Karl Bode presents one of the more salient and lucid arguments in the ongoing debate over national media policy that we’ve seen in a long time….

An eclectic and disjointed mix of businesses, consumer advocacy organizations, politicians and technologists this week banded together under the “Internet For Everyone ” banner to promote, well, Internet for everyone. The group’s long list of strange bedfellows includes the ACLU, Google, Consumer’s Union, Internet2, OpenDNS, Free Press, the Writers Guild of America, the Nancy Drew fan fiction club and many more — though I think they fail to directly tackle this industry’s most pressing problem….

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The problem is that while these groups field yet another feel-good event where Internet Ivy League celebrities like Tim Wu and Larry Lessig wax poetic on the limitless potential of the Intertubes, AT&T lobbyists are purchasing your State’s entire legislative body in order to pass the “Anti-competitive consumer sodomy act of 2008″ or some variant thereof. It’s kind of like cheering for more wind on the deck of a rotting sailboat.

I’d be more impressed if these groups dropped the banal, vague principles (seriously, who exactly opposes “innovation?”) and took a strong stance on the real reasons broadband competition in this country is stagnant: government corruption, an un-skeptical media, the incumbent stranglehold on policymakers, the massive web of disinformation created by lobbyists, and the complete bi-partisan failure in government leadership.

Don’t get me wrong; I do think these groups can help institute change, but I think this particular group’s mission statement is in dire need of clarity. With George Carlin’s passing — and his streamlining of the Ten Commandments fresh in my mind — I’d like to replace the group’s fairly mundane four principles with just one. I think my singular principle would be immensely more beneficial to this industry: Tackle corruption

Read The Complete Post

This is refreshing in that it is one of the few that is actually identifying some of the core systemic problems we are facing in the pursuit of our work towards a more democratic and universally accessible media system. However, the use of the term ‘corruption’ in regards to defining the problem here is off the mark, in that the problems being identified with this post are not the result of corruption. The very term ‘corruption’ implies that the behavior and actions being identified here are deviant from the law. Complaints about “AT&T purchasing your state’s entire legislative body”, the FCC being stacked with partisan loyalists serving corporate interests, etc… are to all effects useless, in that these actions all have one commonality - they are all perfectly legal.

You cannot fight ‘corruption’ when the very definition of the law itself is corrupt, at least according to the nature of the complaints elaborated in this posting. Until there is enough widespread awareness that engages the citizenry to challenge the fundamental basis of how rights are defined and who wields them, this little kabuki theater of democracy we engage ourselves with on a daily basis in the halls of government throughout the nation will continue unabated. The reality, like it or not, is that we do not live in a democratic republic, but rather a corporate state. This is not stated rhetorically or meant to be inflammatory, but as simple basic fact.

Every instance outlined in this posting is yet another symptom revealing once again (and the examples are unpleasantly relentless) that self-governing sovereignty does not exist with the democratic majorities, but rather with ruling minorities hiding behind the fictional façade of corporate personhood. With every example of ‘corruption’ raised here (and elsewhere in our ongoing struggles), one needs to ask one simple question. “Who Decides?” Who is the sovereign in our society? Supposedly it is claimed that all power of governance resides with ‘We The People’. But is that really true? Is it true when small groups of people can shape the law to their own benefit against the stated will and interests of the majorities of those whom our civic mythology claims are actually the governing sovereigns? The evidence that this is the case is incontrovertible, displayed over and over with issue after issue (war, health care, environmental concerns, workers rights, etc… on and on and on, you’ll see over and over how the law and policy do not correspond to the actual interests and desires of the majorities of people).

This situation will never be confronted and successfully resolved until this issue of corporate rights being conferred upon and wielded by small minorities against the supposedly sovereign majorities through the use of these distorted and perverted laws is challenged.

Any actions collectively taken, any battles fought short of this one can arguably be defined as being strictly defensive in nature. Granted, teams can score some points on defense, even win whole games with nothing but a strong defense. But to take the sports analogy a step further, if you want to win championships for the long term, you’re going to need at least some kind of coordinated offense, and know clearly what your target is.

