Excellent and all-too-rare lucid commentary by Naomi Klein from a speech featured on Democracy Now! on the need for a truly effective democratic movement dedicated to more equitable global justice to have a strong sense of narrative envisioning a better future. This is well worth the read, as Klein provides both historical analysis and understanding as well as inspiration, describing why progressives today are overly and undeservedly demoralized by the current global political situation. She reiterates how the seeming defeats are not due to the vision being infeasible. The problem has been that those ideas and efforts have been repeatedly and violently crushed by reactionary opposition, such as we have seen in China, Pinochet’s Chile, today’s ‘war on terror’ repressions and elsewhere.

Read The Complete Transcript

This is one of the better editorial pieces I’ve seen in a major publication in awhile.

And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.

Good to see someone pointing out the fact that even though Marx and Marxist analysis is rather flawed in regards to some of its proposed remedies to the diseased social conditions that are, if not products of, then egregiously inflamed by the unbridled anarcho-capitalist system, he had some very important and prescient things to say in describing some of the more virulently negative aspects of that system.

…There is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich north. In just a few decades, we would use up the fossil fuels that took some 400 million years to accrete - and change the earth’s climate as a result. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more.

Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?

I would question the use of ‘capitalism’ at times here, whereas the more accurate term should be ‘consumerism’, or even perhaps ‘corporatism’, which to the article’s credit is pointed as well. The whole piece is a refreshingly lucid take on the fundamental problems facing our society today. The opening lines here may themselves qualify as the money shot lines in the whole article.

Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires.

Our multi-multi billions of dollars advertising industry at work.

Read The Full Article

Regardless of the seemingly provocative nature of the headline (after all, the Abolitionists and the Suffragists, for instance, were ‘defying’ the Constitution through their work as well), this is certainly one way of approaching the core issue of the complete corporatization of our politics and culture. Simply make the participation of these fictional entities in our politics illegal, just like the original American revolutionaries intended (and which was one of the major purposes of the American Revolution).

More than 100 largely Republican municipalities have passed laws to abolish the constitutional rights of corporations, inventing what some critics are calling a “radical” new kind of environmental activism. Led by the nonprofit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, they are attempting to jumpstart a national movement, with CELDF chapters in at least 23 states actively promoting an agenda of “disobedient lawmaking.”

It would be more appropriate to refer to the actions of those described here in this article who are resisting corporate colonization of their communities as defying not so much the Constitution as much as the corporate-supported legal interpretations of the Constitution. After all, the word ‘corporation’ is not to be found anywhere in the text at all, yet a long history of the work of highly-paid lawyers serving these fictional entities seems to have been able to arrange for our modern legal system to behave like it was written entirely for their benefit.

A commentary posting to the article by David Lewit does a good job of making some important points along these lines as well….

Thanks, Channing, for writing up environmental defense with local folks taking responsibility to drive out the chief offenders—corporate dumpers. But aren’t you going a bit overboard by saying, in your opening line, that citizens are “declaring the Constitution null and void”? It was not the Constitution that gave corporations the rights of persons, but rather a clerk of the Supreme Court who in 1886 wrote the introduction to the Court’s ruling in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. He identified the Company as a legal person, and the Justices let that stand as they nullified a law that took corporate property without “due process of law”, as if the corporation were a person protected by the Fifth Amendment. And thereafter corporations used the “personhood” argument and courts thereby often ruled in their favor. The Constitution never defined “person” in that way, and never uses the concept or word “corporation”.

The money shot line from this piece, and from the whole thrust of the work of CELDF and all rights-based organizing, comes from historian Richard Grossman (who has a number of postings you can find here on USTV Media)….

Abolitionists in the early 19th century could “have ended up demanding a slavery protection agency ˜ you know, the equivalent of today’s Environmental Protection Agency ˜ to make slaves’ conditions a little less bad,” Mr. Grossman said in a 2000 speech comparing corporations to slave owners. Instead, “they denounced the Constitution” which permitted slavery at the time “and openly violated federal and state laws by aiding runaway slaves.”

