A profoundly important (to say nothing of disturbing) report on what may be the most dangerous corporation on planet earth, Monsanto. They are for all intents and purposes in the process of attempting to control the world’s food supply, and own the patents to the life that sustains agriculture itself.

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

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Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds have transformed the company and are radically altering global agriculture. So far, the company has produced G.M. seeds for soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton. Many more products have been developed or are in the pipeline, including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. The company is also seeking to extend its reach into milk production by marketing an artificial growth hormone for cows that increases their output, and it is taking aggressive steps to put those who don’t want to use growth hormone at a commercial disadvantage.

Even as the company is pushing its G.M. agenda, Monsanto is buying up conventional-seed companies. In 2005, Monsanto paid $1.4 billion for Seminis, which controlled 40 percent of the U.S. market for lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetable and fruit seeds. Two weeks later it announced the acquisition of the country’s third-largest cottonseed company, Emergent Genetics, for $300 million. It’s estimated that Monsanto seeds now account for 90 percent of the U.S. production of soybeans, which are used in food products beyond counting. Monsanto’s acquisitions have fueled explosive growth, transforming the St. Louis–based corporation into the largest seed company in the world.

Read this detailed expose’ from Vanity Fair

Now we are starting to get to the heart of the matter, starting to identify where that hole in the Death Star is….

At this point, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is basically a public menace.

Eli Lilly & Company’s rap sheet as a public menace is so long that for Lilly watchers to overcome the “banality-of-Lilly-sleaziness” phenomenon, the drug company must break some type of record measuring egregiousness. Lilly obliged earlier this year, receiving the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation.

Here’s the money shot line all should take note of bear in mind at all times…

If Americans are ever going to revoke the publicly granted charters of reckless, giant corporations — well within our rights – we might want to get the ball rolling with Lilly, whose recent actions appalled even the mainstream media. And with Lilly’s chums, the Bush family, out of power, now might be the right time.

On January 15, 2009, Lilly pled guilty to charges that it had illegally marketed its blockbuster drug Zyprexa for unapproved uses to children and the elderly, two populations especially vulnerable to its dangerous side effect. Lilly plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and agreed to pay $1.42 billion, which included $615 million to end the criminal investigation and approximately $800 million to settle the civil case.

One of the eight whistle-blowers in this case, former Lilly sales representative Robert Rudolph, says the settlement will not completely change Lilly’s business practices, and he wants jail time for executives. “You have to remember, with Zyprexa,” said Rudolph, “people lost their lives.”

Some of the commentary by readers of this article are good, as well.

If the corporation is a ‘person’, and said ‘person’ is convicted of murdering someone (as is the case here), then perhaps its time to apply the death penalty to that perpetrator.

Read the full article from AlterNet Here

UnCommon Sense TV - “Corporate Democracy & USA Inc.” What is a corporation and what is its role today? How was the American Revolution an anti-corporate revolt? How have corporations become such powerful, seemingly unaccountable entities, gaining such extraordinary control over our lives? The program looks at how the original controls over corporations established by our nation’s Founders have been gradually eroded over the years, and what types of effects this has had on the economic, political and cultural life in our country today.
Joining the discussion is special guest Rick Sahli, a veteran attorney working for over twenty years on behalf of the protection of environmental laws in the state of Ohio and against corporations that attempt to put profit above the public welfare. (http://home.columbus.rr.com/sahlilaw/)

Richard Grossman who helped found the POCLAD: Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy and does groundbreaking work with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, provides this important reminder in regards to how best to frame a political response to the degrading state of America’s economic (and thus political) solvency. Nail, meet hammer.

Sure, there are crooks out there. But the overwhelming majority of actions by corporate directors and managers that have created today’s messes have been legal.

Not only legal, but also widely regarded as necessary and essential to sustain the American Way of Life. To put food on our tables. To heat our homes. To provide jobs. To defend liberty and freedom …

Simply put: Giant business and financial corporations govern. The few who run them make the governing decisions that dictate people’s work, living conditions, health and the nature of our communities.

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Armed with “freedom of speech,” “due process,” “equal protection of the law,” the “commerce clause,” “the contracts clause,” and other constitutional powers, corporate directors and managers have been wielding the law to deny people’s most fundamental human rights.

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After the great savings and loan thefts, after the great WorldCom and Enron Corporation thefts - after every financial cataclysm of the past century - people have been assured that the problem was “greed and excess” ….

But after the Madoffs of every generation are all locked up, most of the corporate directors and managers who “legally” plunged the nation into these messes continue governing over the nation. They keep instructing people that the source of the nation’s problems is “greed and excesses,” and “crooks.” They keep spending the people’s money to set things right. And they keep writing We the People’s laws.

Read The Complete Article

Excellent overview by Michael Parenti on the ‘crisis of capitalism’ we are currently experiencing. What we are actually experiencing is much more in line with a crisis in democracy and democratic accountability for the decision making processes in our country, a point which Parenti hits on here.

