Worth reading: How the TransPacific Partnership undermines democracy

Here's a very comprehensive rundown on what we know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a monster trade deal that involves nearly a dozen nations on both sides of the Pacific. Authors Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese note that from NAFTA on, international trade deals have led to job loss and economic disruption, and warn readers to beware any talk of Congressional "Trade Promotion Authority," the euphemism that the Obama Administration, which is pushing this deal, has seized on to avoid the now toxic term "Fast Track."

Read more...

Elinor Ostrom outlines the best strategies for managing the commons

Beyond Western notions of the market and the state, community-based forces can manage the commons effectively, and those methods can be studied and adapted to new situations and locations--hopeful news for any group seeking to manage local resources for the good of all rather than exploit them for the enrichment of a few.

To learn more about how AfD's Tapestry of the Commons project can jumpstart a commons conversation where you live, see the project webpage here.

by Jay Waljasper. Posted November 4 on Common Dreams

A breakthrough for the commons came in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The first woman awarded this honor, the Indiana University political scientist not only made history but also helped debunk widespread notions that the commons inevitably leads to tragedy. In 50 years of research from Nepal to Kenya to Switzerland to Los Angeles, she has shown that commonly held resources will not be destroyed by overuse if there is a system in place to manage how they are shared.

How such systems work around the world was the topic of Ostrom’s keynote address at Minneapolis’ Festival of the Commons at Augsburg College Oct. 7, co-sponsored by On the Commons, Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning and The Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

Ostrom explained there is no magic formula for commons management. “Government, private or community,” she said, “work in some settings and fail in others.”

The most effective approach to protect commons is what she calls “polycentric systems,” which operate “at multiple levels with autonomy at each level.” The chief virtue and practical value of this structure is it helps establish rules that “tend to encourage the growth of trust and reciprocity” among people who use and care for a particular commons. This was the focus of her Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, which she opened by stressing a need for “developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of ‘the market’ and ‘the state.’”

Addressing a crowded auditorium at the Minneapolis Festival, Ostrom pointed to an authoritative study of 100 protected forests in 14 countries, which shows that the cooperation of local people is more important to preserving these commons than whether a national government, local officials or someone else actually oversees the forests. If the people who live there feel they benefit long-term from how the forests are managed, she notes, they make sure the rules are followed. “When local groups have the right to harvest non-timber resources, they are more likely to monitor and sanction those who break the rules.”

Overall, she recommends local control as the best path for protecting a commons because it allows rules to be “based on unique aspects of a local resource and culture”. But the polycentric approach—a diverse web that might include some community or private governance along with different layers of government—“can have the benefits of local control, but still cope with the problems that come on a larger scale.”

What We Can Learn from New England Fishing Fleets
Ostrom also champions “self-organized” systems, where the people closely involved with a commons help “develop rules for themselves which can be quite different from what is in the textbooks.” Her favorite example of this is the intricate system of rules and enforcement created by fishing fleets in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to ensure there are enough lobsters for everyone.

*The first time the rules are broken, a bow is tied around the offending lobster trap. “Imagine these big lobstermen tying a bow on a pot,” she said with a laugh.

*On the second offense, the lobstermen visit the home of the offender to discuss the problem.

*On the third offense, the lobstermen break up the trap.

*On the fourth offense, it’s possible the lobstermen may destroy the offenders’ boat—but Ostrom is not certain it has ever come to that.

This way of governing the commons has proven effective because penalties are imposed gradually and enforced by the community itself. Although she cautioned that “Community control is not a panacea” anymore than private or government control in a panel discussions with local commons advocates after her talk at the Commons Festival.

What Local Cops and Jane Jacobs Have in Common
Before the speech, Ostrom met with students from various colleges around the Twin Cities, discussing her commons research in subjects beyond natural resources. She cited Jane Jacobs—the passionate advocate of neighborhoods who believed that local people usually know more about what’s best for their communities than expert planners—as an influence on her work.

Ostrom outlined her years of research on local police departments in 80 metropolitan areas across the country, studying them at a time when they were under pressure to consolidate operations in the name of efficiency. Yet most of them, she discovered, were able to achieve increased efficiency in resources like crime labs without merging into a huge metropolitan-wide forces.

Unfortunately, she added, schools were not able to resist consolidation. While there were 125,000 separate school districts across American in the 1930s, now there are 13,500.

