Portland (OR) presents "Alliance for Democracy--Populist Dialogues"

The Portland Chapter will be screening the first two editions of its new cable TV program, "Alliance for Democracy--Populist Dialogues," in early December. The schedule's at the end of this post.

The half-hour program features David Delk, AfD co-chair and Portland chapter president, as host, with chapter members as crew and tech support.

The first program is on single payer healthcare with one of the Mad As Hell Doctors (Samuel Metz). On the second, Barbara Dudley (former head of Greenpeace USA and National Lawyers Guild and currently co-chair of the Oregon Working Families Party) talks about fusion voting, State Bank of Oregon and Korea Free Trade Agreement.

The program will be on a regular schedule on Portland community access cable starting in January, and will also screen in suburban communities.

If you're not in Portland, you can request a copy of the show to view locally or to screen at your local community access station. The programs will have some content specific to Portland or Oregon but will be general enough to be of interest around the nation.

You can also watch online on the Portland chapter website's Populist Dialogues video page, or on blip.tv. The single payer program with Samuel Metz is here and David talks to Barbara Dudley here.

We are all very excited about this project, so I hope everyone likes them. Your comments are welcome!

Schedule for Barbara Dudley show:

• Thursday 12/2/2010, 8:00 PM, Channel 22
• Monday 12/6/2010, 10:30 PM, Channel 11
• Tuesday 12/7/2010, 7:30 PM, Channel 22
• Wednesday 12/8/2010, 10:00 PM, Channel 23
• Thursday 12/9/2010, 8:00 PM, Channel 23

Schedule for Samuel Metz Single Payer program

• Wednesday 12/1/2010, 7:30 PM, Channel 22
• Friday 12/3/2010, 4:30 PM, Channel 22
• Monday 12/6/2010, 10:00 PM, Channel 11
• Wednesday 12/8/2010, 9:00 PM, Channel 23
• Monday 12/13/2010, 5:00 PM, Channel 23

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It's not a bribe, it's a contribution!

by Rachel Slajda. Posted on Talking Points Memo, November 24

A casino owner indicted on charges of bribery and honest services fraud is trying to get 11 of his 33 counts thrown out, arguing that campaign contributions don't count as bribery.

Federal prosecutors say that Milton McGregor, a businessman with controlling stakes in two Alabama casinos, hired lobbyists to bribe state politicians into supporting electronic gambling legislation. A fellow businessman, the lobbyists and four state legislators were also indicted in the sweep.

Prosecutors say McGregor and his alleged co-conspirators promised $100,000 in campaign contributions to one state senator and $2 million to another.

So McGregor filed a motion to dismiss 11 charges of defrauding voters of honest services, arguing that "'Honest Services' bribery does not include campaign contributions." He also argues that direct personal payments don't constitute bribes unless tied to a specific action.

His lawyers argued that their point is proved by the recent Skilling Supreme Court case, which dramatically narrowed the definition of honest services fraud and has the potential to reverse convictions in countless corruption cases. Defendants had for years complained that the definition of such fraud, "to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services," was too vague.

In Skilling, a case brought by former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling, the court ruled that prosecutors must prove that a defendant has committed "bribery or kickbacks," the so-called "core" of honest services. In other words, they had to prove a quid pro quo.

Prosecutors in the McGregor case disagreed with his lawyers, writing a scathing brief this week calling them flat-out "wrong" about Skilling, arguing that McGregor's alleged promises of campaign cash for certain votes falls well within the honest services core.

The case is being tried in federal district court in Alabama. A judge has not yet ruled on McGregor's motion.

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Today's the day to check out War is a Lie

David Swanson's new book, War is a Lie, is out today and there is a campaign to bump it up the Amazon sales lists to #1.Why not support a worthy author and the common wealth by buying a copy for your local library? You can read all about it at www.warisalie.org.

From the website: War is a Lie is a thorough refutation of every major argument used to justify wars, drawing on evidence from numerous past wars, with a focus on those wars that have been most widely defended as just and good. This is a handbook of sorts, a manual to be used in debunking future lies before future wars have a chance to begin.

“David Swanson despises war and lying, and unmasks them both with rare intelligence. I learn something new on every page.” — Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR and author of Cable News Confidential.

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Do corporations have personal privacy rights?

by Steven Aftergood, from Secrecy News Blog

The Supreme Court will decide next year whether corporations are entitled to "personal privacy" and whether they may prevent the release of records under the Freedom of Information Act on that basis. FOIA advocates say that assigning personal privacy rights to corporations could deal a crippling blow to the Act.

The case before the Court--known as FCC v. AT&T--arose from a FOIA request to the Federal Communications Commission for records of an investigation of a government contract held by AT&T. The FCC found that the requested records were subject to release under FOIA. But AT&T challenged that decision and won an appeals court ruling that the documents were law enforcement records that were exempt from disclosure because their release would constitute "an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" -- namely, the "personal privacy" of AT&T.

The appeals court noted that the word "person" is defined in the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) to include corporations, and it went on to infer from this that the FOIA exemption for "personal privacy" in law enforcement records must logically extend to corporations as well.

But "that analysis does not withstand scrutiny," the government argued in its petition (pdf) to the Supreme Court for review of the case. Personal privacy can only apply to individual human beings, it said, and not to other entities. "The court of appeals' novel construction would erroneously create a new and amorphous 'privacy' right not only for corporations but also for local, state, and foreign governments [which also fall under the APA definition of 'person']."

A concise description of the pending case as well as key case files and amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court by several FOIA advocacy organizations are conveniently available from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. (EPIC prepared one of the amicus briefs and Steven Aftergood was among the signatories to it.)

Corporate information that qualifies as a "trade secret" has long been exempt from disclosure under the FOIA. But prior to this case, no court had ever held that a corporation also has personal privacy rights.

