(Interesting. A little glimpse inside the Festung Corporatia, courtesy the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. Many of these are basic truisms for any ‘team’ in competitive combat. - Andy Valeri, USTV Media)

Success Story: Michigan Chamber Political Action Committee
One of the nation’s most successful business political action committees is managed by Robert S. LaBrant, Sr. VP for Political Affairs and Legal Counsel, Michigan Chamber of Commerce. Here are the ten maxims that he shared with the NCFREE Annual Meeting audience:

Maxim #1: Most business PACs don’t play to win. They play not to lose.
Watchers: Most business PACs are “Snack PACs” or “Pal PACS” who commit their dollars to sure winners and buy tickets to all of the fundraisers.
Doers: Doers put PAC dollars in Open seats, Marginal Incumbents and Challengers. They get involved in primaries, make independent expenditures and create issue ads.

Maxim #2: Political Action is a demand-side enterprise, with more demand than the supply of PAC funds available. Adopt a disciplined PAC budgeting strategy. (NOTE: Here is a sample budgeting strategy for PAC $: 40% to Incumbent Allies who need help; 30% to New Allies in winnable Challenge races; 20% to New Allies in winnable Open Seat races; 10% contingency for unanticipated opportunities.)

Maxim #3: Endorsement process should be based on set of written criteria and procedures.

Maxim #4: The difference between a PAC program of excellence or mediocrity is often the willingness to take risk. There is a difference between being a risk-taker and being reckless. Willingness to take risks is often dependent on who serves on your PAC board. Michigan Chamber PAC Board is ten Past Chairs (all company CEOs).

Maxim #5: Pay attention to campaign finance and election laws. Why would you let Common Cause write the rules of the game that you have to play under?

Maxim #6: Play the campaign finance arena aggressively. File complaints, request declaratory rulings, litigate if necessary.

Maxim #7: Recognize that business has political opponents: unions and trial lawyers.

Maxim #8: Work to de-fund the opposition.

Maxim #9: Need an Issue Advocacy Component. Issue advocacy allows you to raise funds for independent advertising. (An example from this election cycle is FairJudges.Net, chaired by former NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Burley Mitchell, a fund that ran ads in favor of four supreme court candidates.)

Maxim #10: Business Advocacy is more than lobbying the legislature. If your state elects Supreme Court Justices, you should be involved… trial lawyers certainly will.

The NY Times Co. reports on an Ohio Supreme Court decision that merits a moment’s attention. Here’s the lead…

“The Ohio Supreme Court upheld a KFC (sic - rg) franchise’s position to deny workers’ compensation payments to a teenage boy who was severely burned while cleaning a pressure cooker, raising questions from lawyers and the dissenting judges about the basis no-fault tenet of the state’s workers’ compensation.

“The majority in the 5-to-2 decision on Wednesday accepted the argument by the restaurant owner that the boy, David M. Gross, then 16, had voluntarily abandoned his job when he ignored repeated warnings not to boil water in the cooker to clean it. That meant that he was not entitled to workers’ compensation payments because he no longer had a job when he was injured, the ruling said.”

OK. So here’s my perspective on this current event:

Judicial lawmaking of the 19th Century demolished the intentions of those who wrote and enacted the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution.

The drafters of these amendments had sought to clothe freed slaves and all other human persons with fundamental rights. Their amendments gave to the United States of America, and all its governmental arms, including and especially the judiciary, the clear and solemn responsibility to enforce and vindicate those fundamental rights. But this was not to be: see, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in The Civil Rights Cases (1883): the majority opinion by Mr Justice Bradley, and the lone dissenting opinion by Mr Justice Harlan. Among other things, Justice Harlan, referring to Justice Bradley’s decision, observed: ‘I cannot resist the conclusion that the substance and spirit of the recent amendments to the Constitution have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism.’