“The ideas was that bigger schools would be cheaper,” she said, but that has not turned out to be true. Ostrom believes that both education and our democracy have suffered in the process. She pointed out that each of those 125,000 districts had at least five elected school board members, meaning that a much higher proportion of people then were directly involved with public affairs in their communities. That left me wondering if the widespread contempt for politics we see today would be so prevalent if more of us personally knew someone who actually served in public office.

Following Ostrom’s keynote speech, the audience flowed out into Murphy Square—the oldest public park in Minneapolis—to celebrate the many ways the commons enriches our lives with art, cuisine, community organizations and social interaction. The Brass Messenger band set a rollicking mood for the evening while a mob of theater students enacted a scene from the play Marat/Sade. The festival continued the next day with a walking tour of commons landmarks in the inner city neighborhood around Augsburg College led by Sabo Center chair Garry Hesser, followed by a commons bike tour led by Augsburg urban sociologist Lars Christiansen and me, which wound up at the site of the Occupy Minnesota protest downtown.

Read more...

Across the Great Divide

Is corporate personhood the unifying issue for the single payer, antiwar, environmental and Tea Party movement? This article was written for the Coos County (OR) Democrats Advocate by Alliance for Democracy national council member Rick Staggenborg, MD. What do you think?

by Rick Staggenborg, MD

The corporate media and the politicians who depend on it to get their message out would have us believe that Americans are sharply divided about the issues that are causing gridlock in the US Congress. Nothing could be further from the truth. Roughly 70% of citizens want out of Afghanistan, nearly everyone wants the debt limit raised, most Americans agree in principle that we should work to achieve universal health care in some form and a large majority wants no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The difference between what Americans want and need and what the corporate-driven Congress will give us is appropriately referred to as the “democracy gap."

What was quickly forgotten by the corporate media and largely by the “alternative” media is the fact that nearly 80% of both self-identified liberals and conservatives are opposed to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Recognizing that giving corporations carte blanche to buy the politicians of their choice to serve their interests in Congress is a dagger aimed at the heart of democracy, Americans across the political spectrum were momentarily united in the common cause of defending the possibility of true representative democracy. Unfortunately, the point was lost to most as the story was quickly buried in the 24 hour infotainment cycle.

The significance of the Citizens United case is not just that it is an outrageous step closer to fascist control of the US government but lies in the possibility of using the nearly universal anger toward it to build a bridge across the artificial divide between those who regard themselves as liberals or conservatives, Democrats, Republicans or independents. We the People now have an historic opportunity to create a truly democratic Republic in which the interests of the citizens of the US take precedence over those of the corporate Puppetmasters of Congress. All we need to do is to heed the lessons of 1775 and come together to fight for liberty and justice for all.

There is a growing movement to abolish corporate personhood and overturn the Supreme Court in Citizens United by working together to get a constitutional amendment introduced and passed in Congress. Oregon’s own US Representative Kurt Schrader recently took an important first step in introducing an amendment that would give states the power to regulate corporate money in elections. While still falling short of the goal of eliminating all “rights” granted corporations by an Imperial Supreme Court, has the potential to lead to the end of corporate control of the US government. If enough in Congress are willing to step up and support it, the issue will finally get the attention it deserves in the so-called “alternative” media.

Imagine if Peter DeFazio were to support the Schrader amendment. It would shine a spotlight on the issue of where Robinson gets his campaign funding. Last year he came from nowhere to raise $1.3 million dollars, much of it as soon as he announced his run. That’s pretty good for an unknown. Apparently he is not unknown to the big money interests who supported him and other ostensible “Tea Party” candidates. As was pointed out by a member of Americans for Prosperity in the district, he cannot be both a Republican and a Tea Party candidate, since the Tea Party represents those to the Right of the Republican Party. Similarly, Sharon Angell challenged Harry Reid and almost beat him, Rand Paul was actually elected in Kentucky and other candidates who were marginal at best were elected with sophisticated and very expensive corporate-funded propaganda campaigns.



In 2008 DeFazio won with 82% of the vote. In 2010 he won with less than 54%. Despite his liberal voting record, he has historically been supported by conservatives in his purple district because of his staunch support of veterans and his principled stands with Republicans when the Democratic leadership is on the wrong side of issues such as the first bankster bailout. In 2010, amid wild charges of socialism by the Robinson camp, his re-election was seriously challenged for the first time in years. The corporate money behind Robinson financed a very successful propaganda campaign that convinced many self-described conservatives to place a false ideological principle ahead of their own interests and that of the people of Oregon.