If affirmed by the Supreme Court, the appeals court ruling "could vastly expand the rights of corporations to shield their activities from public view," said Sen. Patrick Leahy this week, and it "would close a vital window into how our government works."

"Congress never intended for this [personal privacy] exemption to apply to corporations," he said. "I also fear that extending this exemption to corporations would permit corporations to shield from public view critical information about public health and safety, environmental dangers, and financial misconduct, among other things -- to the great detriment of the people's right to know and to our democracy."

"I sincerely hope that our nation's highest Court... will narrowly construe the personal privacy exemption, consistent with congressional intent," said Sen. Leahy. "Should the Court decide to do otherwise, I will work with others in the Congress to ensure that FOIA, and specifically the personal privacy exemption for law enforcement records, remains a meaningful safeguard for the American people's right to know," he said.

FCC v. AT&T is scheduled to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on January 19, 2011.

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Victory for fair elections at Los Angeles City Council

The California Clean Money Campaign reports that after months of working with the Los Angeles City Council and years of CCMC and coalition efforts with the city, the council voted 11-4 on Tuesday to place a measure on the March 2011 ballot that would amend the city charter to remove the cap on the city's public financing Trust Fund, a key step towards both strengthening the city's current public matching funds system and eventually allowing the city to move to full Fair Elections public financing of campaigns.

The charter amendment, if passed, will also restrict campaign contributions and fundraising by bidders on certain city contracts and impose bans on future contracts for violators.

The council must still reaffirm the measure by a majority vote and CCMC has to work with the mayor to avoid a veto, but they've jumped this big hurdle to putting Fair Elections on the LA ballot.

Several AfD supporters are now organizing with the California Clean Money Campaign, including CCMC chair and former AfD council member Jo Seidita, Southwest regional rep and now CCMC San Fernando Valley coordinator Robin Gilbert, and CCMC Metro LA Coordinator Tobi Dragert.

Los Angeles currently has a partial public financing system, passed as a charter amendment by the voters in 1990, that requires the city to make an annual appropriation (currently ~$3 million a year), up to a cap (currently ~$12 million). In its first 16 years or so it worked well to help new candidates run for office and compete, but it hasn't kept up with the times. And, of course, to better lessen "the appearance of corruption" (as the Supreme Court would say), it really needs to provide full public funding for candidates. But the cap on the trust fund makes that impossible without going to the voters.

This measure will give voters the chance to remove the trust fund cap, a small but critical step towards full Fair Elections public funding of campaigns in the second largest city in the country and therefore a powerful example for the rest of the state.

CCMC thanked councilmembers Jose Huizar and Council President Eric Garcetti for their leadership putting Fair Elections on the LA city ballot, and Council members Ed Reyes, Paul Krekorian, Tom LaBonge, Paul Koretz, Tony Cardenas, Richard Alarcon, Herb Wesson, Bill Rosendahl, and Janice Hahn, for their "yes" votes. They also thanked fellow organizers CA Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of LA, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, as well as CCMC's many grassroots supporters.

If you're not on the CCMC list, sign up here.

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New study confirms US health care accessibility trails other nations

The Commonwealth Fund has released an 11-country survey focusing on health care access, cost, and insurance coverage that finds that adults in the US are by far the most likely of the industrial nations surveyed to go without care because of costs, have trouble paying medical bills, encounter high medical bills when insured, or have disputes with insurers or payments denied.

You can access the study here. So far US coverage of the study has been a little spotty. On the other hand, it's hardly news at this point that we pay more and get less health care than citizens of many other nations.

But it's not bad news for everyone--health insurance industry profits are up 41%, prompting outgoing Ways and Means subcommittee chair Rep. Pete Stark to call for the health insurance companies to return the profits to their costumers by reducing the cost of premiums.

Meanwhile, the US's drop to 49th among nations in life expectancy, down from 24th in 1999, also has received scant coverage in the US media.

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Take action today to support the DISCLOSE Act

We urge you to take immediate action in support of the DISCLOSE ACT, which will force sunlight on the dark recesses of corporate spending on elections. DISCLOSE stands for Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections.

The DISCLOSE Act would require all organizations making political expenditures to name their donors. This would allow voters to know the corporations and individuals hiding behind front groups with feel-good names. Deep pockets--like Big Pharma, Big Oil and Coal, and Big Finance and Wall Street to name a few--should not be allowed to hide their funding of misleading and inaccurate election ads.

Introduced in the Senate and House on April 29, the DISCLOSE Act will help address the fallout from the Supreme Court’s activist and illegitimate decision in Citizens United v FEC. Citizens United opened the floodgates of corporate spending as being protected by the 1st Amendment free speech provision. Democrats and the White House hoped it would be passed to take effect before the mid-terms elections.

The clock is ticking...
The clock is ticking to get this done during the “lame duck” session of Congress which ends before Christmas. We expect the new Congress will be much less sympathetic to shining sunlight on the power of money and corporations.

Fortunately the bill has already passed the House. Now action in the Senate is critical. We can’t let the Republicans keep blocking the bill!

Please contact Senate Majority Leader Reid and your Senators today and tell them you want action on this bill before Congress adjourns.

Contact them via the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 or by using this Congressional Directory

Necessary but not sufficient
This is only a first and necessary step. However, the larger questions about the role of corporations in our democracy cannot be resolved until we address the question of corporate personhood. Activist Supreme Courts, including our current Roberts court, have given our human rights to corporations that we create by state charter. We cannot let this stand. We must amend the constitution to place corporations in their rightful place as our servants, not our masters.

Only humans should have human rights
To do this, Alliance for Democracy is part of the steering committee of MOVE TO AMEND – that is, move to amend the US Constitution so that only human beings (you know, the people with belly buttons and a conscience) have human rights.

