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.

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