Interestingly, when I asked Robinson in Roseburg at one of his mock “debates” why he referred to a government that funneled taxpayer money to corporations “socialism,” he had a momentary lapse into reason. He shouted “You’re right! It’s fascism!” Then he expounded on the point for a full five minutes while I listened in amazement. Of course, by the time he got to the real debate in Coos Bay he had returned to the script written for him by his corporate Puppetmasters. If even Art Robinson recognizes that allowing corporations to buy Congress and dictate legislation and policy amounts to fascism, why don’t more Democrats capitalize on the fact when running for Congress? Neither Defazio nor Merkley take dirty money. Making their support of a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood would not only be principled but would tap into the truly independent voters who want to see something done about our system of corporate welfare.

Some time ago I wrote an editorial for the Advocate in which I argued that the key to saving the Republic is to get Tea Party supporters to join the effort to abolish corporate personhood through a constitutional amendment. Many of my friends scoffed at the idea. What they seem to have forgotten is that these people are more highly educated than the general public. They are not stupid, just misinformed and thus unable to see that the solution to our woes is not fighting the imaginary specter of “socialism” but in fighting creeping fascism. It is our job to educate them of this fact. They value democracy as much as the rest of us do. I spoke to Jeff Kropf, former state director of Americans for Prosperity about this. He was intrigued by the idea of working together to restore our democratic Republic through the process of constitutional amendment. He also confirmed my impression that although the Koch brothers initially provided funding for Tea Party events, the state organization is now self-funded.

Tea Party supporters are actually ahead of the political curve in one respect: They have rejected both Republican and Democratic politics as usual and are seeking to create the change America must see to save itself from economic, social and moral destruction. While I remain convinced that they are going about it in entirely the wrong way, they will be key allies in the fight to end corporate rule in America once they understand what Robinson in a rare moment of honesty admitted: Fascism is the enemy, not our fellow Americans. Partisan Democrats can take a lesson from the Tea Party. If they learn to put America before the Democratic Party, they can join in common cause with the Tea Party to rid Congress of the corporate tools who are destroying the American experiment in democracy.

Read more...

Thinkprogress: How The Kochs Built An Oil Speculation Empire

Don't believe the hype from anyone or any organization that tells you that all we have to do to bring gas prices down is drill everywhere the oil and gas industries want to sink a well. Wheeling and dealing is responsible for a big chunk of what we are paying at the pump--and Koch Industries has played a big role in siphoning part of your energy budget off to Wall Street speculators.

by Lee Fang. Posted June 6 on Thinkprogress.org

The Koch Industries front group Americans for Prosperity is preparing a tour across America “aimed at trying to put the blame for high gas prices on the Obama administration.” The tour will feature multiple campaign-style rallies, a website, and radio and television advertisements. The tour will demand that Obama increase domestic drilling — even though domestic oil production is at an all time high and further drilling will do nothing to affect prices.

Koch’s relaunch of Drill Baby Drill appears to be a crass attempt to distract Americans from a true driver of high prices: oil speculation, coming from companies like Koch. In fact, a new ThinkProgress investigation of Koch’s oil speculation business reveals that Koch is perhaps the most important player in distorting oil markets for private profit.

Our report highlights:

• Koch’s role in inventing modern oil derivatives.
• Koch’s alliance with Enron and the Gramm family in deregulating oil speculation, first in the early ’90s then again ten years later.
• Koch’s participation in unregulated exchanges, and the ways in which it uses its political power to allow excessive oil speculation to continue.

Experts contacted by ThinkProgress pin the blame for sky-high prices and record volatility on excessive oil speculation, the oil market corrupted by unregulated Wall Street traders who buy and hold onto oil futures contracts with no interest in the actual delivery of oil. Koch Industries — generally known as an oil pipelines and refining company — is also on the forefront of speculating on oil for profit.

Even Goldman Sachs concedes that at least $27 of the price of crude this year has been a result of rampant speculation, not supply and demand. Other experts contacted by ThinkProgress have said the number is closer to fifty dollars. To read our report about Koch Industry’s long and sordid history in the oil speculation business, click here.

Read more...

Wal-Mart—It's Alive! How the Company Is Terrorizing the Country With its Corporate 'Personhood'

Banks might be too big to fail but apparently Wal-mart is too big for anyone in charge to have any notion of how employees are treated. So what kind of "corporate person" has no idea what's going on within itself?

by Barbara Ehrenreich. Posted April 29 on Alternet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of several books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. © 2011 The American Prospect All rights reserved.

Read more...