Make the call, sign the petition
Please call Senate Majority Leader Reid and your Senators NOW to support the DISCLOSE Act. Then go to the Move to Amend website and sign the petition and learn what else you can do to amend the constitution.

Thanks for taking action to protect our democracy!

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AfD signs on to letter supporting recognition of rights of nature

The United Nations is currently considering a resolution to have the Rights of Nature debated by governments on Mother Earth Day, April 22, 2011. The document is at the informal consultation stage so is not public, but Alliance for Democracy has joined several other organizations in support of the debate, which would force countries to publicly declare their position with reference to the rights of nature and allow individuals and organizations to stand with supportive governments in moving forward on a global campaign for these rights.

Organizers note that these rights are embodied in the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, adopted when 32,000 people from around the world took up the call of President Morales and converged in Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 22, 2010, for the 'World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

To read the letter, click on the "read more" link.

His Excellency M. Joseph Deiss
65th President of the United Nations General Assembly

Dear Mr. President,

We, the undersigned representatives of civil-society organizations from around the world,

Expressing concern over the well-documented environmental degradation and negative impacts on nature resulting from human activity,

Distressed by the consequent unsustainable depletion of the Earth's resources and the impacts on the natural systems which support life,

Urge you to convene, at the earliest opportunity, a high-level debate within the United Nations General Assembly focused on the rights of nature.

Mr. President, we believe that all alternatives for reestablishing harmony with nature should be discussed and analyzed within the United Nations, and this is not possible if we limit the debate to a consideration of the market-based approaches that have thus far garnered significant attention. It is also necessary to discuss proposals that consider that we are all part of the Earth's natural system and that, in order to reestablish the balance of this system, we should recognize that all living beings have rights that should be promoted and preserved.

The recognition of the rights of nature already exists in many places of the world at local, national and federal levels, including in some State constitutions. Raising the issue of the rights of nature in an open debate at the United Nations would allow Member States to share differing views and experiences on the subject.

We ask you to consider that such a debate would benefit the ongoing work of the United Nations related to the environment and critical issues such as climate change, forests, water and biodiversity.

We call on you to ensure that these issues, as they relate to the rights of nature and are essential to the future of humanity, are explored in the broadest, most transparent and democratic manner possible during the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.

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Pittsburgh bans natural gas drilling

Good news from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, whose press release is below. Kudos to the City Council for their unified stand for public safety and health, and to the people of Pittsburgh for electing accountable and responsible Council members. 
 
The Pittsburgh City Council has unanimously adopted an ordinance banning corporations from conducting natural gas drilling in the city.
 
The ordinance was drafted by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) at the invitation of Councilman Bill Peduto, and was introduced by Councilman Doug Shields.
 
Pittsburgh's first-in-the-nation ordinance confronts the threat of Marcellus Shale drilling--an activity permitted by the state which allows corporations to site drilling activities over the wishes of a community.
 
Energy corporations are setting up shop in communities across Pennsylvania, to drill for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation.  The gas extraction technique known as "fracking" has been cited as a threat to surface and groundwater, and has been blamed for fatal explosions, the contamination of drinking water, local rivers, and streams.  Collateral damage includes lost property value, ingestion of toxins by livestock, drying up of mortgage loans for prospective home buyers, and threatened loss of organic certification for farmers in affected communities.
 
Councilman Shields stated, "This ordinance recognizes and secures expanded civil rights for the people of Pittsburgh, and it prohibits activities which would violate those rights.  It protects the authority of the people of Pittsburgh to pass this ordinance by undoing corporate privileges that place the rights of the people of Pittsburgh at the mercy of gas corporations."
 
Shields added, "With this vote we are asserting the right of the city to make critical decisions to protect our health, safety, and welfare.  We are not a colony of the state and will not sit quietly by as our city gets drilled.  We encourage communities across the region to take this step and join with us to elevate the rights of communities and people over corporations."
 
CELDF's Ben Price, who is engaging with communities across the state seeking to protect themselves from drilling, said, "Communities are coming to recognize that our state laws and government are not in place to protect their interests, but rather the interests of private corporations."
 
Price applauded the city for taking a stand on behalf of community rights. "Some will say that the municipality doesn't have the authority to ban this noxious practice associated with gas drilling.  The only way that's true is if the state has the authority to strip the residents of their rights, and it doesn't."
 
Under the ordinance, corporations that violate the ordinance or that seek to drill in the city will not be afforded "personhood" rights under the U.S. or Pennsylvania Constitution, nor will they be afforded protections under the Commerce Clause or Contracts Clause under the federal or state constitution.
 
In addition, the ordinance recognizes the legally enforceable Rights of Nature to exist and flourish.  Residents of the city shall possess legal standing to enforce those rights on behalf of natural communities and ecosystems. 

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Chris Hedges talks to Chandler Davis on the origins of the US's economic intelligence gap

Chris Hedges talks with blacklisted math professor Chandler Davis about the narrowing of the US economic mind, and how ideas and ideals too easily painted "red" have been purged from debate. The beneficiaries, Davis and Hedges agree, were and are the US ruling class--a demographic that almost can't be named here nowadays because the concept of "class" itself is now considered too left-wing.

by Chris Hedges. Posted on Truthdig November 14.

The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life.

“You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959 essay “...From an Exile.” “You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand. You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us back.”

But they did not take Davis back. Davis, whom I met a few days ago in Toronto, could not find a job after his prison sentence and left for Canada. He has spent his career teaching mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the professors ousted from universities never taught again. Radical and left-wing ideas were effectively stamped out. The purges, most carried out internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was killed.

