hartmann bks sum

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https://truthout.org/articles/:{unequal-protection:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:-the-deciding-moment/

https://www.youtube.com/ 404

https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-influence-there-are-politicians-who-work-on-behalf-of-corporations-and-those-who-work-on-behalf-of-humans/

...How Public Opinion Is Influenced by Concentrated Money

Poll after poll has shown that Americans overwhelmingly support reform of our health-care system. People are concerned about costs and quality of care. Yet in 1993, when President Bill Clinton proposed that the government offer some form of health-care protection to the nation’s 40-plus-million uninsured, the insurance industry spent an estimated $100 million on lobbying and $60 million on advertising and provided members of Congress with about 350 free trips.

What actually happened as a result of all this spending is extraordinarily ironic. Industry polls showed that people cared more about being able to choose their own doctor than most other medical issues. Taking advantage of this, an infamous series of ads featuring “Harry and Louise” warned Americans that under a government-run health insurance program they would lose their ability to select the doctor of their choice.

The advertising worked. People panicked, and American public opinion swung from strong support for Clinton’s proposals to overwhelming fear of them. The Internet became flooded with insulting e-mails about the evils of “Hillary’s” insurance proposal.

Even more ironically, those fears have been realized today—without the Clinton proposal. Back in 1993 you could pretty much go to any doctor you wanted (assuming you were insured), and your insurance would almost always pay for it. Overtly restricting that ability was never part of the Clinton proposal, but because of the power of the Harry and Louise ads people came to believe that it was.

And within a few years, insurance companies and HMOs (health maintenance organizations) began to crack down on consumers who wanted to select their own doctors. Today fewer Americans have that privilege than in 1993, even though it’s fully available to citizens of virtually every country that has a national health-care program…which is every developed country in the world except the United States.

It turns out there is a strong reason why the insurance industry was eager to invest so much cash in advertising and lobbying to keep the government from competing with it in the realm of health care: profits. For every $100 that passes through the hands of the government-administered Medicare programs, between $2 and $3 is spent by Medicare on administration, leaving $97 to $98 to pay for medical services and drugs. But of every $100 that flows through corporate insurance programs and HMOs, $10 to $45 sticks to corporate fingers along the way. As Yale University Professor of Public Policy Theodore R. Marmor, author of The Politics of Medicare, said, “The costs of administering private insurance are somewhere between 5 and 10 times the costs of administering Medicare.”5

After all, Medicare doesn’t have lavish corporate headquarters and corporate jets, nor does it pay expensive lobbying firms in Washington to work on its behalf. It doesn’t pay out profits in the form of dividends to its shareholders. And it doesn’t compensate its top executives with more than $1 million a year, as does each of the largest of the American insurance companies. The result, as Professor Marmor points out, is that Canadians—who receive health care at one-half the cost of comparable services in the United States because no insurance companies are in the middle—“are somewhat healthier than citizens of the United States, use more hospital days per thousand, and visit their physicians more often” because services are freely available.6

Yet most citizens of the United States have no idea what it’s like to live in a country with national health care. When our family lived in Germany for a year in the late 1980s, we were amazed at how smoothly its health-care system worked: we could make any appointment with any physician, and they were excellent at what they did. But even describing the reality of that experience draws uncomprehending stares from Americans, who have been fed a steady corporate diet of very one-sided information.

This is why when President Obama decided he wanted one of the main legacies of his presidency to be a solution to America’s health-care mess, he first met privately and secretly with the pharmaceutical, hospital, and health insurance industries. He cut a deal with them, if news reports are to be believed (and they were not denied by the Obama administration), that he would protect their interests and give them tens of millions of new customers if they would hold back and not spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy his attempts the way they had with Clinton.

Something really rotten has taken hold of the American political system when the president of the United States must go to big corporations on bended knee and get their approval before suggesting legislation.

Polluters Pass “Go”

In 1995 the new governor of Texas responded to the needs of the “polluting industries” that had contributed more than $4 million (about 20 percent of his total) to his election campaign the year before. Thus, as soon as he was in office, George W. Bush signed into law the Texas Environmental Health and Safety Audit Privilege Act, also known as the “polluter immunity law.” This new law, which has since been emulated in twenty-five other states and was tried at the federal level during the Bush presidency, allows polluting industries to avoid prosecution for pollution violations if they themselves report their own crimes to themselves in an internal audit. It also gives them the ability to prevent the public from knowing about their violations.