Chris Hedges: This is what resistance looks like

Join the protest, starting at 11 a.m, Friday April 15 in New York City's Union Square at the doors of Bank of America. Visit "It's Our Economy" online for more information on the protest and concert, on the web and on Facebook. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

by Chris Hedges. Posted on truthdig April 3

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.
“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.

Read more...

Expect a more obvious plutocracy in 2011

AfD Portland chapter president David Delk wrote in a recent blog post that while austerity measures in Greece and Ireland brought people out into the streets for days of protest, the mood here remains docile. "Barely a voice is raised to defend the American working people as we are told that the government is too large, spends too much money on social programs like Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and education. Certainly, the American people have not moved to the street. They don’t even dare talk about it amongst themselves," he writes.

Obama's tax reform package was only the "latest stage of the attack of the rich and powerful on the middle class.  The attack began with President Kennedy when he said we needed to encourage business  by reducing the highest tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations.  It continued with President Reagan and his attacks on the unions. President Clinton pushed forward the Pres George H.W. Bush North American Trade Agreement to further empower the multinational corporations and dis-empower labor and environmental activists.  The tax cuts continued.  More so-called free trade agreements were imposed.  With each new law, the people continued to lose all power."

Last year's Citizens United decision laid it out plain: "The United States is no longer a democracy; the United States is a plutocracy.  No longer 'of the people, for the people, by the people', but 'of the wealthy, for the wealthy, by the wealthy.'

David recommends this article by Jack Rasmus, published in In These Times, as a possible predictor of how the middle class will be eaten up to support the incomes and privileges of the well-to-do. Look for drastic spending cuts in the start of 2011, and the institution of a US variant of the austerity programs being promoted across the globe.

Read more...

Dear States, Watch Out for the Privatizers

Here's a heads-up in an area where local watch-dogging and organizing can prevent your city or state from being penny-wise and pound-foolish by turning local infrastructure over to private investors. Jack Lohman's website is the excellent MoneyedPoliticians.net.

by Jack Lohman. Published by The Capital Times (Madison, WI) January 3

State after state is reporting dire financial conditions - California, Illinois, New Jersey, and even our own Wisconsin. The losses are so deep that only bankruptcy seems an option. But wait - there's another ploy coming to a theater near you! They've been preparing the soil and soon they'll spring it on us.

It's called privatizing.

It's always the same false claim: Private is more efficient than public. The public unions are impossible to work with, they'll say, and we have a corporation that can save us dollars.

Rarely is that true, especially after they add all of the exorbitant salaries, bonuses, shareholder profits, marketing and political bribes that must be passed on to the taxpayer. These costs usually far exceed government waste, unless offset by egregiously low salaries that further harm the economy.

Need proof? Privatized Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers 17 percent more than government Medicare, which provides care to 80 percent of our seniors. Privatized Blackwater troops in the Mideast cost five times what U.S. troops cost. But Blackwater executives give campaign dollars and our troops don't, so what else would you expect?

Politicians now have us right where they want us: desperate.

They'll take state assets - say, roads - and lease them to a private company, which will then add tolls and recoup their investment in 10 years and pocket the profits thereafter. And part of those profits will go to the friendly politicians.

Or the politicians will sell state-owned buildings and then lease them back so the private company can make the profits from the taxpayers. Or farm out housekeeping and security services to for-profit companies, as was done by Gov.-elect Scott Walker in Milwaukee.

Walker, as Milwaukee County executive, proposed leasing out Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport and then leasing it back to help the county financially. Fortunately, he was elected governor before that could be pulled off, but now the state must contend with similar crazy ideas. No successful airport privatizations have been implemented nationally, and higher airport and traveler fees would have been necessary.

It's the same old story, but will we ever learn?

We voters are too hung up on "our side" being right and "their side" being wrong, when in fact BOTH sides are corrupt. Republicans hate Democrats -- or the reverse -- when in fact we should be taxpayers who hate crooked politicians who bargain away our assets. And as long as we battle each other they are free to give away the store.

Politicians want us to believe that they have a handle on this whole economy thing, but they don't. All they know is that the guy sending the campaign check wants this or that, and if the politician wants the checks to continue, that guy will get his wish.

How much deeper into our pockets will we allow? Now is the time to say stop!

State assets are now on the line, and next comes privatizing water rights. Food is some ways off because family farms haven't all been bought off yet, but that time will come. Unless we have the gumption to stop the drain. NOW!

We must have 100 percent political turnover every two years until we get the politicians off the corporate dole.

Read more...