“Political discourse has been impoverished since then,” Davis said. “In the 1930s it was understood by anyone who thought about it that sales taxes were regressive. They collected more proportionately from the poor than from the rich. Regressive taxation was bad for the economy. If only the rich had money, that decreased economic activity. The poor had to spend what they had and the rich could sit on it. Justice demands that we take more from the rich so as to reduce inequality. This philosophy was not refuted in the 1950s and it was not the target of the purge of the 1950s. But this idea, along with most ideas concerning economic justice and people’s control over the economy, was cleansed from the debate. Certain ideas have since become unthinkable, which is in the interest of corporations such as Goldman Sachs. The power to exclude certain ideas serves the power of corporations. It is unfortunate that there is no political party in the United States to run against Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of elections, but there is no way I can vote against Goldman Sachs.”

The silencing of radicals such as Davis, who had been a member of the Communist Party, although he had left it by the time he was investigated by HUAC, has left academics and intellectuals without the language, vocabulary of class war and analysis to critique the ideology of globalism, the savagery of unfettered capitalism and the ascendancy of the corporate state. And while the turmoil of the 1960s saw discontent sweep through student bodies with some occasional support from faculty, the focus was largely limited to issues of identity politics—feminism, anti-racism—and the anti-war movements. The broader calls for socialism, the detailed Marxist critique of capitalism, the open rejection of the sanctity of markets, remained muted or unheard. Davis argues that not only did socialism and communism become outlaw terms, but once these were tagged as heresies, the right wing tried to make liberal, secular and pluralist outlaw terms as well. The result is an impoverishment of ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem. The “centrist” liberals manage to retain a voice in mainstream society because they pay homage to the marvels of corporate capitalism even as it disembowels the nation and the planet.

“Repression does not target original thought,” Davis noted. “It targets already established heretical movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality. And in the population, fear of uttering such a taboo word as communism may in the next stage become general paralysis of social thought.”

It is this paralysis he watches from Toronto. It is a paralysis he predicted. Opinions and questions regarded as possible in the 1930s are, he mourns, now forgotten and no longer part of intellectual and political debate. And perhaps even more egregiously the fight and struggle of radical communists, socialists and anarchists in the 1930s against lynching, discrimination, segregation and sexism were largely purged from the history books. It was as if the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had no antecedents in the battles of the Wobblies as well as the socialist and communist movements.

“Even the protests that were organized entirely by Trotskyists were written out of history,” Davis noted acidly.

Those who remained in charge of American intellectual thought went on to establish the wider “heresy of leftism” in the name of academic objectivity. And they have succeeded. Universities stand as cowardly, mute and silent accomplices of the corporate state, taking corporate money and doing corporate bidding. And those with a conscience inside the walls of the university understand that tenure and promotion require them to remain silent.

“Not only were a number of us driven out of the American academic scene, our questions were driven out,” said Davis, who at 84 continues to work as emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. “Ideas which were on the agenda a hundred years ago and sixty years ago have dropped out of memory because they are too far from the new center of discourse.”

Davis has published science fiction stories, is the editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and is an innovator in the theory of operators and matrices. He is a director of Science for Peace. He also writes poetry. His nimble mind ranges swiftly in our conversation over numerous disciplines and he speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of a new undergraduate. His commitment to radical politics remains fierce and undiminished. And he believes that the loss of his voice and the voices of thousands like him, many of whom were never members of the Communist Party but had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy of the Cold War and corporate capitalism, deadened intellectual and political discourse in the United States.

During World War II Davis joined the Navy and worked on the minesweeping research program. But by the end of the war, with the saturation bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he came to regret his service in the military. He has spent most of his life working in a variety of anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.

“In retrospect I am sorry I didn’t declare myself as a conscientious objector,” he said. “Not at the beginning of the war, because if you are ever going to use military force for anything, that was a situation in which I would be happy to do it. I was wholehearted about that. But once I knew about the destruction of Dresden and the other massacres of civilian populations by the Allies, I think the ethical thing to do would have been to declare myself a CO.”

He was a “Red diaper baby.” His father was a professor, union agitator and member of the old Communist Party who was hauled in front of HUAC shortly before his son. Davis grew up reading New Masses and moved from one city to the next because of his father’s frequent firings.

“I was raised in the movement,” he said. “It wasn’t a cinch I would be in the Communist Party, but in fact I was, starting in 1943 and then resigning soon after on instructions from the party because I was in the military service. This was part of the coexistence of the Communist Party with Roosevelt and the military. It would not disrupt things during the war. When I got out of the Navy I rejoined the Communist Party, but that lapsed in June of 1953. I never got back in touch with them. At the time I was subpoenaed I was technically an ex-Communist, but I did not feel I had left the movement and in some sense I never did.”

Davis got his doctorate from Harvard in mathematics and seemed in the 1950s destined for a life as a professor. But the witch hunts directed against “Reds” swiftly ended his career on the University of Michigan faculty. He mounted a challenge to the Committee on Un-American Activities that went to the Supreme Court. The court, ruling in 1960, three years after Joseph McCarthy was dead, denied Davis’ assertion that the committee had violated the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech. He was sent to prison. Davis, while incarcerated, authored a research paper that had an acknowledgement reading: “Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons.”

Davis, who has lived in Canada longer than he lived in the United States, said that his experience of marginalization was “good for the soul and better for the intellect.”

“Though you see the remnants of the former academic left still, though some of us were never fired, though I return to the United States from my exile frequently, we are gone,” he said. “We did not survive as we were. Some of us saved our skins without betraying others or ourselves. But almost all of the targets either did crumble or were fired and blacklisted. David Bohm and Moses Finley and Jules Dassin and many less celebrated people were forced into exile. Most of the rest had to leave the academic world. A few suffered suicide or other premature death. There weren’t the sort of wholesale casualties you saw in Argentina or El Salvador, but the Red-hunt did succeed in axing a lot of those it went after, and cowing most of the rest. We were out, and we were kept out.”