And the fact is the shot clock is running out, what with a whole host of threats and challenges; state franchises, FCC rulemaking, heck, with the ever-more-obvious economic and even global climate meltdown. How long can we keep playing prevent defense in these circumstances? The time is running out and the shots will be few, and yes the opponent is seemingly overwhelming in scope and power. To use a Star Wars analogy, ‘Corporate Personhood’ can be likened to the ‘hole in the Death Star’, the single Achilles-like mark surrounded by all the protective devices and acolyte minions of Festung Empire. The reality is, if we’ve only got limited time with a limited chance to make that shot, like Luke Skywalker ’staying on target’ and going for broke, we best identify where we need to make that shot and how to make it count.

Because Lord knows we don’t have the time, energy and resources to continue to fight these piecemeal battles against the Goliaths on a playing field they designed and already rigged for themselves. If that is to be the case, we are simply fighting to regulate the speed of our demise.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

Daniel Greenwood is a highly unusual law professor who writes academic articles with subtitles like “The Illegitimacy of Corporate Law” and “Why Corporate Speech is Not Free.” Strangely, his work has been strangely overlooked by the democracy/anti-corporate movement. That’s a shame because it’s great stuff and worth a close look.

Recently Professor Greenwood switched from University of Utah to Hofstra Law School, so he has a new web page with links to all his writings:

http://people.hofstra.edu/Daniel_J_Greenwood/

Sample article titles:

“Should Corporations Have First Amendment Rights?” (a classic)

“Democracy and Delaware: The Mysterious Race to the Top/Bottom”
From the abstract: Re-politicizing corporate law would allow us to see a series of difficult value choices that are currently concealed but ought to be the subject of political debate”

“Markets and Democracy: The Illegitimacy of Corporate Law”

“Introduction to the Metaphors of Corporate Law”

“First Amendment Imperialism”

“The Semi-Sovereign Corporation” (very good)

“Essential Speech: Why Corporate Speech is Not Free” (awesome article!!!)

- Posted by Ted Nace

This is an interesting article. I still find it disturbingly amusing to watch the high priests of our corporate capitalist religion continue to cling to their dogmatic faith, even in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence of disaster. But then, it has nothing to do with ‘rationality’ or any kind of economic logic. It is just the age old human spiritual and psychological sickness of clinging and grasping to greed and ego gratification at the expense of the ‘other’, and capitalism in it’s most virulent form seems to have attained the distinction of being the finest, most effective ideology in propagandizing the morality play of transforming the notion of private vice into a public virtue.

The foolishness which continues to preach the wonders of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market place, leaves people never bothering to notice that the ‘invisible hand’ has been busy picking our pockets.

When CNBC abandoned infomercials in favor of programming from its international affiliate on Sunday night, it merely confirmed that much of the world now holds Wall Street in about the same regard as a Nigerian email scam or an Albanian pyramid scheme. The anchors and guests with the funny accents were quick to note the dollar’s decline and the general instability of the American financial system.

So while it’s good that Washington has finally woken up to the historic financial crisis on its hands, it still hasn’t confronted the ideological emergency. There’s more at stake here than just next quarter’s write-offs or next year’s growth rate. Laissez-faire capitalism has run headlong into a massive credibility problem.

And it’s really as simple as the difference between $84 and $2 per share. Efficient markets are those that can tell what something is worth. Ours can no longer make that claim, whether in regard to financial stocks or, by extension, about the much larger pool of private debt. The numbers Bear Stearns posted last year, the numbers it clung to until the bubble finally burst, proved in the end not to be worth the recycled paper they were printed on. Just like the mortgage debt that had been rated AAA but ended up at the bottom of the junk pile. Invest in America, where the numbers can be anything you want.

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It’s also an attempt to obscure the connection between costly crises and bailouts and vast private profits that have flowed to those who never really shouldered proportional risk. If our dynamic global marketplace is going to require taxpayer bailouts every decade or so, perhaps that ought to be taken into account when dividing the spoils from its lucky streaks.

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Poor Chinese, who discarded Soviet-style central planning for the market mechanisms beloved by us all. Now they sit on a powder keg of a stock-market bubble while contemplating belatedly that incompetent central planners could at least be shot, while even incompetent investment bankers get to keep their Bentleys.