Robert Reich: Why the Obama Tax Deal Confirms the Republican Worldview

Reich is right on the money when he writes that power and privilege at the top--not elected officials but the power of the people who fund their campaigns--make it impossible to write tax and social policy that benefits the nation as a whole. But political bribery is a bipartisan problem. It's a rare industry that doesn't drop cash on both sides of the aisle, which is why we need to clean up the system, not just switch the players.

by Robert Reich. Posted June 30 on The Huffington Post

Apart from its extraordinary cost and regressive tilt, the tax deal negotiated between the president and the Republicans has another fatal flaw.

It confirms the Republican worldview.

Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story--the same one they've been flogging for thirty years. The bad economy is big government's fault and the solution is to shrink government.

Here's the real story. For three decades, an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the top 1 percent. Thirty years ago, the top got 9 percent of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical worker have barely budged.

The vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going. (The rich spend a much lower portion of their incomes.) The crisis was averted before now only because middle-class families found ways to keep spending more than they took in--by women going into paid work, by working longer hours, and finally by using their homes as collateral to borrow. But when the housing bubble burst, the game was up.

The solution is to reorganize the economy so the benefits of growth are more widely shared. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and apply payroll taxes to incomes over $250,000. Extend Medicare to all. Extend the Earned Income Tax Credit all the way up through families earning $50,000. Make higher education free to families that now can't afford it. Rehire teachers. Repair and rebuild our infrastructure. Create a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work.

Pay for this by raising marginal income taxes on millionaires (under Eisenhower, the highest marginal rate was 91 percent, and the economy flourished). A millionaire marginal tax of 70 percent would eliminate the nation's future budget deficit. In addition, impose a small tax on all financial transactions (even a tiny one--one half of one percent--would bring in $200 billion a year, enough to rehire every teacher who's been laid off as well as provide universal preschool for all toddlers). Promote unions for low-wage workers.

But here's the obstacle. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block all of this.

The midterm elections offered dramatic evidence. NBC news reported shortly after Election Day, for example, that Crossroads GPS, one of the biggest Republican secret-money organizations, got "a substantial portion" of its loot from a group of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers. Why would they sink so much money into the midterms? Because they've been so strongly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats to treat the earnings of hedge fund and private equity managers as ordinary income rather than capital gains (subject to only a 15 percent rate).

In other words, the problem isn't big government. It's power and privilege at the top.

So another part of the solution is to limit the impact of big money on politics. This requires, for example, publicly-financed campaigns, disclosure of all sources of political spending, and resurrection of the fairness doctrine for broadcasters.

It's the same power and privilege that got the Bush tax cuts in the first place, and claimed the lion's share of its benefits. The same power and privilege that got the estate tax phased out.

Get it? By agreeing to another round of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the president confirms the Republican story. Cutting taxes on the rich while freezing discretionary spending (which he's also agreed to do) affirms that the underlying problem is big government, and the solution is to shrink government and expect the extra wealth at the top to trickle down to everyone else.

Obama's new tax compromise is not only bad economics; it's also disastrous from the standpoint of educating the public about what has happened and what needs to happen in the future. It reinforces the Republican story and makes mincemeat out of the truthful one Democrats should be telling.

Read more...

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.”

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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!

Read more...

Fighting to Protect Consumers

Consumer protection is a little stronger thanks to President Obama's appointment of Elizabeth Warren as adviser on the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The appointment is an end-run around potentially endless Senate confirmation hearings, and a victory for the millions of people who spoke out in favor of her hiring. But we still need to stand behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and make sure she has the authority she needs to establish an agency that will be a no-compromise advocate for the people.

by Elizabeth Warren. Posted September 17 on OpEd News.

Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.

The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started--right now. The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.

President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again for families and creating protections that work not just for the wealthy or connected, but for every American. The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn't learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them--way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over. This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what's going on, they will have better tools to make better choices.

If the CFPB can succeed at leveling the playing field, we can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families. But nobody has ever thought or argued that the consumer bureau can fix everything. Lost jobs, stagnant incomes, rising costs for college, dwindling retirement savings--there's a lot of work to be done.

Read more...

More on Oregon's feed-in tariff program

Here's a more detailed look at how Oregon's new feed-in tariff program is working for one participating family. The pilot program is designed to encourage local production of solar power, and is backed by AfD partner organization Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP).

by Richard Read. Posted September 1 on The Oregonian
Like almost all Oregonians, Jeff Ramp has paid utility bills for years to power his home, which sits on an onion farm near Salem.