Over a century later, it is difficult to grok how the federal courts in general — and the Supreme Court in particular — was able to use mere words to defeat the purpose of the Civil War Amendments, while they were simultaneously employing other mere words to wrap the 14th and much of the Constitution around property and men of property. One technique was to concoct the legal fiction that state officials who violated people’s rights, and who failed to protect and defend people’s rights, ceased being state officials because a proper state official would never/could never act in such manner, because such improper behavior had not been authorized. In other words, the courts ruled that state officials ceased being state officials, and therefore ceased being subject to the 14th Amendment, as soon as they acted inappropriately or failed to act appropriately.

Yesterday, the Ohio Supreme Court showed how such verbal and substantial legerdemain can be accomplished in this our own age of Endless War on Terror, YouTube, hybrid motor vehicles, cyberspace, cloned sheep and astounding bonuses galore flooding so-called private equity firms that hardly anyone has ever heard about.

A Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation corporate franchise owner argued to the Ohio Supreme Court justices that a 16 year old young man it had hired and, presumably, trained and supervised, simply ceased to be an employee of the corporation just prior to the moment when he burned himself and others while trying to clean a cooker. In other words, the franchise owner instructed the justices that at the nanosecond when its employee-in-good-standing caused the accident which harmed himself and fellow workers, his employment with the franchise corporation SHAZZAM! officially terminated. Presumably, no employee worth his fried chicken-ness would or could ever do anything wrong or against the rules. To the Ohio Supreme Court — not to mention God and Mother Nature — this was self-evident.

“Because the young man brought the severe burns upon himself,” argued the corporate franchise owner, the Buckeye State must deny him workers’ compensation payments. While it is true that the Ohio workers’ comp system is alleged to be based upon ‘no fault’ principles, the attorney for the franchise corporation asserted to the justices: “No Fault, No Schmault.”

The attorney continued: ‘Who but the corporation should know best exactly when our employee ceases to be our employee? After all, we know when our chickens cease to be chickens…or that they are not even chickens in the first place. So what’s the difference?’

The 5 justice majority of the Ohio Supreme Court diligently pondered the evidence. They sifted and winnowed all presentations of the plaintiff and defendant. Then, they meticulously outlined the corporate franchise’s argument and declared: ‘DITTO! DITTO! DITTO! Of Course we agree with the fried chicken corporation’s contention!’

The two court dissenters, while well-intentioned, wrote off-the-point dissents. Mr Ty Pine, the head of the Ohio Chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business — a non-profit cultural whip-and-chain corporation funded by business corporations across the country to spread disinfectant everywhere — got the last words: ‘We think it is an appropriate decision that keeps intact the integrity of the system.’

Indeed, the New York Times Co.. rag ends its article with two paragraphs expressing the feelings and emotions of Mr. Ty Pine in detail.

I’ll end by expressing admiration for the creativity and ingenuity taught in nation’s law schools which, in era after era, has ensured that even in the most complex of cases special privilege ruleth not over our courts.

Rather, as is chiseled in stone at the US Supreme Court building in the nation’s capital, in these United States we enjoy “Equal Justice Under Law” — and this includes justice for David M. Gross, 16 years of age, x-employee.

- Richard Grossman, CELDF

Many Ohioans have been rankled by the recent overturning of municipal home rule powers by the Ohio legislature—which recently adopted laws that nullify municipal laws banning assault weapons and prohibiting predatory lending practices by banks and mortgage companies. The growing wave of resentment toward the legislature frames these bills as attacks on Home Rule powers. Cities are now hiring lawyers to challenge the authority of the legislature to override home rule.

Other Ohioans, however, are focused on what seems to be the underlying root problem: how to stop gun manufacturers and mortgage and lending corporations from using the state legislature to pass diluted state laws that replace restrictive municipal laws. Many Ohioans understand that under current law, these corporations routinely exercise the rights of “persons,” which give them the constitutionally protected “right” to lobby the legislature, create political action committees, and dump massive amounts of money into the political process. They understand that laws like the recent preemptive bills (assault weapons, H.B. 347; predatory lending H.B. 386) are not the result of an objective legislative process, but are, instead, written by the very corporations affected by the laws.