As Arizona’s assistant attorney general, David Ronald, said, “Only the business with something to hide would benefit from a law that turns data gathered from environmental audits into secret information.”:{7}::{ }:Some of these laws even provide for a year in jail and a $10,000 fine for any human who reveals to the public or to government agencies any corporate pollution discovered in an audit, thus discouraging investigative reporting or whistle-blowing employees.

Like with health-care policy, these laws that increase the power and the profitability of the nation’s largest corporations at the expense of smaller companies who play by the rules—and to the detriment of average citizens—from the beginning are influenced by enormous amounts of “corporate free speech” in the form of cash for politicians and political parties.

In a Democracy…

The point for a democracy is, “What is the will of the people?” That will may change over time, but it is undemocratic when it is shaped by the single voice that shouts the loudest because there are profits to be made. Democracy is more important than any single debate, and this is a classic example of how democratic republican processes have been twisted because of the concept of corporate personhood.

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https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-regulation/

...During the Reagan administration, Robert Monks and Nell Minow worked with the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief. Monks says, “We found that business representatives continually sought more rather than less regulation, particularly when [the new regulations] would limit their liability or protect them from competition.”

Monks and Minow became disenchanted with the process. In their 1991 book Power and Accountability, they say, “The ultimate commercial accomplishment is to achieve regulation under law that is purported to be comprehensive and preempting and is administered by an agency that is in fact captive to the industry.”[1] In this way corporations find an actual government shield for their actions. For example:

Tobacco companies point to the government-mandated warnings on their labels, saying that the labels relieve them of responsibility for tobacco-related deaths because they’re obeying government rules.
Producers of toxic wastes can’t be sued or attacked if they are releasing their toxins within guidelines defined by a government agency.
Telemarketingcompanies push for laws and regulations that define their practice, thus legalizing it.
Manufacturers of genetically modified products can bring them to market without labeling, so long as the products are made within the guide- lines of the regulations. [2]

The Fox Guarding the Chicken Coop

Before there was a single genetically modified food product on the market, Monsanto, a leading provider of agricultural products to farmers, including Roundup, the world’s best-selling herbicide, and a pioneer in genetically altered crops, sent lobbyists to the White House in late 1986 to meet with Vice President George H. W. Bush.

“There were no products at the time,” Leonard Guarraia, one of the Monsanto executives at the meeting, told the New York Times in 2001. “But we bugged him for regulation. We told him that we have to be regulated.”[3]

And so, the Times reports, “the White House complied,” and Monsanto got the regulations it wanted from the EPA, FDA, and USDA.

Those regulations evolved throughout the Reagan and Bush administrations into aregulatory policy, announced by Vice President Dan Quayle on May 26, 1992,when he said, “We will ensure that biotech products will receive the same oversight as other products, instead of being hampered by unnecessary regulation.”

Certainly there would be no unnecessary regulation, but the regulations that were now in place were necessary for the industry. Said the New York Times, “The new policy strictly limited the regulatory reach of the FDA.”[4]

Under the regulations shepherded through government agencies by the White House, the dangers of genetically modified foods would be determined by the manufacturers, not the government, and testing would occur only when the companies wanted it to. And consumers were not to be notified if their food contained genetically modified organisms (as does now a substantial percentage of the American food supply).

“Labeling was ruled out as potentially misleading to the consumer, since it might suggest that there was reason for concern,” notes Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald.[5] In the meantime, gene-altered corn accounted for about 32 per- cent of the 1998 U.S. crop, 38 percent for soybeans, and 58 percent for Canadian canola oil.[:{6]}:

In the summer of 2000, the Clinton administration had to select an American representative to the World Trade Organization talks on genetically modified foods. Ignoring the nomination of a scientist from the Consumers Union, the administration instead chose a former lobbyist for one of the largest companies in the business of genetically modified foods.