Just as judges and juries slowly changed their minds about the slave trade, Mr. Grossman said, today’s public eventually will come to see corporations in a different light.

Through decades of work, abolitionists “built a political movement, with the clout to get their three constitutional amendments enacted,” he added, referring to the 13th through 15th amendments.

As someone who has participated in a number of the Democracy Schools, I highly recommend them for anyone and everyone interested in expanding one’s understanding of the situation we are confronting in the ongoing struggle for a more just and responsibly democratic world, and for providing a new range of insightful and necessary tactics in that struggle.

Read The Complete Article

Find out more about the work of CELDF and the Democracy Schools.

This article is rather good. A beginning of a broader public discussion, one would hope. The discussion of corporations as tools for minority rule must become as prevalent in society over the next decade or two as slavery and abolition (and I mean in the vein of Garrison’s “immediatism”) became before the US Civil War.

I think the discussion must become “popularized”, even in the corporate press, but by that I do not mean it will be at all helpful for it to become co-opted by “reformers” who think minority rule will be dealt with sufficiently by an amendment or two, or through “market campaigns” that have reformers negotiating concessions from corporate boards of directors “on behalf of the People.” Let us radicalize everything. That is, let us get to the “root” (the “radish” in “radical”) and define “democracy,” as this article nicely reports was done, as Rule by the People. To rule is not to vote. To rule is not to “regulate” what others have determined you must abide. To Rule is not to have anyone secretly negotiate concessions from corporate minorities, who will thence continue to Rule and Decide and Govern…and rescind concessions at-will. To Rule is to decide. To Rule in a democracy is to self-govern in a community of the living.

Hopefully there will be generated more valuable public conversations on very “radical” notions. The work ahead is massive. The opposition is powerful. The People are still drowsy with enculturated lethargy. The stakes are enormous.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

Is there any space left which is left unaffected by the kudzu of advertising? This is par for the course in the continued de-evolution of our civic society from one of the public commons to that of the privatized corporate state, where everything (including the genetic code of life itself) is for sale.

Drivers crossing the George Washington Bridge must contend with 18-wheelers, infuriating delays and noxious exhaust. Soon, they will also have advertisements from Geico. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is expected to announce an arrangement with Geico, the auto insurance giant, that will include the posting of a huge billboard on top of the toll plaza in Fort Lee, N.J., that says “Geico Drive Safely.” Drivers will also see Geico signs with the company’s mascot, a gecko, on the tollbooths and electronic signs on the approach roads. Geico’s message will also be integrated into the Port Authority’s direct mailings and its Web site, and costumed gecko mascots will appear at Port Authority bus stations. . .

Geico is not the first company to think about buying a bridge - or at least the advertising rights to one. And other public agencies have been exploring unconventional ways to bring in more money, even if it means toying with long-held taboos about commercializing public spaces. The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, for instance, is exploring how to sell sponsorships in San Francisco. . .

“This is more than just eyeballs; it’s about reinforcing a message about a bridge that people have an endearing feeling to,” said Drew Sheinman, chief executive of Axcess Partners Worldwide, a marketing company hired by the Port Authority to develop new advertising. . .

The new signs could irritate drivers who view their cars as a refuge from media messages, as well as preservationists who see the bridge, a landmark, as unfit for commercial advertisements - even if they appear only on the tollbooths. . .

Read the rest of the article Here, originally published in The New York Times

Private capital using the power of the state in order to pursue it’s own business agenda. Though this crosses all political lines, it is an area where those on the right of the American political spectrum have been particularly misled. They have spent so many decades trumpeting private power over the role of the ‘evil government’, that so many of them (too many) are now at a loss as to how to deal with the fact that private power has now ascended to sovereign control over the government. A government that is supposed to be of, by and for the people, but is now of, by and for the governing minority elites, usually organized around wielding power through the dominate institutions of our time, the corporation. Private power now uses government in a way that is designed to do nothing but confer privilege on insiders. The very characteristic that was the prime animus behind the drive for the war of Independence in the 1770’s.