“I was a scientist four years past my Ph.D. and the regents’ decision was to extinguish, it seemed, my professional career,” he said. “What could they do now to restore to me 35 years of that life? If it could be done, I would refuse. The life I had is my life. It’s not that I’m all that pleased with what I’ve made of my life, yet I sincerely rejoice that I lived it, that I don’t have to be Professor X who rode out the 1950s and 1960s in his academic tenure and his virtuously anti-Communist centrism.”

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No awards for water grabs

We're supporting this action from Food and Water Watch--they are asking that you write Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to oppose possible "corporate" excellence awards to Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Fiji Water, companies that make huge profits by bottling a common good and necessity and selling it back to the public at wildly inflated prices.

The Secretary of State's Award for Corporate Excellence recognizes "American companies who are global leaders in corporate social responsibility," according to the award website, here.

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Pittsburgh's City Council gives a first nod to fracking ban

From WDUQ-FM, via CELDF:
Pittsburgh City Council has given preliminary approval to a ban on future Marcellus Shale gas well drilling. The bill, which was first introduced in August has gone through several rounds of debate at the council table and has been the subject of more than one public input session. Bill Sponsor Doug Shields says over the weeks it has become clearer to him that the ban is needed if the city is to protect its water supply, property values and quality of life.

Most council members and legal experts believe the bill runs afoul of state law but Shields says it is far too important of an issue for him to worry about a legal challenge. “Maybe some members are comfortable with this challenge, some members aren’t, but I won’t concede an inch on a legal argument. I will not concede anything until that argument is made. I will not be preempted. I hope we do not preempt the city’s voice,” says Shields.

Shields says he is not certain that the drilling companies would want to launch the fight but if they do he has been in contact with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. A representative of that group says he will put in writing that CELDF will provide free legal assistance to the city if a challenge if filed.

The bill was passed 7-0 with councilmen Ricky Burgess and Daniel Lavelle not in the room at the time of the vote. While the mayor has not taken a stance on the bill the 7 votes means council would be able to override a veto.

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The Re-Education of a Citizens United Denier

TThere is a new "third party" in politics--the corporate money party. Industry and corporate 501 c 4's are as powerful as party committees, but without party members, leaders or a public platform. As Schmitt writes, they're "a lean, mean, pure money machine."

by Mark Schmitt. Posted on The American Prospect November 5.

When the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC came out last January, I declared myself a "Citizens United minimalist." It's not that I thought the decision was correct -- it wasn't, particularly in the precedents it overturned unnecessarily and the way it undermined the very basis of regulation of money in politics. But I believed that the specific change in the law created by the decision -- allowing corporations to engage in independent spending to influence elections, just as individuals already could -- would not be all that significant in practice.

After all, there was already a lot that corporations could do that they were not doing. Existing campaign-finance law didn't stop corporations from running ads that would influence an election without mentioning candidates by name or from running ads outside of the 30- and 60-day windows created by the law. I also doubted the scenario in which, say, Exxon-Mobil aggressively spends tens of millions of dollars to take out an unfriendly member of Congress -- publicly held and consumer companies generally shy away from such controversy, and there would be no guarantee of success.

In many ways, the first post-Citizens United election confirmed my prediction. Corporations didn't spend aggressively in their own name, and one that did, Target, on behalf of the Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, became the focus of an aggressive boycott effort. (It should be said, though, that we only know about Target's role because it was a state race, subject to Minnesota's first-rate campaign-finance disclosure rules.)

But there's now little doubt that Citizens United had a considerable effect on this election cycle, in particular through organizations like Karl Rove's American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, and through the massive spending of the Chamber of Commerce. The Sunlight Foundation estimated on Thursday that $126 million of $450 million in spending by outside groups was "made possible by the Citizen's United ruling," by looking at the total amount spent by groups that don't disclose their donors. But we'll probably never know for sure whether that money came from corporations or from (very wealthy) individuals -- presumably Rove's donors include both. And in many ways it doesn't really matter. Wealthy individuals usually have an interest in one or more corporations, and in cases such as Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch, whose Koch Industries is privately held, whether they take money from the corporate treasury or their personal back accounts is of little consequence.

But this is money assembled very quickly, and thus presumably in very large amounts, and certainly the Chamber of Commerce money, if not much of Rove's, came from corporations. They could have done some of this before Citizens United but didn't. What changed? Part of it was a sense that something significant had changed, and, as a couple of corporate lawyers have described it to me, executives rushed to ask their lawyers and their Washington lobbyists what the new rules were and how to take advantage of them. In addition, of course, at a time of action on health care, financial regulation, and energy, a lot of corporations felt they had more at stake than in the past. It was a change in norms as much as a change in the law.

But Citizens United isn't the only innovation that made this flood of money possible. The other key move is the use of the 501(c)4 nonprofit form to engage in purely electoral activities. This kind of nonprofit is permitted to engage in some political action, but that is not meant to be its "primary purpose." Enforcing that distinction, however, is up to the Internal Revenue Service, and as several experts told The New York Times last month, the IRS doesn't prioritize that kind of enforcement because they wouldn't collect any more taxes. The (c)4 structure allows donors to make unlimited contributions (unlike a political action committee, to which donations are limited), while also avoiding disclosure of donors (unlike the independent political committees known as 527s). Thus, Rove can assure large and corporate donors that they can avoid the exposure and controversy that Target faced.

The other question that will be asked is whether "Citizens United money" affected the outcome of the election. Sunlight says it did, noting that Republican groups spent money in races they won, and Democrats on races they lost. But that's to be expected in an election in which Republicans won the vast majority of close races. Political scientists would ask the question a little differently, as Eric McGhee did, looking at the predicted outcome of each race without the outside money and concluding that Republicans did slightly less well than they would have without the outside money. (Neither estimate includes the (c)4 money because that isn't linked to individual races; McGhee estimates that it might have affected up to 10 seats.)