And in one of the most notorious cases, a multinational chemical and agricultural-products company’s attorney quit his job with the company’s law firm; went to work for the FDA, where he wrote a regulation that allowed that company’s product into the food supply; quit the FDA and went to work for the USDA, where he participated in writing regulations eliminating labeling of the product for consumers; and then quit the USDA and went back to work for the law firm representing the multinational.[:{7]}:

Unfortunately, because of “veggie libel laws” passed in numerous states after much lobbying by pesticide manufacturers and others in the agricultural products industry (under which Oprah Winfrey was sued for her hamburger remarks), it would be a crime in at least fourteen states (where, hopefully, this book will be for sale) for me (or any reporter) to give you the details of this episode.*

*Even Ben & Jerry’s must, by law, say something nice about the outcome of this incident on their labels, although you can read the entire story on the wall of their Waterbury, Vermont, manufacturing facility, as Vermont has not yet passed a law making it illegal to question the safety of the American food supply.

The GMO (genetically modified organism) regulations followed a pattern set out years before by the chemical industry. As Paul Hawkenpointed out in 1994 in The Ecology of Commerce, the industry launched such a huge lobbying effort to fight regulations on toxic chemicals after the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act that by 1990 “the agency has been able to muster regulations for exactly 7 of the 191 toxins that fell under the original legislation.”[:{8]}:

A decade later things are still problematic, with profit driving the equation at every turn. The last year for which EPA statistics are available on the release of toxic chemicals into the environment by industry is 1999, and in that year 7.7 billion pounds of toxins were released directly into our air and water, most with unknown short- or long-term effects.[9] And as huge as that statistic may sound, it’s actually only the tip of the iceberg:

Lobbyists defined EPA regulations so that now only 650 of the more than 80,000 chemicals being used in industry have to be reported— which means that the 7.7-billion-pound total represents only 1 percent of the possible chemicals in use.
Only America’s largest chemical manufacturers are required to report their figures.
Those figures include only accidents and spills. As the Worldwatch Institute’s Anne Platt McGinn noted in a commentary titled “Detoxifying Terrorism” on November 16, 2001, “Releases during routine use are not included” in that 7.7-billion-pound figure. Platt added that we don’t yet even know how dangerous or carcinogenic are more than “71 percent of the most widely used chemicals in the United States today” because the data simply doesn’t exist or hasn’t been released by the industry.[:{10]:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

The Impact on Small Business

Small businesses rarely lobby Congress, the White House, or regulatory agencies for more regulations. But because large businesses have an infrastructure to deal with regulations, the burden of regulations on small businesses some- times wipes them out. Many regulations come along with benefits. Farm subsidies represent a huge transfer of tax money to corporations, but only a very small portion goes to family farmers.

In the agriculture industry, four multinational corporations control 82 percent of the beef cattle market; five companies control 55 percent of the hog-packing marketplace. Although large agricultural corporations numerically own only 6 percent of U.S. farms, that 6 percent accounts for almost two- thirds of all farm income.[:{11]:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

In a growing trend known as contract farming, farmers are forced (because they can’t compete against large-scale multinational purchasing) to sell their farms to agribiz companies and then work on the land they once owned. The United States lost 300,000 family-owned farms between 1979 and 1998. As agriculture writer Julie Brussell notes, “This agrarian ‘genocide’ mirrors the descent of much of America’s rural country into economic serfdom.”[12] The result, as documented by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s (CELDF) Thomas Linzey, is that, “Suicides have replaced equipment- related deaths as the number one cause of farmer deaths.”[:{13]}:

References:

1. Robert A. G. Monks and Nell Minow, Power and Accountability (New York: Harper- Collins, 1991),https://www.ragm.com/archives/books/poweracc/cover.html.

2. Kurt Eichenwald, “Redesigning Nature: Hard Lessons Learned; Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle,” New York Times, January 25, 2001,https://www.nytimes .com/2001/01/25/business/redesigning-nature-hard-lessons-learned-biotechnology- food-lab-debacle.html?pagewanted=1.

...