Thus, the current gun legislation coming out of Columbus did not begin at the state capital. It began with the gun manufacturing companies, and their political shill, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which is also a corporation. Of the 80 local ordinances currently in effect across Ohio, bans on assault weapons exist in Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo. Dayton’s law bans the sale of assault weapons. Smaller municipalities’ laws restrict registration and prohibit gun dealers locating near schools. The state law, however, overturns the ban and replaces it with mere regulation of gun sales and use.

The State legislature’s approach to eviscerating municipal “anti-predatory lending laws” begins and ends at the same point. In 2001, the City of Dayton passed a local law banning predatory lending within the City. The state law nullifies the ban and instead, institutes a measure that shields lending institutions from citizens subject to predatory lending practices. Why should known predatory lending corporations be allowed to scam Ohioans at all? Whose interests does this bill advance—the people, or the lending corporations?

The question many Ohioans are left trying to answer is why corporations seem to have greater rights than the citizens of Ohio. In asking that question, they’re joining citizens across the United States who have watched as their own rights to self-government are routinely trumped by corporations using their own state legislatures against them.

Answering that question requires exploring the history of state and federal court rulings that have bestowed the constitutional rights of “persons” onto corporations. Today, as illogical as it may sound, corporations assert all of the Bill of Rights that American Revolutionaries fought, bled, and died for, from the Lexington Green to Concord. What that means today is that corporations—and the handful of people who run them—can hide behind the cloak of the First Amendment to deliver political contributions and manage state legislatures.

And it means that when Ohio Cities get uppity, and begin challenging their subordinate status under the law, that the corporations can use other parts of the Constitution—including the Interstate Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause—to sue those municipalities and overturn their Home Rule laws.

So over the coming months, as lawyers hired by municipalities focus their attack on what they consider unfair action by the legislature, they fail to challenge the layers of hundreds of court decisions that have traded the majority of citizens’ rights for those of a corporate few. Since the parameters of Home Rule are only as good under this system as the legislature chooses to make it, those arguments are certain losers.

Instead of spending two years in the courts challenging the fairness of state legislation that preempts municipal ordinances, cities like Dayton should instead go on the offense: Challenge the authority of gun manufacturing corporations and their shills, and mortgage lending corporations and their shills, to assert their “rights” against the rights of Ohioans.

These challenges are happening in some places across the United States today. To the east, several Pennsylvania communities have now stripped corporations of constitutional “rights,” thus righting an imbalance of power between corporations and communities. Other communities are questioning the authority of agribusiness and waste corporations to determine the future of farming and waste management where they live.

Perhaps Ohio municipalities should attack the very root of the problem, by taking similar actions. Their Home Rule Charters offer an excellent place to begin. If not, residents of Ohio must simply resign themselves to being second-class citizens, one position behind the very corporations that they seek to control.

- Posted by Kat Walter, CELDF

More evidence of our continual (de)evolution from corporate state to corporate police state.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places - and trying to expand their terrain. The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise.

Read The Full Article

For those interested in some of the more dark aspects of this trend, I recommend some of the investigatory work of journalist Jeremy Scahill (such as on Truthout and Democracy Now) on the role of private security (read: mercenary) firms, such as Blackwater, and their role in post-Katrina New Orleans.

When Is a Corporation Like a Freed Slave? Good question. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, and their Democracy Schools provide some pretty clear answers.

Mother Jones did one of the more extensive journalistic inquiries so far published on the work of CELDF.