But who wins is not the only question to ask about money in politics. When we think about money in politics, we tend to ask "How much?"; "Who does it come from?"; and "Does it matter?" But the better question to ask is, "Who has power?" And power can mean many things. Sometimes it's the (imagined) power of a big donor to walk into a congressional chairman's office and say, "I paid for this office." But there's far more power in being the person who can aggregate and allocate money and decide which candidates get a blast of last-minute independent spending and which get ignored. It's the power of the broker.

In the past, the party committees played that role, along with unions for Democrats and groups like the Club for Growth for Republicans. "Bundlers," who aggregated small contributions, were a concern of reformers. Starting in 2004, outside groups, mostly 527s, started to play this role, with funders who were fully disclosed. But the big change this year is that, with the combination of Citizens United, (c)4s, and a Republican establishment that didn't trust its own party chair, Rove and his allies were able to construct a full, alternate funding system. While they were not permitted to coordinate with candidates or the party, these committees have acknowledged coordinating their efforts with one another, dividing up races to avoid duplication. Such a structure has all the trappings of a political party, except without members, policy positions, leaders, or accountability. It's a lean, mean, pure money machine.

This, then, is where power lies in the post-Citizen's United world: Not with candidates or elected officials or political parties that voters can hold accountable, but with Rove and his allies, pure brokers of anonymous money, some of it corporate and some not. Democrats may or may not be able to compete in such a world -- they certainly were not outspent this year. But as power accrues to the money brokers, it shifts away from parties, elected officials, and candidates -- and thus away from voters. Citizens United isn't the only cause of this power shift, but it's certainly a big part of the story.

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Hell with congress--we need a movement!

The best response to the midterms is to bring together progressive populist groups to address the legitimate anger and frustrations that fuel Tea Party sympathies by building alternatives to the corporate status quo. A summit on the January anniversary of Citizens United will call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood, and thus the stranglehold that major corporations have on our government and economy.

by Bill Moyer. Posted on The Huffington Post November 8.

Though I share people's sadness for our country, I'm not depressed about the election results. I'm not any more disappointed in President Obama than I've been since he chose his advisers two years ago. I'm not even mad at the Tea Party. I'm fact, I am kind of psyched and ready do the work that needs to be done.

Change was never going to originate in Washington, D.C. Change is always catalyzed by social movements. The legitimate anger that animates the Tea Partiers may be misplaced and polluted with racism and fear, but most of us share their outrage at the system we find ourselves participants in and victimized by. If anyone is to blame for the Tea Party, it is the Beltway Democratic Party affiliated progressive organizations and foundations who failed to create and fund a populist left flank.

The strategic response to Tuesday's election results is not to fight to defend private mandates or toothless financial reforms. The strategic response is to refocus and redouble our efforts to build a nationally-networked, community-based progressive populist movement that makes a real difference in the people's lives.

After the polls closed, Backbone Campaign and the Coffee Party http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/Summit-Jan20-21 announced a summit for strategic dialogue and action on January 21, 2011, the first anniversary of the Citizens United vs. F.E.C. Supreme Court decision. Together, we must build a movement capable of wining the long-term prize of a Constitutional amendment that strips corporations of their illegitimate claim to the inalienable rights of humans, and topples the corrosive equation of money with speech.

With affection and respect for our creative friends at agit-pop, the issue is not RepubliCorp. Wall Street's money is polluting Democratic coffers and its people are embedded in the current administration. What unites progressives, most Americans, and some in the Tea Party is a gut instinct that the real enemy is the corruption of our system by the top 0.1 percent to whom wealth and power flow, and for whom wars are waged against countries and classes. Maybe Oligarchy Inc. or Empire Unlimited are more accurate, evenhanded labels. Regardless, reversing the direction that power and money/equity flows requires a real movement with a national and local strategy to build economic and political power.

Many who've landed new jobs in D.C. will likely be revealed to be defenders of Wall Street or Oligarchy Inc. rather than Main Street. Progressives should seize this as an opportunity to lock arms with principled, reality-based conservatives on the big issues we agree on. For instance, we should make "Too big to fail" synonymous with "Too big to exist!" We should unite behind challenging the Federal Reserve's unaccountable and incestuous relationship with Wall Street banks. When the Federal Reserve provides TRILLIONS of dollars in 0 percent loans to mega-banks, so they can buy US Treasury Bonds, it's taxpayers who pay the interest on those bonds. When the Fed "weak dollar theory" cash machine kicks into gear it's everyone's home equity, wages, and pensions that are devalued in order to prop up and fuel the Wall Street casino economy.

There is also some potential for a right-left coalition to dismantle empire and challenge the military-industrial-congressional-complex. Budgetary accountability is a universal value. Deficits are infinitely more impacted by wars and occupations than Social Security (which in fact adds not one penny to the deficit). And localization ideas such as community-based financial institutions and local systems of exchange also transcend ideological divides.

But ultimately, none of the national goals can be achieved unless built on the foundation of local community-based organizing. And that will take more than one election cycle. What we really need is a 20+ year strategy to divest from Wall Street and build equity -- economic, social, and environmental -- in our communities. Together, a progressive populist movement with its allies can build a movement that offers what the Tea Party never will, i.e. SOLUTIONS!

Here are some local & national populist organizing ideas that really excite me:
Organizing Community Credit Unions learn about what we are doing in our community), Community Solar Projects, Community Supported Organizer (CSO) positions, establishing Coal Free Zones to grow green weatherization jobs, Local Currencies, local Transition Town projects, Foreclosure Defense efforts, Mortgage Strikes, Land Trust Housing, Associations for the Unemployed, Depositors Unions, Farm-to-School Programs, Agricultural Coops, Human Rights Zones is low-wage worker areas, and Clean Elections campaigns. Here's a recent publication from the Alliance for Democracy with other great ideas.