6. Marian Burros, “Shoppers Unaware of Gene Changes,” New York Times,July 20, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/20/world/shoppers-unaware-of-gene-changes .html?scp=1&sq=Marian%20Burros,%20%E2%80%9CShoppers%20Unaware%20 of%20Gene%20Changes,%E2%80%9D%20New%20York%20Times,%2020%20 July%201998&st=cse.

7.https://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0523-02.htm. wayback rolls to denver post?

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https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-uses-for-the-bill-of-rights/

The statistic in this chapter’s epigraph is sobering indeed. It says corporations sought protection under the Fourteenth Amendment a hundred times more often than did the people it was intended to protect. And this is not a victimless shift—there have been real and substantial consequences. In the years following the Santa Clara decision and the cases that referred to it, companies have used their personhood rights in an amazing variety of ways. What follows in this chapter is a small selection.

First Amendment

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. noted in the landmark 1919 Shenck v. United States case that shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater does not constitute free speech; the Bill of Rights guarantees that a person’s opinion can be expressed, not that there are no limits on what one can do. But consider how this fundamental freedom has been bent by corporations since Santa Clara.

by claiming the same right as humans to express themselves, companies won approval to spend whatever they want on lobbyists in Washington. At one point there was a full-time tobacco lobbyist for every two legislators on Capitol Hill. As of 2005 there were roughly 64 registered lobbyists for every member of Congress, and 138 of them are former members of Congress. Include state lobbyists, and there are more than 60,000 (because of variations in state laws on what is or isn’t a lobbyist, and who and how they should register, this may well be a significant underestimate: nobody really knows the true number).1

As Jeffrey H. Birnbaum noted in the Washington Post in June 2005, “The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Only a few other businesses have enjoyed greater prosperity in an otherwise fitful economy.”2

He added that “lobbying firms can’t hire people fast enough” and that salaries started at $300,000 a year.“Big bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress,” Birnbaum noted, citing a study by Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. The situation has only gotten worse since then.

And in a bizarre twist, during the administration of George W. Bush more than a hundred very well-paid lobbyists decided to forsake their big pay checks for, relatively speaking, paltry Civil Service paychecks for a year or two to become the actual regulators for the agencies they used to lobby.

J. Steven Griles, for example, moved from a $585,000-per-year paycheck as a lobbyist for oil and gas interests to become the number two person in the Department of the Interior, right under Interior Secretary Gale Norton. The Department then opened 8 million acres of western lands for oil and gas exploration and gave $2 million in no-bid contracts to one of Griles’s former clients—and Griles continued to receive a four-year $284,000-per-year bonus from his former employer.

Charles Lambert, a fifteen-year lobbyist for the meat industry in its effort to block labeling and mad cow disease investigations, went to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he officially determined that mad cow disease wasn’t a threat and shouldn’t be investigated and that meat shouldn’t be labeled with regard to its safety.

[Watch: Thom Hartmann: The $1 Million Corporate Personhood Mystery vid]

daniel E. Troy worked for a lobbying firm representing Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and others. In 2001 he left the lobbying firm and became the top lawyer (chief counsel) for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Mysteriously, the FDA’s position on regulating the drug companies became that it wants “to discourage frivolous lawsuits, which drive up costs,” making it harder for consumers damaged by prescription drug side effects to sue Troy’s former employers.

Lobbyist Thomas A. Scully represented HCA, a huge hospital corporation originally started by Bill Frist’s family; HCA was embroiled in a fraud investigation by the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, started by a whistleblower, that looked like it was going to cost HCA $250 million. In 2001 Scully left his job to head the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. By coincidence, the agency worked out a settlement that kept the feds from looking further into HCA’s books and kept the Justice Department away. Scully then left the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and is working again as a lobbyist for Medicare providers.