Four years ago, Robertson and the other supervisors were debating an ordinance to restrict the spreading of toxics-laden sewage sludge on local fields — a major issue in an area that has become a destination for waste from Pittsburgh. The supervisors knew that messing with big business could come at a price: Three years earlier, another Pennsylvania township had passed an anti-sludge ordinance, only to be sued by a sludge hauler called Synagro, which argued that the township had infringed on its rights under the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to guarantee “equal protection” to all. Synagro could make that argument because since the late 19th century, the Supreme Court has defined corporations as legal “persons,” conferring on them many of the same rights that belong to flesh-and-blood citizens. And so, Licking‚Äôs supervisors did something that has been variously described as creative, futile, or out-and-out revolutionary: They passed an ordinance declaring that henceforth, in their township, “Corporations shall not be considered to be “persons” protected by the Constitution of the United States.”

The measure was the brainchild of a brash 37-year-old attorney named Thomas Linzey, who has made a name for himself around the country taking on the principle of corporate personhood — an idea and legal precedent that undergirds much of the past century’s rise in corporate power. The director of the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Linzey sees Licking Township’s action as one of the opening shots of a movement that will redefine American democracy. “It’s about going on the offensive,” he says.

————————

People fighting corporate personhood like to think of themselves as heirs to the American Revolution. “The colonists realized they needed to tear up the very roots of colonialism, including corporate rule,” says Jeff Milchen, director of the Montana-based ReclaimDemocracy.org, a fledgling group focused on corporate power. Indeed, the Revolution was partly an insurrection against entities like the East India Co., whose monopolistic tactics triggered the Boston Tea Party in 1773. The ordinances passed by the Pennsylvania townships, Milchen and others believe, are the modern-day version of such a backlash.

————————

Linzey knows that his undertaking appears quixotic but — perhaps fittingly — betrays not a hint of uncertainty. “The abolitionists did not seek to create a Slavery Protection Agency, or to make conditions for slaves a little better,” he says. “They understood the Constitution left them remediless, and the only thing they could do was to change it.”

Read The Complete Article

If the USA were a corporate state, pretty much everything that matters (starting with people’s labor, Nature, money, transportation of knowledge, police, elections, lawmaking, adjudication) would be controlled at local, state and national levels by a minority of people.

This minority would use corporate institutions (some “public,” some “private,” some “governmental,” some “eleemosynary”), and the rule of law, to enforce and perpetuate their values. Most of this process would be invisible.

This corporate class would be the product of investments and other intentionalities across generations designed to replicate key values of the country’s slavemaster class, perfect the nation’s minority rule plan of governance (i.e., the US Constitution), and teach dogmas (constitutional, economic, historic, religious) which disempower (and disappear) people, communities and Nature.

If the USA were a corporate state, the overwhelming gestalt within philanthropic corporations and philanthropic families would be the gestalt of Gates/Hathaway/Rockefeller etc., principals and their managers. Those entities and people, in turn, would be praised by other institutions, by very important people in “government,” “finance,” the [institutional] “arts,” “media,” “business” and “philanthropy.”

At the drop of a discordant hat, corporate cultural police would kick into gear to reinforce their mantra: “If you want jobs, goods, services, liberty, freedom, security and peace, There Is No Way But Ours.”

Human rabble who are resisters/activists/organizers “dependent” upon philanthropy dripping down from wealth galore accumulated from the slave state — and from its successor corporate state — would feel reluctant to criticize — or even seriously engage — philanthropists.

Many resisters/activists/organizers would continue what they are doing despite having concluded that We the Rabble People
* have not been stopping very much of the corporate class’ stupidities, rights denials, usurpations and violences;
* have not been strengthening our ability to govern ourselves, our communities, states and nation;
* have not been bringing justice to flying people, flowing people, crawling people, standing people…;
* have not been triggering equitable and ecologically sound transitions in food, energy, health, general manufacturing, transportation, water, ad nauseam.

Some of these activists would repress their anger at philanthropists, and direct their frustrations at people and groups which reconceptualize “the problem,” run campaigns to expose, challenge and tumble the corporate state, and work with communities asserting municipal authority to violate well-settled constitutional dogmas.

