinances which establish rights for people and ecosystems. The Constitution of Ecuador now recognizes such rights. Throughout the Andes, people understand that nature has inherent fundamental rights which must be respected if life is to continue. This water flowing from Mt. Hood National Forest should be respected as well. The state should not act as Nestlé’s proxy, but instead should protect water for people and nature and oppose the privatization and commodification of water.

This application should be rejected for the reasons set forth above.

Sincerely,

Ruth N. Caplan
National Coordinator
Defending Water for Life
Alliance for Democracy

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