Lobbyist Jeffrey Holmstead had represented big utility companies and as a lawyer for them had proposed twelve paragraphs of changes in EPA regulations affecting those utilities. Holmstead then went to work for the EPA as a regulator, and soon thereafter those twelve paragraphs—which gave a pollution exemption to 168 of 232 western-based power plants—appeared in proposed EPA rules changes. The case was so blatant that forty-five U.S. senators—including three Republicans—and ten states’ attorneys general wrote a letter asking the EPA to void the proposed rule because of “undue industry influence.” Their complaints were largely ignored by the Bush administration.3

The American Academy of Pediatrics has proposed that the federal government initiate controls on advertising directed at children and has recommended that parents educate their children about how advertising can manipulate them. Corporations, using their First Amendment rights to freedom of expression, have instead increased their spending on ads to children.4

The California Public Utilities Commission ordered a public utility to include a statement-stuffer in its bills, informing consumers of a key point. In a move that was startlingly reminiscent of the Santa Clara case, the utility (a corporate monopoly) sued the state and took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—and won. The utility asserted that it didn’t have to comply because it had aFirst Amendment right “not to speak” and so could avoid informing its customers about issues as it chose.The Supreme Court, extending the logic of the Santa Clara case, agreed.5

Lawyers at a 1988 judicial conference recommended that corporations “use the First Amendment to invalidate a range of Federal regulations, including Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements that govern corporate takeovers, and rules affecting stock offerings.”6 Since that time, this has become a routine claim made by corporations.

Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment, instituted to prevent government agents from bursting into homes and unreasonably searching and seizing property, has been used by corporations to avoid government regulators as if they were British dragoons.

Supreme Court cases in 1967 and 1978 affirmed that corporations do not have to submit to random inspections because, as persons, they are entitled to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches.7 Corporations have pursued this logic for many years.Referencing the 1886 Santa Clara decision, the Supreme Court granted Fourth Amendment privacy rights to a corporation in 1906, just sixteen years after the Sherman Act had been passed.8 As William Meyers notes in The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy, “This ruling made it difficult to enforce the Sherman anti-monopoly act, which naturally required the papers of corporations in order to determine if there existed grounds for an indictment.”9

An electrical and plumbing corporation in Idaho cited the Fourth Amendment and deterred a health andsafety investigation.10

In a 1986 Supreme Court case, a corporation sued the Environmental Protection Agency because the EPA hired a professional photographer to fly over the plant with a camera after the corporation had turned down a request by the EPA for an on-site inspection. The Court acknowledged the corporation’s right to privacy from inspections by the EPA within its buildings.11 Meyers says that, “Without random inspections it is virtually impossible to enforce meaningful anti-pollution, health, and safety laws.”12

Fifth Amendment

Like the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment was written to prevent a recurrence of government abuses from colonial days. Among other things, it says that a person cannot be compelled to testify against himself (as often happened under English royal rule) or be tried twice for the same crime. This was in a time when the balance of power was definitely in favor of the government, which could and routinely did execute people.

Today the shoe is on the other foot: business, the more powerful party, is claiming protection, again to avoid government investigation of alleged misdoings. Convicted once of criminal misdoing in an anti-trust case, a textile supply company used Fifth Amendment protections and barred retrial.

In a Democracy…

The constitutional rights of free speech, privacy, and protection from overzealous prosecution all were the results of the Founders’ of the United States having lost these rights to a multinational corporation and the government that supported its right to so-called free trade. They and the Fourteenth Amendment that was part of the post–Civil War legislation necessary to free slaves in the United States were all put in place specifically to benefit and protect humans.

The core concept of American democracy, as established in the writings of the Founders, is that all institutions, from churches that claim to be created by gods to businesses created by the wealthy or ambitious to the very government itself—all institutions—are authorized by the people to exist and are answerable to the people for their existence. And, as the Declaration of Independence notes, when an institution’s behavior “becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Notes:...

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https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-uses-for-the-bill-of-rights/

First Amendment

[Watch: Thom Hartmann: The $1 Million Corporate Personhood Mystery vid]

Fourth Amendment

An electrical and plumbing corporation in Idaho cited the Fourth Amendment and deterred a health andsafety investigation.10

Fifth Amendment

In a Democracy…

Notes:...