But within a few weeks, Ramp will start receiving monthly checks from Portland General Electric Co. instead. The utility will pay him a premium for solar energy he produces and consumes. The checks will keep coming for 15 years and could exceed $600 a month, ultimately more than repaying his investment.

Ramp, 61, is the first PGE customer to generate electricity under a pilot program in which utilities pay homeowners for power produced from solar panels. The program, also available to Pacific Power customers, proved so popular when it launched July 1 that available spots ran out in 15 minutes. The next chance to apply is Oct. 1.

"I've been wanting to do this for years, but it never made economical sense," Ramp said. "I like to take advantage of what nature will give you."

Directed by the Legislature, Oregon's Public Utility Commission launched the solar program in such a hurry that Ramp and other early adapters had to wait while installers and utility workers refined details.

PGE managers overcame a glitch in insurance requirements. An electrician returned to Ramp's house and rewired a meter after the utility developed specifications. The fixes will smooth the way for the next round.

Solar advocates say a far more significant barrier is posed by an obscure federal regulation, interpreted by state officials as preventing homeowners from selling to utilities any power beyond what they consume. Because of the regulation, Oregon and other states have stopped short of an approach that has boosted solar power in Europe and Canada's Ontario province, where homeowners sell their surplus electricity to power companies.

Under Oregon's pilot program, revenue from surplus electricity is donated to Oregon Heat, a low-income energy-assistance organization. A spokeswoman for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which presides over the U.S. energy system, declined to comment Wednesday on the sell-back prohibition.

National Solar Inc.'s Kim Berhorst, who helped design Ramp's system and managed the project, is pleased to see Oregon's pilot program move forward. She hopes residents of Oregon and other states will eventually be allowed to sell excess solar power to utilities, using a so-called feed-in tariff system.

"This is a first step toward trying to craft a true feed-in tariff for the state of Oregon," Berhorst said. "That's the only way for the United States to catch up with people in Europe and Ontario."

Berhorst said she discovered while working on Ramp's system that insurance companies would not allow residential customers to add liability coverage for PGE to their homeowners' policies. PGE amended its contract language to waive the provision.

In Central Oregon, homeowner George Jameson got his solar system running Aug. 11 with minimal problems, apparently becoming the first person in the state to connect under the pilot program. Jameson, 66, a retiree from the computer industry, said the only hitch was Pacific Power's refusal to tell him what day -- let alone what time -- its technician would arrive to install meters.

"They eventually showed up," Jameson said, "and, luckily, we were here."

Jameson and his wife, Deanna, spent just over $20,000 on their system, installed by Bend's Sunlight Solar Energy. The Crooked River Ranch residents are eligible for a 30 percent federal tax credit. But like all participants in Oregon's pilot program, they're ineligible for state tax credits and cash incentives.

Oregon residents can still qualify for those local perks, and the federal credit, if they install solar systems without applying to receive utility checks.

The Jamesons expect checks averaging about $185 a month, meaning they'll break even in about nine years -- profiting during the remainder of their 15-year contract with Pacific Power. George Jameson marvels over an idiosyncrasy of the system that encourages him to burn more energy in order to receive bigger payments. He's not likely to do so, given his interest in conservation.

In Brooks, Ramp expects a payback in roughly the same time period as Jameson. Ramp spent $63,000 on his 9,900-watt system, which uses U.S.-made panels and electrical inverters manufactured by Bend's PV Powered Inc.

Payback times may be somewhat longer for future applicants. That's because the Public Utility Commission could decide during a Sept. 21 public hearing in Salem to reduce payment amounts by 10 percent, as requested by PGE and Pacific Power, due to the program's popularity.

Also -- perhaps predictably, during tight budgetary times -- state and federal officials have decided homeowners must pay income tax on the utility payments they receive.

The determination doesn't faze Jameson. "If you're going to tax me on the revenue that comes from that solar system," he said, "I can depreciate that asset."

How to apply: Utility customers can apply to enter the next round of Oregon's solar pilot program starting at 8 a.m. Oct. 1. They'd better be prompt. When the program opened July 1, applicants snapped up available spots in 15 minutes. Successful applicants can proceed to install solar panels and receive monthly checks at premium rates for power they produce and use themselves.

Pacific Power customers can apply online for the company's Solar Incentive Program. Portland General Electric customers can apply for PGE's Solar Payment Option. Applicants must come prepared with detailed information concerning their proposed project.

Idaho's Power customers in Oregon are also eligible, starting at the same hour. They can apply for the utility's Oregon Solar Photovoltaic Pilot Program.

Read more...