Read The Complete Article

This is both darkly humorous and rather telling…

State Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, has been a strong advocate of giving consumers a choice besides cable for television service. But his letter inviting constituents to an AT&T-sponsored event Friday celebrating its new U-verse TV service may have gone too far, some critics say. A letter sent by Fonfara on April 1 to residents on several streets in Hartford’s Behind the Rocks neighborhood encouraged them to attend the event marking the local U-verse launch.

The mailing, paid for with state money and printed on official Senate letterhead, described U-verse as an “exciting new technology” and listed a website for potential customers to check for availability. Fonfara, co-chairman of the legislative committee that deals with cable and telephone regulation, said the letter was meant to highlight a cable TV alternative. “I am promoting the fact there’s competition coming to my district, where so many people said it would never happen ,” Fonfara said at the event at Rocky Ridge Park.

Fonfara’s decision to highlight U-verse in official state correspondence crossed the line, said state Rep. Christopher Caruso, D-Bridgeport, co-chairman of the government administration and elections committee, which writes and oversees ethics law. Caruso said the letter doesn’t violate state ethics laws or legislative mailing rules, but mailings discussing the advantages of a new product should be sent out by the company, not legislators. “That is a promo piece,” Caruso said. “John is a good friend of mine, but I won’t have written the letter.” The letter was also criticized by Edwin Vargas Jr., a former Democratic town committee chairman who is considering challenging Fonfara for the party nomination this year for the 1st Senate District, which includes parts of Hartford and Wethersfield.

Fonfara “may have gone too far”? He “crossed the line”?

There is no line left to cross here, folks. The so-called ‘line’ between the power of the corporation and that of the state has long been obliterated. Fonfara’s real transgression wasn’t that he turned his public office into an advertising division of AT&T, it was that his clumsy actions (clumsy from a power management perspective) simply made that condition more readily visible to the normally unobservant eye of the general public.

Read The Full Article

There’s more on Mr. Fonfara’s ‘gaffe’ Here from The Hartford Courant

This brings to light the aphorism about how American politics is pretty much about organized money vs. organized people, as the incident highlighted here is a literal example of what is meant by that. It’s a pretty telling indictment of the popularity of Comcast’s position on the all-important issue of Net Neutrality that they have to resort to recruiting citizen mercenaries to support their efforts within anything resembling the sphere of democratic accountability in the decision-making processes of governance.

Comcast Paid Shills To Attend FCC Hearing

The Federal Communications Commission hearing about net neutrality this week was so crowded that police had to turn away an estimated 100 people from the Harvard Law School classroom where the event was held. The large audience even seemed to surprise some of the organizers, who did not have an overflow room available on site.

But now, it’s come out that the packed room wasn’t just filled with concerned citizens. Comcast paid shills to arrive early and save seats so that employees and other supporters could attend and cheer on executive vice president David Cohen.

The move came to light after the net neutrality advocacy group Free Press posted this MP3 file of an interview with an unidentified line-stander on its site. “Honestly, I’m just getting paid to hold somebody’s seat,” a man said on the recording. “I don’t even know what’s going on.” Pictures also surfaced online showing audience members sleeping during the hearing.

Read The Full Report

Harold Feld of Wetmachine.com really lays out the disturbing meaning underlying this whole situation with his column For the Clueless Among Us: Why Comcast Paying Folks to Attend FCC Hearing Is Wrong. The fact that Comcast is trying to claim this is simply an example of democratic organizing shows just how far out in orbit these corporations are in regards to their understanding of what truly meaningful and appropriate exercise of democratic governance and accountability is. But then, ruling elites hiding behind the legal fictions of corporations do not, nor ever have, given much concern to the whole notion of ‘democracy.’

I can’t believe I actually need to explain this.

Suppose Comcast made the following offer: If you vote “yes” on a ballot initiative we like (and agree to take a pocket recording device into the voting booth with you so we can have proof), we will pay you $50.