The U.S. Constitution states, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The big bench wrongly ruled that “public use” could be whatever states want it to be — including private developments designed to expand the tax base. The ruling allowed the City of New London, Conn., to seize the land under Susette Kelo’s “little pink cottage” and hand it over to a private developer for a development featuring high-end waterfront homes.

———–

“The Kelo court said that any private use — like a hotel or big box store — that generates the public benefit of tax revenue could be a ‘public use,’ ” [Rep. Maxine] Waters noted. Like the Institute for Justice, she sees the unholy alliances that Kelo engenders — and the likelihood that tax-hungry governments will allow low-income homes to be leveled to make room for pricier projects.

As former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who dissented on Kelo, warned, “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.” Another dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, “Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.”

———–

No government should be able to take your land to give it to a corporation. As Susette Kelo noted Thursday, “Our federal tax dollars shouldn’t be used to take away our homes and businesses so that developers can build shopping malls and condominiums.”

Citizens have an interest in a system that allows governments to take property — at a just price — for public projects. But when states and cities, in search of a richer tax base, can take your land and give it to a private developer — they have license to trample on everyone’s rights. And no one, except the very rich, is safe.

Actually this is a melding of both the ignorance of the right and left, coming together in a witch’s stew of overreaching government authority combined with unaccountable private power.

Can anyone still question the reality that we live in a corporate state?

Read The Full Article from The San Francisco Chronicle

How can we change the whole basis for American corporate-based society, when so many perceive it as the source of their financial and material stability and comfort?

We can anticipate that the first question in some reformers minds will be: “Can we presume to alter society so fundamentally, and risk depriving people of this sense of stability and comfort?”

If this weighty question blocks us from proceeding, it will be at the cost of the planet, not to mention that valued but vulnerable stability and temporary comfort. But I recognize that it is not enough to make this assertion. How do we change perceptions of the problem, so that the many, who have no choice in current privileged minority decision-making process under the corporate state, see that their stability and comfort come at a cost they are no longer willing to pay?

To ask it more pointedly: how can we strategically create a People’s Movement that rejects the usurpations of a corporate state, even at risk of stability and comfort?

At Democracy School we spend insufficient time considering how People’s Movements of the past succeeded in driving their values into lore and law. It has been immensely helpful to me to study not just the history, but the tactical, strategic and personal stories of Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was often accused of being a radical, who asked for too much too fast. He identified himself as an “immediatist,” who demanded no delay in ending slavery, no “reforms,” but only immediate abolition.

In terms of strategy, many historians criticize the Garrisonian Abolitionists. They called not only for immediate emancipation, but also for equality of the sexes, an end to capital punishment, and other steps to perfect society. It was all too much for conservative “reformers” of the day, and for chroniclers of the time, who were fine with Abolition, but who saw the rest of Garrison’s causes as threatening the stability of society, and in particular the conservative Christian sects that found biblical justification for the oppressions identified by the other causes.

Aileen Kraditor, in her book “Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850″ makes a compelling argument that, without asking for the whole ball of wax, Garrison would not have succeeded in moving northern white supremacists to the cause of emancipation. Why? Because it was necessary to create what today we might call “cognitive dissonance” between what it meant to be a Christian and what the average “Christian” was willing to stand up for. If slavery was working just fine for the average American who was satisfied with the stability and comfort life afforded under the slave state (Abolitionsim in the 1830’s - 1840’s was extremely unpopular), then it would be necessary to create a disconnect between what people believed they believed and what they experience daily, between their self image and their real world.

