On the July 9 edition of "Corporations and Democracy" radio, hosts Steve Scalmanini and Annie Esposito talked about nuclear disarmament with Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, and an internationally-known expert on nuclear disarmament. Jacqueline deconstructed Obama's recent statements on nuclear weapons, discussed the corporatization of nukes and warned that while progress has been made on reducing numbers of weapons, there are still more than enough of them out there to destroy civilization.
You can listen or download the show on our radio page, here.
The audio from Tuesday's edition of "Corporation's and Democracy" is now up on our radio page. The show, as promised, features two takes on privatization, both from speakers at this year's Public Banking Institute national conference.
Steve and Annie's first guest, Darwin BondGraham, is a sociologist and journalist (and occasional "Corporations and Democracy" listener) who now covers political economy for print and web publications. He explains some of the history and thinking behind his conference talk, titled "Public-Private Partnerships--Highway to Ruin." He's followed by chief of staff of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Jim Sauber. There are lots of privatization pressures on the US Postal Service, but Jim discusses ways that the post office could add services that would benefit workers and the public alike.
Callers give their points of view, and Steve's look at the headlines features some good news on the fight against GMOs.
Tomorrow, June 11th, on our "Corporations and Democracy" radio show, Annie Esposito and Steve Scalmanini will discuss the treacherous trend of privatization with two speakers from last week's Conference on Public Banking, journalist and sociologist Darwin Bond-Graham, and the chief of staff of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Jim Sauber. Listen live starting at 1 p.m. Pacific Time on www.kzyx.org or over the airwaves at KZYX & Z, 90.7, 91.5, and 88.3 FM in Mendocino County, CA. We'll be taping and posting the show and will have it up on the Alliance for Democracy radio page after it airs.
There's a new "Corporations and Democracy" show online at www.afdradio.org. Nomi Prins, author and senior fellow at Demos, discusses the continuous banking and financial disaster and what listeners can do about it with hosts Tom Wodetzki and Toni Rizzo.
Nomi is a journalist and senior fellow at Demos. Her latest book is It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (Wiley, September, 2009). Her 2004 book, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (The New Press, October 2004) was chosen as a Best Book of the year by The Economist, Barron's and The Library Journal.
She talks about the financial industry's resistance to structural reform, and industry leaders' lack of concern for long-term stability if the regulation that would achieve it comes at the cost of short-term profit.
"Corporations and Democracy" is aired every other week on KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo, California.
The September 9 edition of "Corporations and Democracy" is online on AfD's radio page. In this show, Annie Esposito and Steve Scalmanini discuss product safety and the right of individuals to sue for redress with Christine Hines, consumer and civil justice counsel at Congress Watch, an arm of Public Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader.
Listen and learn how recent court cases are helping corporations evade accountability and responsibility to their employers and clients, and actions you can take to push legislation to help level the playing field. Mendocino county callers provide lively comments.
Thanks to KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo for broadcasting and streaming the show, and making the programs available. To inquire about rebroadcasting the show in your area, please email afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org.
Ben Manski, executive director of Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution and spokesperson for the Wisconsin Wave, talks to Steve Scalmanini and Annie Esposito, hosts of the August 19 edition of Corporations and Democracy, heard on KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo, California.
Ben, Steve, and Annie discuss heartland progressive populism and resistance to attacks on local government in Benton Harbor and other Michigan towns, to the results of the recent Wisconsin recall elections, including allegations of pro-GOP election fraud in a well-to-do county (not the first time this has happened!). Ben reviews the history of home rule provisions and the need to strengthen them today to provide a democratic bulwark against corporate personhood and corporate rule.
Open mouth, remove silver spoon, insert foot. Regardless of whether Mitt Romney was speaking from the heart or got jittery and shot from the hip, his Iowa State Fair quip that "corporations are people" set a lot of teeth on edge. For Romney, perhaps, it was a glib critique of tax increases. But it was also a sign of how closely political fortune is tied to corporate rule and corporate cash.
Romney might be correct in that the money corporations make eventually get paid out to some individuals--employees or stockholders. But to say that corporations are people, and especially to endow corporations with constitutional personhood rights, as court decisions have steadily done, endangers our nation and our democracy. Corporations have no loyalties to any concept other than making a profit. If the good of an individual, a family, a community, or even the nation gets in the way of a strong bottom line at the end of the quarter, there's no question that real people--you and me--will take a back seat to profit.