Most of us would not only say that this is wrong, we would have no problem understanding why that’s a crime. We would not be persuaded by Comcast defending itself by saying “well, Free Press and other organizations have campaigned in support of the bill and are calling people to ask them to go out and vote — they even provide free rides to people likely to vote for the initiative. That’s just like paying people directly to vote the way we want.” In general, we recognize a difference between organizing ad trying to persuade people to vote the way you want and actually paying people for their vote (and wanting a receipt).

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Which brings us back to Comcast. This isn’t some gray area of giving local employees the day off with pay and a free ride while others had to take time off ad make their own way. This is just hiring warm bodies to block others and — if they stay awake long enough — to applaud on cue. The notion that this is in any way comparable to the kind of civic conversation that democracies depend on and the sort of organizing that Free Press engages in — citizens persuading other citizens and urging them to make their voices heard — is worse than ignorant and beyond Orwellian. It is downright insulting. It takes our most fundamental right and responsibility as free citizens and transforms it into a mockery. It is literally to defend the practice of placing democracy up for sale, and to reduce our democracy to the level of a banana republic.

The best democracy money can buy.

Read The Full Post

Update: Looks like the FCC and even members of Congress are taking notice of these stunts by our friends at Comcast. Sen. John Kerry of all people actually defined the point pretty well…

“Trying to lock out the public is a great example of why we need net neutrality… If the other side will use their money to restrict public access to a public meeting, how can we feel confident they won’t use their power to restrict voices in the virtual world?

Read more about it Here

Another Update: Looks like Robin Harris has weighed in on this issue as well on his blog ‘Storage Bits’….

Comcast hired dozens of “seat-warmers” that kept others from attending a Monday FCC hearing held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society meeting room for an FCC hearing. God forbid that the public be seen at a hearing intended to solicit public comment.

Then they lied about it.

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Trust Comcast to regulate the Internet? They can’t manage the PR for a public hearing let alone the Internet.

Read The Complete Post with Comments Here

A report by telecom and broadband expert and activist Bruce Kushnick laying out in painful detail how model corporate bills get introduced and enacted in state legislatures. Here he is describing the situation in Wisconsin, but it pretty much works the same everywhere. Just replace the words “Wisconsin” and “Madison” with locations of your choice, and you’re pretty much there.

The best democracy money can buy.

Read The Complete Report

Thomas Linzey, the innovative attorney and co-founder of the Democracy Schools and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, gives this excellent presentation at the annual Bioneers convention, portraying the provocative successes of conservative townships in Pennsylvania to challenge the validity of corporate rights, claim local self governance and reclaim democracy.

Watch The Video provided via Free Speech TV

(Originally Posted December 2, 2007)

AT&T has been doing this all around the country, taking their business plan and finding willing acolytes in state legislatures to sponsor it under the guise of public legislation.

This article on what they are doing in Wisconsin gives a good synopsis on their M.O. on how this corporation is co-opting state lawmaking for its own agenda. Well worth the read for anyone interested in understanding how the law making mechanisms of our corporate state functions.

When you write the rules, you win the game. This week in the Senate, the fight will be over the rules governing the delivery of cable TV, internet, and telephone services for the foreseeable future.

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The bill as written, gives AT&T the power to do just about anything it wants, without consequences or the public having a say. This is the “competition” AT&T advertises on television and in direct mail across the state.

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Lobbyists for AT&T told me that they want to continue to offer “charity” and provide service to public places like fire and police departments and schools but they don’t want the requirement in law. In Michigan, however, when providing public cable services became optional, the cables were cut to police departments, fire stations and local government. And there was no recourse.

That is why who writes the rules makes a difference.

Here is a bit of a heartening follow up in how showing how there is at least some element of growing awareness about what is going down in Wisconsin, and how there is an element of hesitancy and even resistance to the corporate juggernaut. Typical in that the more people learn of the true nature of these kinds of moves by corporations, the more they don’t want them. Unfortunately, any attempt to counter the moves of entities like AT&T through some semblance of democratic accountability without confronting the rights they wield over our society through corporate personhood are eventually doomed to failure.