Also: systematically engaging people — especially “activist” people — in conversation and struggle towards challenging the corporate state would require remedial education about the nation’s founding, prior people’s struggles, law and the Constitution, etc. It would also require walking away from regulatory laws and agencies.

For starters.

Philanthropy which supported such education and organizing would be be limited to a few courageous and risk-taking Earthlings.

So: how do these hypotheses test out?

- Richard Grossman, CELDF

This is from the actual press release from the Ayn Rand Institute in defense of the ‘civil rights’ of Exxon…

Senators’ Letter Is a Violation of ExxonMobil’s Freedom of Speech
December 7, 2006

On October 27 Sens. Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) and Snowe (R., Maine) sent a letter to ExxonMobil’s CEO requesting that ExxonMobil end its financial assistance and support of groups and individuals who reject global warming claims, and urging it to “publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it.”

“This letter constitutes an outrageous violation of ExxonMobil’s right to free speech,” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. “Whether or not one believes there is a threat of catastrophic global warming, the government has no right to tell ExxonMobil what ideas it should advocate or fund.

“Free speech means the freedom to promote any idea one wishes without the danger of suppression or punitive action by the government. When two United States senators declare that a company has ‘manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years,’ that is clearly a thinly veiled threat, and any sensible organization must regard it as such.

“Observe that the senators do not offer a single fact intended to convince ExxonMobil of the truth of their position. Their message is not ‘agree with us because,’ but ‘agree with us or else.’ That is a message appropriate to a dictator, not to the representatives of a free nation.

“Defenders of free speech must stand up against this vicious attempt to intimidate ExxonMobil into embracing the global warming cause, and declare that the government has no business telling Americans what they should think or say.”

### ### ###

Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews. He is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute and has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including FOX News (The O’Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, At Large with Geraldo Rivera), CNN’s Talkback Live, CNBC’s Closing Bell and On the Money, and C-SPAN.

“Observe that the senators do not offer a single fact intended to convince ExxonMobil of the truth of their position. Their message is not ‘agree with us because,’ but ‘agree with us or else.’ ”

But DO NOT observe that ExxonMobil Corporation is not really a person deserving or able to be convinced of anything, and DO NOT observe that the natural persons hiding behind the ExxonMobil Corporation are asserting that the rights of property (the rights injected into corporations - property - by nine folks on the US Supreme Court) should silence the senators, or that the people, who through their state legislatures charter (license) all corporations, are subordinate to the rights of property being asserted by the minority of the opulent (as James Madison called his beloved ruling elite).

When “Objectivists” (”libertarians”) at the Ayn Rand Insitute make statements like those in this press release it is not out of character with their general assertion that property should convey extra rights and privileges to those who own it. They follow a strong American tradition of elevating property over people. The slavocracy established by the US Constitution in 1787 legalized the property status of slaves, and infused that property with extra privileges not enjoyed by the property itself, but conveyed directly to the owners via the three-fifths clause. That gave slave states control of the federal government via a weighted share of representation in Congress and in the Electoral College. (Other provisions of the Constitution placed imperatives of national subordination to the slavocracy into law, like the fugitive slave language later made statutory).

Today, corporations similarly convey extra and superior rights and privileges to the directors and officers (decision-makers) of the corporations. In their capacity as individuals, they may say any outlandish thing they want. But by what authority do they demand the people to pretend that corporate property may “speak” and the privileges incorporation bestows on a liability-free minority can be used with impunity to persuade society of lies against the best interests of everyone — and yet the incorporators can claim innocence of calumny, falsehood, misuse of their chartered privileges?

It’s not a joke; it’s the structure of American law.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

Yet more evidence of the unaccountable nature of corporate power. Counterpunch reports….

Only a couple of years ago, you couldn’t find a respectable academic or defense lawyer or study group to come out and say what Wall Street wanted to hear–don’t criminally prosecute corporations for their crimes.

After all, with the growing divide between the hyper-rich and the rich–never mind the rich and the rest of us–it was just considered a touch gauche to let major American corporations off the hook for corporate crimes that inflict more damage on society than street crimes.