In terms of current organizing, we may or may not want to or be able to target the conservative clergy, move heaven and earth and split them from their congregations by setting up “cognitive dissonance” between what believers believe they stand for and what they experience. On the other hand, causing the average American to value fundamental rights more highly than her or his automobile, 401K plan and mortgage may seem like an even larger Herculean task. But the Garrisonian parallel is worth considering. Americans have deep-rooted beliefs in the legend and mythos of “America.” Making visible the disconnect between those ideals and the structure of law that sustains and nourishes the corporate state: that seems to be the direction laid out before us.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

Here’s more on AT&T’s continued efforts to bludgeon those communities in Illinois for daring to resist them. This is important information for any and all citizens concerned about local governance rights, preservation of their rights-of-ways and resistance to the use of eminent domain by private corporations. Readers in Ohio, take notice. This is Ohio Senate Bill SB 117 in another guise.

Promising increased competition and consumer advocacy, AT&T is investing $4.6 billion in a national move into the cable industry, yet many area municipalities have accused the telecommunications giant of pursuing anything but fair competition.

————-

…While AT&T blames the system, many municipalities state that it was not the system itself that caused negotiations to stall, but rather AT&T’s insistence in not considering itself bound by the rules of cable franchise agreements.

“They say that they are not a ‘cable’ franchise,” said Terry Miller, senior assistant attorney for the city of Naperville. “We have not been able to agree with them because they want to follow a different set of rules.”

————-

However, during the negotiations, city officials found too many discrepancies that they could not come to terms with, primarily that AT&T would not guarantee universal coverage of its services, said Terry, placing it on a scale different from already competing entities in the municipality.

“You can’t cherry pick customers,” said Miller. “How do you compete fairly when someone who says they will service everybody goes up against someone who doesn’t have to?

“It is not a small issue if you say that you aren’t going to service everyone. And if we were going to be a blueprint for other areas we could not let that pass with a clear conscience.”

————-

Comcast released a statement saying that “If AT&T wanted to provide video to all customers today, there is nothing preventing them from doing so. Instead, they are seeking special rules that will apply only to them since they don’t want to be held accountable for problems with their proposed cable service.”

Another problem that arose during negotiations with numerous municipalities was public right-of-way laws. AT&T’s new service would require that a cable box be established for every 300 users. The boxes are 63 inches high, 48 wide, and 25 deep and must be stationed on concrete.

————-

“The current bill says that we can control permits, but it does not state that we can tell AT&T ‘no,’” said Miller. “If they want to put one of their boxes in the middle of someone’s lawn, there is no way for us to say ‘no.’”

Read The Full Article

There’s finally a Legislative Reference Service bill analysis posted for Senate Bill 117, AT&T’s bill to eliminate local cable franchising in Ohio. The bill substitutes a state-issued “Video Service Authorization”, or “VSA”, for local cable TV franchises. The LRS analysis says in paragraph four:

“a VSA confers on a person the authority to (1) provide video service in the video service area specified in its application, (2) construct and operate a video service network in, along, across, or on public rights-of-way, and (3) when necessary to provide the service, appropriate private property.”

If AT&T (in its capacity as a state-rubber-stamped VSA) should decide that it needs a piece of your yard to provide U-Verse video to your neighbors, your only recourse will be a court of law. Your local government will have no authority at all in the matter; and the state Commerce Department, which will issue the VSA, “has no authority to regulate video service rates, terms, or conditions of service”.

Read The Original Post on DaytonPolitics.com

This pretty much nails it in regards to the hypocrisy of the GOP in regards to their ’small government’ and ‘local authority’ principles, as well defining what indeed that party has become…simply the political arm of corporate interests in America today.

So why is the supposedly “conservative” GOP that controls the General Assembly pushing such a bill? Because in the final analysis the GOP has become the corporate party of American politics. Conservative values are fine as long as they don’t interfere with what private corporations want, but if such a conflict happens, then corporate interests will win out almost everytime.

Read The Full Post