Read more on how Some Support For Cable Competition Bill Is Eroding

Good interview with Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), on the true nature of why and how corporations wield their power over our civic society and what can be done about it. It also references CELDF’s ‘Democracy Schools’, which I have attended on a number of occasions and highly recommend to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of what we are up against and how to better aim their efforts towards changing our current political situation through changing the structure of law.

Thomas Linzey thinks of himself as more than just a lawyer. A co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Linzey is a practicing attorney, committed to the idea that change happens at the grassroots. Much of his activism occurs through CELDF’s “Democracy Schools,” an innovative curriculum that encourages people to go beyond the single issue they are working on to think of their struggle as part of a larger fight against corporate power. The schools prompt citizens to question basic assumptions behind our legal system. Linzey and his colleagues encourage communities to create local constitutions, or “home-rule charters,” enumerating the rights of local citizens and backing up those rights with enforceable laws.

Q: Can you tell us about “democracy”? It’s a word used by everyone and can mean so many things.

Thomas Linzey: Well, I don’t think we have ever had a democracy in this country. I think it’s a myth that majorities have ever been able to decide what happens to their communities and their lives.

It goes back to the American Revolution when we jettisoned the king, but we didn’t jettison the English structure of law. That structure of law developed at the same time England was developing into a global cultural empire. And the folks that wrote the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the DNA or hardwiring for this country, in essence worshiped English common law. We got rid of the King but we didn’t get rid of an English structure of law that placed property and commerce over the rights of communities and nature.

Amazing as it might sound, a community that may want to stop toxic waste, or stop toxic sludge from coming in, or stop a big corporate hog factory farm from coming into the community, not only runs up against the corporations and the state regulatory agencies, it runs up against the Constitution.

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Q: Many people in this country don’t understand that corporations have personhood rights. Why does this come as such a surprise to some people?

TL: That’s a very good question. People only begin to peel back the layers of the legal opinions under which they are governed when they have something threaten them personally. One or our most able organizers — a woman named Jennifer England — is from southwestern Virginia. She has seven children. And she’s an evangelical Christian. There were plans to dump sludge right next to her house. And it was that imminent threat to her kids, to her land, to her family, to her home, that drove Jennifer to start questioning how this entire structure of law is set up.

She asked, “Why can’t we just have a law that says ‘no sludge can be spread in this community’?” So we had a conversation with her, and we told her that you can’t do that, because it would be illegal. It’s unconstitutional to ban something at the community level that the state has permitted, because it violates the corporation’s constitutional rights. So the question is, as Jennifer asked, “Why?” When you explain to people like Jennifer that corporations are persons, it just doesn’t make any sense to them.

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What this work is about is knitting together those communities who are finally learning that they are always on the losing end of the stick, that the regulatory agencies are not a remedy, that they can’t turn to their state legislature or their courts for a remedy because those courts are carrying out laws that are written by the corporations in the first place.

Read the complete interview from Alternet

This is disturbing, but unfortunately not unexpected. Regardless of one’s perspectives on Oliver North, this is a real problem. What is ironic is North has consistently been a cheerleader and partisan flack for an ideology for which this is a real world result of it’s successful fruition.

The Enemy Within: Selling Alternative Reality to the American Public

Oliver North has a beef with the Smithsonian. The American institution, largely funded by public tax dollars, has decided what information it will allow him - or anyone - to present to the public. Recently Col. North, on behalf of his Fox News series “War Stories”, went to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to get footage of the Enola Gay - the WWII airplane that dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan. To his surprise, he and his crew ran into such resistance from the museum that, in the end, it was impossible to get the material they needed for their documentary; this, in spite of the fact that the Smithsonian exists to preserve American history for us all.

Col. North commented that he received better cooperation from the Vietnamese government and Ho Chi Minh’s protegees.

It turns out that the Smithsonian has entered into a “secret” business deal with Showtime/Viacom, which gives the media company exclusive control over film and photos of historical treasures (our historical treasures) in over 150 of its museums. Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee (which oversees the Smithsonian), told Col. North, “This raises serious concerns about any contracts that the Smithsonian may have entered into that limit people’s contact with American treasures…”

Why should it matter that a media conglomerate controls access to the Smithsonian?

Find out Here