How is Backbone Campaign going to contribute to building this movement?
The Backbone Campaign is already working on many of the above ideas or supporting allies who are leading the way. The Credit Union is of particular value to organizers, as we have discovered a model that others could easily emulate. (Story here.)Our Coal Free Zone project is up and going, and hopefully our Community Solar project will evolve into model others can emulate as well.

Our 2011 Artful Activism trainings will deliver strategic tools to community activists that transcend spectacle for spectacle sake. We will prioritize collaboration with organizations that combine a global and national critique with local organizing. This year we will augment our Artful Activism trainings with best practices from old fashion community organizing. For example, in LA we are collaborating with foreclosure defense and peace groups to produce a local training that combines creative tactics with door-to-door organizing. Our summer Localize This! Action Camp will be expanded to include a Community Supported Organizer training. And we are working with the Coffee Party to design a CSO template, to help create positions in communities around the country.

January 20-22, 2010 events to mark the Citizens United anniversary have the potential to be a powerful pivot point. Backbone's collaboration with the Coffee Party, MovetoAmend, the Transpartisan Alliance, PDA and hopefully many others is an exciting expansion of our reach and a broad acknowledgment that Beltway-Centric, mouse-click activism is not paying off and people are ready looking for more effective engagement.

If you'd like to take part in the January 20-22 effort, please contact the Backbone Campaign.

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AfD'ers speak on corporate rule at College of the Redwoods

On November 10, Mendocino chapter members Tom Wodetzki and Jim Tarbell will speak at College of the Redwoods on "End Environmental Destruction, War & Political Corruption by Eliminating Corporate Rule."

Tom and Jim will focus on what citizens are doing to create a democratic, peaceful and joyous future in the face of corporate control of government and policy development. The talk is free, and begins at 6 p.m. in Room 112 at the campus at 1211 Del Mar Drive in Fort Bragg.

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Washington and change: cash you can believe in

Lobbyist and special interest money have turned the city of Washington into a kind of Oz, with its struggling, low-income neighborhoods hidden out of sight of the rich and powerful, just as systemic national problems of poverty, stagnant wages, haphazard education and health care, and unemployment seem to have dropped off the radar of the playmakers funding this year's crop of 501 c 4's and 6's.

by Michael Winship. Posted October 14 on Truthout
"Somebody once said the Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency." So John F. Kennedy famously remarked in 1961 and so the town seemed to remain when I first moved there in 1969 to go to school.

Clerks in dusty stores moved with the majestic inertia of tall ships becalmed. You could count the number of good restaurants on the fingers of one hand - okay, maybe two hands. There was a rendering plant on the south side of K Street that turned animal carcasses into glue; when the wind blew the wrong way, the awful smell brought tears to the eyes of those who lived and shopped along the fashionable lanes of Georgetown.

There were still "temporary" buildings on the National Mall that had been there since the end of World War I, filled with government workers. But any citizen could freely walk the corridors of Congress, enter a member's office to leave an opinion or pick up a pass for the visitors' galleries of the House or Senate, ride that little subway that runs underneath the Capitol. No campaign contributions required.

Or so it seemed to a white, middle-class college kid. Washington also was a city in decline. Not quite a year and a half had passed since the three days of riots that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Thirteen people had died, more than a thousand were hurt and you could still see piles of rubble and burned out storefronts. Hundreds of businesses had been damaged or destroyed.

Robert Reich - the new chairman of the nonpartisan, citizens' lobby Common Cause - remembers DC in those days, too. He interned for Bobby Kennedy and later at the Federal Trade Commission. Then, the capital changed. By the time Reich became President Clinton's secretary of labor in 1993, poverty was still rampant in the city, but much of it had been shoved beyond the sightlines of the rich and powerful. "Washington was much fancier," he recalled. "It almost glittered - the hotels and the bistros and the restaurants - and the money."

Speaking at Common Cause's 40th anniversary dinner on October 6, Reich noted, "It's even wealthier today. You walk around Washington and you see what it is and that money is here for one reason. It may go into the hands of people who are lawyers and public relations people and lobbyists but it is here for one reason and that is to influence our democracy. We have never seen in American history as much money flowing to our nation's capitol. This election that is coming up is an election in which for the first time that I can remember there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to candidates and we have no way of knowing who is providing this money at all. Complete, absolute secrecy."

Kenneth Vogel at the web site Politico.com echoes Reich: "Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election. By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can't be traced back to its original source, predicts Fred Wertheimer, president of the non-profit group Democracy 21. 'And this is just the beginning,' Wertheimer said. 'Unless we get some changes here to mitigate this problem, I would expect we will see $500 million or more in 2012.'"

This year "has raised two basic questions that strike at the very core of the ethos of the campaign-finance reform effort: Can the flow of money into elections be limited if the courts have deemed political giving and spending a First Amendment right? Can any system of rules to make money more transparent ever keep up with the legal devices that powerful interests use to keep their influence hidden?"

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This is not just the fault of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, although it has unleashed vast new sums of cash into the system - compare this year's elections with the midterms of four years ago. Nor is it yet because of foreign money attempting to influence elections although, Karl Rove and the US Chamber of Commerce's denials to the contrary, this is a clear and present danger. And true, it's not solely because of deep corporate pockets that Democrats seem to be headed toward a significant setback in three weeks; a still faltering economy and lack of jobs are giving them a brutal slapping around.

But the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act has been eviscerated by the courts and what's left of it is barely enforced by the Federal Election Commission. The same goes for various provisions of the federal tax code, which need not only stricter enforcement, but beefing up.

The October 12 Washington Post editorialized:

"Nonprofit advocacy groups, known as 501(c)(4)s, are permitted to engage in political advocacy as long as that is not their primary purpose. Meanwhile, these groups do not have to reveal the identities of their donors. IRS regulations bar such organizations from 'direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office,' but as a practical matter, these limits have not made much difference.

