This is one of the best, most concise, explanations I’ve ever read on how Wall Street banking firms are controlling the economy. Ellen Hodgson Brown describes an ongoing drama between Wall Street and Washington that gets next to zero coverage in the corporate press, and lays lie to the ongoing mythology of the “free market” that continues to intoxicate our nation’s prevailing political orthodoxy.

We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Geithner/Rubin). Left strewn on the battleground could be your pension fund and 401K.

The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that US politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.

Read The Article

Here’s an additional gem to help drive the point forward…
JPMorgan Chase Aided and Abetted a $250 million Ponzi Scheme

Thomas Linzey, who co-wrote this article, does some great work with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and the Democracy Schools. I would definitely recommend anyone and everyone interested in furthering one’s understanding of how and why we have reached this current situation in our nation’s political environment, and what are some of the ways people can organize to address it.

The expansion of corporate rights and privileges under the law has been deliberate, beginning nearly two hundred years ago with the Dartmouth decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that private corporations had rights that municipal corporations—governments composed of “we the people”—did not.

For the past two centuries, new court decisions have only expanded corporate rights and privileges.  For those who think that the way to stem this tide is to find the perfect lawsuit, stop looking. It doesn’t exist, for there is no magic bullet.

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Today’s structure of law gives corporations a spectrum of legal and constitutional rights which they routinely wield against people, communities, and nature. Corporations have more rights, for example, than the communities in which they seek to do business. They can and do use those rights to lobby Congress, impact elections, and to decide for us what we eat, whether mountaintops are blown off or not, whether there are fish in the oceans, and on and on. Their constitutional and other legal rights, together with their wealth , guarantee that they can define the debates that lead to the adoption of new laws—and often write the laws themselves.

Thus the context for understanding today’s decision is that we have a minority set of corporate interests, empowered by government to wield their rights against a majority. It is the history of this nation. The abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement all built movements of people in order to drive rights (for slaves, for women, for African Americans) into law—which necessarily meant eliminating rights for a minority, such as the slaveholder. In the end, it is our constitutional structure of law that purposefully places the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities, and nature. History shows that strong peoples’ movements can make change by changing the legal structure itself.

Read the rest of this article from YES! Magazine, and go to www.celdf.org for more information on how to organize in your local community.

Great to see this issue get such direct reference and dissection via a national media platform. It is unfortunately becoming of even more relevance these days, what with the Supreme Court ruling giving corporations nearly unlimited carte blanche rights to purchase the American political process.

“Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.”

Watch The Video on the Colbert Nation website.

Sunday talk show pundit and syndicated columnist George Will outdoes himself with this stellar performance in the service of the governing (and owning…same thing) elites of America.

“Now, some people are saying, oh, corporations, that means Microsoft will be buying ads. Microsoft’s trying to sell software. They’re not interested in getting into political fights.”

Well, in a way he’s right. Corporations have no interest in political fights, the same way mob families would prefer not to have to wage war against each other, as it is detrimental to business. And after all, as a colleague of mine pointed out, there’s no need to fight over someone you already own. And campaign donations don’t necessarily determine votes, they just determine, in the end, who gets to cast them. You don’t need to bribe ideological and economic allies. We are replete in data showing how in the near unanimous majority of time, those who spend the most within a campaign cycle attain the office. As the adage goes, we don’t have elections, we have auctions.

George Will’s assertion is not only blatantly disprovable, but is desperately at odds with basic common sense. However, he does reveal, whether inadvertently or not, one basic truth here…

“[The Supreme Court decision is a vindication of free speech rights] because the court recognized the obvious, which is that you cannot disseminate political speech without money. And, therefore, to restrict money is to restrict the dissemination of speech. To that end, they have freed up the amount of money that will be spent.”

Yes, in our society money is indeed, speech, and so we live with a political system inherently undemocratic, and one in which those with the most money get the most speech, in both quantity as well as, and possibly more importantly, volume.

Watch/Read The Full Video Transcript

Perhaps ABC and Mr. Will should consider including some more lucid and informed perspectives on the issues such as these, before they continue to blather on with their platitudes towards the “market of ideas” in our political arena.

Spot on analysis from Ruth Marcus…

In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.