A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy’s notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.

In the corporate world of “free-trade,” the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels. 

It is only in countries where capitalism has been reined in to some degree by social democracy that the populace has been able to secure a measure of prosperity; northern European nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark come to mind. But even in these social democracies popular gains are always at risk of being rolled back.

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In addition, there is the frequently overlooked self-destruction created by the moneyed players themselves. If left completely unsupervised, the more active command component of the financial system begins to devour less organized sources of wealth.

Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.

Some years later, in the United States, came the multi-billion-dollar plunder perpetrated by corporate conspirators at Enron, WorldCom, Harkin, Adelphia, and a dozen other major companies. Inside players like Ken Lay turned successful corporate enterprises into sheer wreckage, wiping out the jobs and life savings of thousands of employees in order to pocket billions.

These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.

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In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen. Its essence is the transformation of living nature into mountains of commodities and commodities into heaps of dead capital.  When left entirely to its own devices, capitalism foists its diseconomies and toxicity upon the general public and upon the natural environment–and eventually begins to devour itself.

The immense inequality in economic power that exists in our capitalist society translates into a formidable inequality of political power, which makes it all the more difficult to impose democratic regulations.

If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.

Read The Full Article

Now we’re talking. These folks are targeting the real bullseye on the issues at hand… so-called corporate ‘rights’. This is ground zero in the effort to bring real democratic accountability to our governing systems.

Today the citizens of Shapleigh, Maine voted at a special town meeting to pass a groundbreaking Rights-Based Ordinance, 114 for and 66 against. This revolutionary ordinance give its citizens the right to local self-governance and gives rights to ecosystems but denies the rights of personhood to corporations. This ordinance allows the citizens to protect their groundwater resources, putting it in a common trust to be used for the benefit of its residents.

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The right to water is a social justice issue and we believe that it should not be sold to those who can afford it, leaving the world’s poorest citizens thirsty. Citizens will do a much better job of protecting this resource than a for-profit corporation.

The multi-national corporation’s allegiance is never to the communities where they do business, as that could conflict with their fiduciary responsibility to make a profit for stockholders.

People throughout the country are saying “enough is enough, large corporations have too much power.” Constitutional Rights were granted to corporations from the bench in the 1800’s and it is time to rectify a wrong! People are saying let’s dismantle the neo-colonial corporate power by starting with their right to personhood.

Read the full article as well as watch video clips from the town hall meetings Here.

(An E-Mail to a Member of the Research Team at Goldman Sachs…)

Harry:

Thank you for the opportunity to be on your e-mail list. I appreciate your generosity and hard work.

I am writing to ask you to unsubscribe me from your list. I value your research reports. However, it would be hypocritical of me to accept them.

I believe in death penalties for private corporations and partnerships. My vote for one of the first to be executed is Goldman Sachs.

You and your colleagues have helped to build and manage a machinery that has committed treason and genocide on a breathtaking scale. The history of Goldman Sachs over the last two decades is living proof that it is possible to kill with a financial system and a pen.

The fact that you don’t understand what you and your colleagues are doing is breathtaking. It raises more than a few questions about whether you understand what is really behind the flow of funds you track and publish.

The question before us is who will pay the price of the mess that you and your colleagues have had such a significant hand in creating:

Who will lose their business and who will keep it?
Who will lose their job and who will keep it?
Who will lose their home and who will keep it?
Who will lose their reputation and who will not?
Who will lose their family and who will not?
Who will lose their health and who will not?
Who will lose their future and who will not?
Who will lose their life and who will not?
Who will lose their freedom and who will not?

My plan for bailing out the country would include asserting common law offsets against the assets of the NY Fed member banks and all of their partners and employees who benefited up to an amount sufficient to repay $4 trillion missing from the US government, to fund losses caused by the manipulation of the precious metals markets and to fund claims of fraudulent inducement and fraud on mortgages and mortgage securities. To fund the offsets, I would propose to seize the offshore and onshore assets of those who created the mortgage bubble and derivatives mess in the first place.

Frankly, I see no reason why millions of poor people around the world should pay a global tax through the dollar and US treasury and agency securities for which the American people are liable, so you and your colleagues can continue to live in comfort and luxury without concern that you will be held accountable to the same standards of enforcement applied to the people who live in the communities wrecked by the mortgage, money laundering and financial fraud that made you and your clients so powerful.

It seems to me if anyone should lose their business, jobs and home, it is you and your colleagues.

Sincerely Yours,
Catherine Austin Fitts

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Catherine Austin Fitts offers a unique perspective on the global financial system and on the political economy. Her background includes Managing Director and member of the Board of Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read & Co. Inc., Assistant Secretary of Housing - Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration and President of Hamilton Securities Group, a Washington DC investment bank. Catherine has designed and closed over $25 billion of transactions and investments to-date, has led portfolio strategy for $300 billion of financial assets and liabilities and has participated in the private and public workout and turn around of billions in mortgage, real estate and banking fraud.

Read the original email posting Here

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