"One such Republican-leaning group, American Crossroads GPS, has touted its ability to keep donor names confidential even as it runs ads in key races. Similarly, trade associations such as the Chamber of Commerce, organized under section 501(c)(6) of the tax code, are not required to disclose donors and are permitted even greater leeway to engage in political activity."

Unfortunately, while the voting public expresses concern over campaign spending, it's not very high on their agenda; most believe it will take an outrage such as Watergate, or at least another Jack Abramoff influence peddling-type scandal to get reform back on the tracks.

Campaign finance reform has been a goal of the organization Common Cause since it was founded in 1970 by the great John Gardner, a Republican.

My friend and colleague Bill Moyers ended their anniversary dinner last week with a call to action, invoking the memory of Gardner and another prominent member of the GOP:

"The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy," Moyers said. "Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the 'naked robbery' of the public's trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: 'It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.'"

Moyers concluded, "The only way to defeat organized money is with organized people. Now it's your turn."

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In Ohio? Bookmark this!

Move to Amend Ohio has a new website--check it out. The group is a state-level chapter of the Move to Amend coalition, which is seeking a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood.

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Nonbinding referendum on single payer passes in several Massachusetts towns

Thirteen out of fourteen Massachusetts state House districts have voted to approve a referendum calling for a single-payer health insurance plan. The ballot measure was organized by Mass-Care, a statewide coalition of groups in favor of a single payer, Medicare for all system. The last district hasn't totaled up its votes, as of this morning.

The ballot passed in four representative districts that voted for Republican Scott Brown in last year's special Senate election, which was seen as an early referendum on the new federal health care bill.

Massachusetts has its own single-payer bill in the works and the vote on this non-binding referendum will probably result in more state representatives signing on as co-sponsors, according to Mass-Care director Ben Day.

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George Monbiot on the Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires

Regardless of the outcomes on election day, the economic uncertainty that galvanized the Tea Party movement will be with us for years to come, as will a corporate elite that seeks to turn economic crisis into a golden opportunity to dismantle all kinds of regulation in the name of economic growth. If, as Monbiot claims here, the Tea Party movement has been co-opted by big business, will its vision of limited government be nothing more than a rubber stamp for whatever big corporations want to do to our economy and environment?

by George Monbiot. Posted October 26 on The Guardian

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of".

Charles and David Koch own 84% of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. It runs oil refineries, coal suppliers, chemical plants and logging firms, and turns over roughly $100bn a year; the brothers are each worth $21bn. The company has had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements for oil and chemical spills and other industrial accidents. The Kochs want to pay less tax, keep more profits and be restrained by less regulation. Their challenge has been to persuade the people harmed by this agenda that it's good for them.

In July 2010, David Koch told New York magazine: "I've never been to a Tea Party event. No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me." But a fascinating new film – (Astro)Turf Wars, by Taki Oldham – tells a fuller story. Oldham infiltrated some of the movement's key organising events, including the 2009 Defending the American Dream summit, convened by a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP). The film shows David Koch addressing the summit. "Five years ago," he explains, "my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation."

A convener tells the crowd how AFP mobilised opposition to Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. "We hit the button and we started doing the Twittering and Facebook and the phonecalls and the emails, and you turned up!" Then a series of AFP organisers tell Mr Koch how they have set up dozens of Tea Party events in their home states. He nods and beams from the podium like a chief executive receiving rosy reports from his regional sales directors. Afterwards, the delegates crowd into AFP workshops, where they are told how to run further Tea Party events.

Americans for Prosperity is one of several groups set up by the Kochs to promote their politics. We know their foundations have given it at least $5m, but few such records are in the public domain and the total could be much higher. It has toured the country organising rallies against healthcare reform and the Democrats' attempts to tackle climate change. It provided the key organising tools that set the Tea Party running.

The movement began when CNBC's Rick Santelli called from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a bankers' revolt against the undeserving poor. (He proposed that the traders should hold a tea party to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan to prevent Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers": by which he meant people whose mortgages had fallen into arrears.) On the same day, Americans for Prosperity set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events.

Oldham's film shows how AFP crafted the movement's messages and drafted its talking points. The New Yorker magazine, in the course of a remarkable exposure of the Koch brothers' funding networks, interviewed some of their former consultants. "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded [the Tea Party]," one of them explained. "It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud – and they're our candidates!" Another observed that the Kochs are smart. "This rightwing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves."

AFP is one of several groups established by the Koch brothers. They set up the Cato Institute, the first free-market thinktank in the United States. They also founded the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University, which now fills the role once played by the economics department at Chicago University as the originator of extreme neoliberal ideas. Fourteen of the 23 regulations that George W Bush put on his hitlist were, according to the Wall Street Journal, first suggested by academics working at the Mercatus Centre.

The Kochs have lavished money on more than 30 other advocacy groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Reason Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. These bodies have been instrumental in turning politicians away from environmental laws, social spending, taxing the rich and distributing wealth. They have shaped the widespread demand for small government. The Kochs ensure that their money works for them. "If we're going to give a lot of money," David Koch explained to a libertarian journalist, "we'll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don't agree with, we withdraw funding."

Most of these bodies call themselves "free-market thinktanks", but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt. The thinktanks that the Kochs have funded devise the game and the rules by which it is played; Americans for Prosperity coaches and motivates the team.

Astroturfing is now taking off in the United Kingdom. Earlier this month Spinwatch showed how a fake grassroots group set up by health insurers helped shape the Tories' NHS reforms. Billionaires and corporations are capturing the political process everywhere; anyone with an interest in democracy should be thinking about how to resist them. Nothing is real any more. Nothing is as it seems.

• A fully referenced version of this story can be found at www.monbiot.com

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