Now, it is the conventional wisdom–don’t criminally prosecute corporations.

The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation (our name–Defending Corporate Criminals in Our Midst (DEFCOM))–earlier this month put out a report recommending that “the Justice Department revise its prosecutorial guidelines so that firms are only prosecuted in exceptional circumstances of pervasive culpability throughout all offices and ranks.”

The only thing this committee is ‘regulating’ is the amount of accountability We The People are allowed to hold to these publicly-chartered institutions. Here’s a good idea…

How about no criminal prosecution of corporations in exchange for no Constitutional protection for corporations?

Read The Full Article

Regarding Coca-Cola and PepsiCo Corporations getting the Indian Supreme Court to overturn a ban on corporate products due to high pesticide content:

Kerela challenges lifting of ban on colas
December 4, 2006

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The communist government of Kerala on Monday appealed against a court order to lift its ban on Coca-Cola and PepsiCo drinks over allegations they contained pesticides.

The ban imposed in August after the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment said the drinks contained unsafe levels of pesticides was overturned by the state high court in September.

The Kerala government had said it would challenge the order and filed a petition in the Supreme Court on Monday.

“The state government has the power to ban sale of a food product under the food adulteration (prevention) act,” the petition said. No date was set for a hearing.

The two U.S. firms have said the ban was unconstitutional and their products were safe to consume.

The controversy erupted when CSE said its tests showed that samples of drinks from both companies across the country had dangerously high levels of pesticides.

—————–

While industry lobby groups have been worried that the ban could damage foreign investment in India, some food scientists have said the row had overshadowed the larger issue of high pesticide content in most Indian foods and drinks.

The “larger issue” here is not the “high pesticide content in most Indian foods and drinks” (though that is a real concern!). The larger issue has to do with a question that goes to the heart of it all: do the people in this, the so-called “largest democracy in the world,” have the authority to decide for themselves what products may or may not be widely distributed, and to decide on what basis those decisions will be made — or do the corporate managers and a handful of technocrats on the Supreme Court call the shots?

The problem of pesticides in food and drink can’t be solved when a minority of the opulent (as James Madison called the governing class) hiding behind corporations are empowered to make the decisions for communities about what they must consume.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

Yates County in New York has a so-called “Right To Farm” law. [Read a pdf copy of the law Here]. The revealing line: “In order to maintain a viable farming economy…it is necessary to limit the circumstances under which farming may be deemed to be nuisance and to allow ag practices inherent to and necessary for the business of farming to proceed and be undertaken free of unreasonable and unwarranted interference or restriction.”

This is a typical “right to farm” law, i.e., right for a few to create holy hell for everyone else in the community…It’s a preemptive strike to bar laws banning specific entities or specific practices. What it sets out to “limit” is democratic self-governance.

SOME farming is essential and important. OTHER “farming” is a menace to life, liberty, breathing, stability, democracy, and the natural world. Up to now, the few have been deciding which is what.

Seems to me this is an occasion to be more than suspicious; how about being up in arms?

Here’s a wonderful opportunity [for the affected community] to come right back with their own bill which opens up the matter of what “farming” makes sense; which bans corporate ownership of farms or farmland, bans whole lists of poisons and manure piling and spreading, strips corporations of constitutional “rights,” recognizes the rights of nature, asserts the proposition that no one farmer/farm family/farming corporation or any farming entity can do harm to air, water, lungs, ecosystems, respiratory systems, nervous sytems, that such people and entities do not have the right to use their “property” in ways which harm others…….etc. Then you could use the occasion of this INSULT to drive discussion on how majorities in the community can make the rules for what can go on in the community…open the discussion to people’s visions of what this community should be like/can become over the next few years.

Of course, people need to be organized and informed to take this on…the “few” are already well-organized I am sure.

This bill is a hammer. Why would anyone want to be a nail?

- Richard Grossman, CELDF