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“If it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more,” a wise judge once wrote. That was Chief Justice John Roberts—back when—and dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens rightly turned that line against him. 

As bad as the court’s activism, though, was its shoddy scholarship. 

First, the majority flung about dark warnings of “censorship” and “banned” speech as if upholding the existing rules would leave corporations and labor unions with no voice in the political process. Untrue. Under federal election law before the Supreme Court demolished it, corporations and labor unions were free to say whatever they wanted about political candidates whenever they wanted to say it. They simply were not permitted to use unlimited general treasury funds to do so. Instead, they were required to use money raised by their political action committees from employees and members. This is hardly banning speech.

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The “conceit” of corporate personhood, as Stevens called it, does not mandate absolute equivalence. That corporations enjoy free speech protections does not mean they enjoy every protection afforded an actual person. Is a corporation entitled to vote? To run for office?

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Fourth, the majority bizarrely invoked the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” defense. Under the Austin ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy argued, lawmakers unhappy with being lampooned in the movie “could have done more than discourage its distribution—they could have banned the film.” Beyond untrue. There is no scenario under which works of art about fictional lawmakers could be limited by campaign finance laws. 

That the majority would stoop to this claim underscores the weakness of its case—and the audacity of the result it has inflicted on the political process.

Read The Full Report

A video on the Supreme Court ruling granting corporations unfettered access to our political system, and for organizing a movement for a Constitutional amendment to counter the egregious growth of corporate dominance over our political system.

New Coalition Responds to Citizens United Decision with a Call to Amend the U.S. Constitution to Overrule the Supreme Court’s Activist Expansion of Corporate “Rights”

Contact: (202) 642-1848 or additional coalition contacts below
www.MovetoAmend.org

Washington, DC - After justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate “rights” in the Citizens United case, a new national coalition of diverse public interest, community, and business organizations responded with a bold call to overrule the decision and amend the Constitution to restore the power of people over corporations, beyond election law. A complete list of the “Move to Amend” Steering Committee is attached; and a list of other groups and people who have endorsed this new campaign is available at the coalition’s new website:

“This decision was Pearl Harbor for American democracy,” said Ben Manski, Executive Director of Liberty Tree and a lawyer helping to lead the coalition. “Decades of judicial activism culminating in today’s decision have eroded the power of ‘We the People’ to govern ourselves and so our move to amend the Constitution is not limited to the powers of the Federal Election Commission but focuses on the broader implications of the decision.”

“We are inspired by historic social movements that recognized the necessity of altering fundamental power relationships,” added Riki Ott, the Director of Ultimate Civics and a marine toxicologist whose activism was galvanized by the Exxon Valdez spill. “America has progressed through ordinary people joining together-from the Revolutionaries to Abolitionists, Suffragists, Trade Unionists, and Civil Rights activists through to today.”

“In this decision, a handful of unelected judges have revealed their agenda to expand the influence of corporations at the expense of the rights of individuals, and it will not stand the test of time,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and former Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and Deputy Assistant Attorney General. “Corporations aren’t people and simply don’t deserve the same rights as people; we have to work together to put people before corporations.”

“The movement we are launching is a long-term effort to make the U.S. Constitution more democratic,” noted David Cobb, the Director of the Program on Corporations Law & Democracy and an attorney helping to lead the coalition. “We are a diverse coalition with deep roots in communities nationwide. We recognize that amending the Constitution to restore the power of the people over corporations will not be easy, but we know correcting the Supreme Court is imperative to the progress of our nation.”

SIGN THE MOTION HERE:
http://www.MovetoAmend.org

Exxon. AIG. Enron. Blackwater. Edison. Halliburton. Diebold.

They’ve gone after our tax dollars. Our services. Our jobs. Our schools. Our military. Our votes. Our future. Our freedoms. And the federal courts have helped them every step of the way.

Today, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government.

Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

~~~ We Move to Amend ~~~

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

- Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
- Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
- Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

SIGN THE MOTION HERE:
http://www.MovetoAmend.org

Ben Manski, Liberty Tree (www.libertytree.org), (202) 642-1848, Manski@LibertyTreeFDR.org

Riki Ott, PhD, Ultimate Civics (www.ultimatecivics.org), (907) 424-3915, otter2@ak.net

Lisa Graves, Center for Media and Democracy (www.prwatch.org), (608) 260-9713, lisa@prwatch.org

David Cobb, Program on Corporations Law & Democracy (www.poclad.org), (707) 362-0333, david@duhc.org

George Friday, National Director of Independent Progressive Politics Network (www.ippn.org) (862) 668-8172, ippn@igc.org

Greg Coleridge, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (www.afsc.net) (330) 928-2301, gcoleridge@afsc.org

Marybeth Gardam, Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Corporations vs. Democracy Committee Leadership Team (www.wilpf.org), (515) 210-7928, mbgardam@gmail.com

Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (www.duhc.org) (707) 269-0984, kaitlin@duhc.org

Nancy Price, Alliance for Democracy (www.thealliancefordemocracy.org) (781) 894-1179 or (530) 758-0726, nancytprice@juno.com

David Swanson, After Downing Street, (202) 329-7847, david@davidswanson.org

Jeff Milchen, ReclaimDemocracy.org, 406-582-122, Jeff@ReclaimDemocracy.org

How many more times does this have to be explained?

The real central message in the film [”Capitalism: A Love Story”], and the one we should all be sharing around on Facebook, is that democracy and capitalism are NOT the same thing. We have suffered for the past eight years under a president led by a spin-master who purposely tried to define American Democracy as run-amok corporate capitalism. “Liberty” to Bush meant chasing down Saddam Hussein in a spider hole. “Freedom” meant allowing a private corporate contractor, Halliburton, to rape and plunder and make off with Saddam’s gold.

It may seem like a cheap trick, but when Moore goes to the US Capitol and searches the original copy of the Constitution for any mention of words associated with capitalism, and can’t find them, that is an essential message that ought to be taught in our elementary schools.

Here’s where Moore falls short, and where I hope to remedy our dialogue in a documentary of my own in the not too distant future. American democracy was conceived in a revolution designed to fight monarchy and what writers such as Thomas Paine then called “mercantalism,” the monopolies of the British tea companies and such.

In other words , the original dream for America was an egalitarian society with a strong middle class, not so much ruling elites and peasants. That’s what most of the people came to these shores from Europe to escape. But that is back where we find ourselves after eight years of Bush, who ran the country like a king in charge of a multi-national company led by a pope.

Public enemy number one in some ways might very well be the government, when Republicans are in charge at least, but the real public enemy number one in this land of the not so free anymore are the mega-corporations. That’s what people need to begin to realize.

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After the movie, I met a restaurateur right down the street who was raised in Trussville, and would tend to be a political conservative because of it, but he gave me some hope about the folks around here when he said he would go see the movie, mainly because he is concerned about what happened to the bailout money. He also feels screwed as a small businessman by certain corporate interests, including insurance companies and Alabama Power, which has a monopoly on the electricity business in these parts - and a government-guaranteed profit margin.

“I’m paying a $3,500 a month power bill,” he said, a rate based not on his power usage, but by the previous tenant in the building. When he asked them to actually read his meter and charge him each month for power he actually uses, they basically laughed at him, he said, and gave him the run-around.

Sometimes, in other words, corporate bureaucracy is worse than government bureaucracy. Sometimes, as in the case of Southern Company, which is supposed to be a quasi-government entity anyway, what you have is both. They basically run it like a corporation, but it runs the government. In the case of domestic spying and AT&T, at least according to some courts, the phone company is considered part of the government .

Read The Full Article

For additional perspective on this, here Steve Fraser writes on The Crisis of Capitalism

On a day America honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., this is one of his speeches most likely not to be quoted or referenced by our politicos or by many, if any, members of the punditocracy.

Delivered in NYC on April 4, 1967, King delivers a cogent analysis as to our responsibility as citizens of a nation which plays the role that it does in the world, and our responsibility as Americans for how war skews the values which become emphasized in our a political and economic system. It becomes ever-more obvious as to its modern relevancy with the ever-expanding military budgets our nation continues to incur in the face of economic break down, and ever-increasing disparities in wealth and opportunity between our haves and growing numbers of have-nots.

Read the full transcript of this lucid and unfortunately still all-too-relevant speech.

As a related video, here’s Martin Luther King, Jr. On War