This is a remarkable piece of journalism from Mark Ames via AlterNet and Naked Capitalism. This is today’s must read, although I take exception to the call-to-arms in the last paragraph. Before going that far, I would wait for the courts to weigh in on the illegal foreclosure story sent out earlier. But this new story does help one understand how Michael McLendon came to see things differently.

Strangely enough, there was almost no media coverage of the occupation — you had to rely on various right-wing outlets like CNSNews.com, whose article I blogged at the time , or the left-wing Democratic Underground.

But what even the right-wing anti-government people won’t report is the true reason why the Army was called out in the first place, something that goes right back to the cause of the shooting rampage: billionaire exploitation of the local Alabamans, not just by the chicken oligarch, but from higher up the predator food chain — Wall Street banking behemoth JP Morgan Chase.

That’s because the right-wing would have to come face-to-face with the ramifications of their ideology, and how the metastasizing of private power isn’t in spite of it, its because of it. The chickens (pardon the pun in this case) coming home to roost.

That meant squeezing lower-middle-class workers for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim’s case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim’s Pride accusing it of grossly undercompensating its employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim’s Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.

There’s a novel idea. Just call them “communists” in the reich-wing media and then ignore them and all will be well.

- A Post From leftofdayton.net

This is an interesting development. Though there is no chance under the current reign of Supremes now inhabiting the court to actually seriously address this, we can only hope it is the start of some actual acknowledgment of the reality of the situation to take hold within the legal establishment, Stare Decisis be damned.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges “created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said. “There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”

Damn right it can be argued, and has been quite eloquently on countless occasions, for those who have had the opportunity to hear.

Even conservatives sometimes have been skeptical of corporate rights. Then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist dissented in 1979 from a decision voiding Massachusetts’s restriction of corporate political spending on referendums. Since corporations receive special legal and tax benefits, “it might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere,” he wrote.

On today’s court, the direction Justice Sotomayor suggested is unlikely to prevail. During arguments, the court’s conservative justices seem to view corporate political spending as beneficial to the democratic process. “Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said during arguments last week.

…Justice Sotomayor may have found a like mind in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights,” Justice Ginsburg said, evoking the Declaration of Independence.

Read The Complete Article

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

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