You don't have to look much further than Romney's own business career to see this concept in action, courtesy of leading political commentator (sadly, we're not being ironic) Stephen Colbert:
“You see, Romney made a Mittload of cash using what’s known as a leveraged buyout. He’d buy a company with ‘money borrowed against their assets, groomed them to be sold off and in the interim collect huge management fees.’ Once Mitt had control of the company, he’d cut frivolous spending like ‘jobs,’ ‘workers,’ ‘employees,’ and ‘jobs.’ […] “Because Mitt Romney knows just how to trim the fat. He rescued businesses like Dade Behring, Stage Stories, American Pad and Paper, and GS Industries, then his company sold them for a profit of $578 million after which all of those firms declared bankruptcy. Which sounds bad, but don’t worry, almost no one worked there anymore."
Romney's rep as a job killer led to his Senate campaign being bird-dogged by a "truth squad" ‘of striking workers from a Marion, Indiana, paper plant who had lost jobs, wages, health care, and pensions after Ampad, a Bain subsidiary, took control. Ampad eventually went bankrupt, but Bain walked away with $100 million for its $5 million investment.
The threat of profit-before-people corporate deeds are why in the early days of this country corporations were kept under tight legal restraint: chartered for a specific public purpose, dissolved when that purpose was accomplished, their books subject to inspection, and conglomerates of corporations owning other corporations forbidden. But thanks to a slew of court decisions, we've swung the other way, to where corporations are legally immortal, dedicated only to profit, and "human" enough to have the same free speech rights as individuals, although their "voice" is amplified a thousand-fold by the money they have on hand to buy, bribe, or influence the candidates of their choice.
So while the Democrats have jumped all over Romney's remark, don't believe their hype. For DNC Communications Director Brad Woodhouse, for instance, Romney's remarks amount to little more than a lack of sympathy: "There's a great message for people struggling to get by and trying to make ends meet. Don't complain -- corporations are people too!"
Here's news for both parties: it's not just the folks who are struggling who are mightily ticked off at the attitude that Romney's quip represents. It's everyone who questions whether our elected officials are more loyal to their funders than to their constituents. It's everyone who sees elections as a public good that should be publicly funded, just as our police, fire, and libraries are, to ensure every voice and every vote counts. It's everyone who sees the Citizens United decision as the ultimate auction of constitutional personhood rights to the highest bidders. We're the majority, we're the citizens, we're the voters, we're the people, and we want our democracy back.
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The latest installment of the Corporations and Democracy radio show explores the current status of health care reform. Download or listen to the .mp3 here. This week, Dr. John Geyman, past president of Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, offers his assessment of pending legislation, the public option, and single payer. Dr. Geyman is professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and author of several books, including Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying and How We Must Replace It, and The Corrosion of Medicine: Can the Profession Reclaim its Moral Legacy? He also blogs at the PNHP site. Toni Rizzo conducts the interview, with call-ins from listeners.
The most recent edition of Corporations and Democracy features AfD members Tom Wodetzski and Toni Rizzo interviewing Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. Hedges's new book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
In the book and in this wide-ranging conversation, Hedges examines commodity culture and the "cult of the self" and sees in it the roots of an illogical, unreflective society which is without compassion and ill-equipped to deal with environmental and economic challenges. Compounding the problem: liberal moral bankruptcy, a corporate media, the fading of print-based society, growing de facto and functional illiteracy. Totalitarian societies, say Hedges, are built around image and spectacle, and the health care debate and media focus on the fringe is an example. Will we learn to "grow up" and build a movement or will we turn to "saviors and demagogues?"
The comments by call-ins are terrific as well.
The sound quality at the beginning of the recording is a little rough this week due to some technical difficulties!
We're going to be posting audio .mp3 files of the radio show "Corporations and Democracy," hosted by AfD'ers Steve Scalmanini and Annie Esposito on KZYX&Z, Mendocino County public radio. This first installment can be downloaded here. It aired last month and features an interview with John Foster of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, an educational non-profit focusing on progressive ballot initiative campaigns nationwide. He discusses the center's project on ballot initiative integrity, especially in relation to a petition for a major mall development in Mendocino County. You can learn more about how the ballot initiative process is being mis-used at www.stopballotfraud.org.
Please leave a comment to let us know if transcripts of the show would be useful to you!
Drive the message home! Support constitutional rights for people, not corporations and show the big donors you're on to their game with these bumperstickers!