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https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-protection-protecting-corporate-liars/

the first direct shot across the bow of the doctrine of a corporation’s “right to lie” by using its “personhood” to claim First Amendment “free speech” rights came in April 1998, when Mark Kasky, a California political activist, noticed that Nike was engaged in what he considered to be a deceptive greenwashing campaign. Kasky had long been a runner and wore Nike shoes, so he was particularly distressed when he saw Nike’s communications director, Lee Weinstein, publish a letter in the San Francisco Examiner in December 1997 that said, in part, “Consider that Nike established the sporting goods industry’s first code of conduct to ensure our workers know and can exercise their rights.”2

This letter was just a small part, it turned out, of a national campaign by Nike to convince the American public that it was making sure that its contractors and subcontractors were treating their employees in Asia well. The year before, Steve Miller, Nike’s sports marketing director, pledged in a letter to athletic program directors and presidents of U.S. universities that Nike’s manufac turers complied with “government regulations regarding minimum wage and overtime as well as occupational health and safety, environmental regulations, workers’ insurance, and equal opportunity provisions.”3

What Nike wasn’t mentioning, but which was leaked to the press in 1997, was a 1996 audit of one of the company’s overseas factories (this one in Vietnam) by Ernst & Young. The audit, which Nike had commissioned but then tried to keep secret, documented how workers in the Vietnamese factory were exposed to cancer-causing solvents like acetone and toluene in ways that would have been flatly illegal in the United States and were not protected from deafening levels of noise; it also raised a series of questions on other workplace issues. As Mother Jones documented in a February 2001 article (“Greenwashing on Trial” by Josh Richman), “another Nike-funded study found evidence of physical and verbal abuse and sexual harassment at nine of its contract factories in Indonesia.”4

kasky was outraged that Nike held itself out as the model corporate citizen. He told filmmaker Lori Cheatle (for her movie This Land Is Your Land, which also features Naomi Klein, Thomas Frank, Jim Hightower, and me, along with seven others):“The Nike code of conduct stated that they maintained the highest standards of health, worker safety, and compensation, and they used that to market their products. So I felt very upset when I realized that a lot of the representations they were making might not be true.”

He and a lot of people in California were buying Nike products under false assumptions or misrepresentations, so he called an attorney and decided to take the company to court.

Kasky went to attorney Alan Caplan (of the “Joe Camel” cigarette lawsuit fame), and together they invoked a rather unique California law that allowed individuals to behave as if they were the state’s attorney general and sue companies for fraudulent or other illegal practices, producing what would ultimately become the Supreme Court case Kasky v. Nike.

[vid 404 The Daily Take: Why Fox News has the Right to Lie to Us]

in 1999 the case was dismissed by San Francisco Superior Court Judge David Garcia, who suggested that Nike’s right to lie—to “free speech”—was protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Kasky and Caplan appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where, in March 2000, that court ruled against Kasky again, with Justice Douglas Swager arguing that Nike was only promoting its products, as any company would, could, and should be able to do in a world of corporate “persons” endowed with free-speech rights.

His comment specifically noted that Nike’s use of inaccurate letters to the editors in newspapers across America, letters telling untruths to university presidents, and other false statements to the press were “within the core area of expression protected by the First Amendment.”

Undeterred, Kasky carried his suit to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in May 2002 (by one vote, 4 to 3) that Nike had violated the California laws against unfair competition and false advertising. The Supreme Court justices didn’t, however, challenge the notion that First Amendment protections didn’t extend to commercial “speech” by corporations; instead they suggested that such rights should be limited to the commercial interests of the corporation and that the action of Nike in this case “bears only a tangential relation to commercial transactions.”

At that point Nike decided that, rather than pay the fine and change its business practices, it would take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a very curious thing happened.

The Supreme Court typically gets more than ten thousand requests every year to hear cases. It has a small army of clerks and lawyers (usually including clerks for the justices—Samuel Alito chooses not to have his clerks participate—known as the “cert pool”)who filter through them to find the ones that have reasonable merit and which the justices may be interested in hearing. The Court as a whole then considers the thousand or so that survive the culling process, further reducing the caseload for the year to a number typically around one hundred total cases (it takes the votes of four justices to grant certiorari, allowing the case to be argued before the Court).

After the Court has gone through all this work to whittle down its case-load, each case comes before the justices in two ways. First, both parties to the case file their own legal briefs or arguments in writing.Second, interested parties—“friends” of either side (by virtue of association or concern for the issue behind the case)—file Friend of the Court, or amicus curiae, briefs, adding their voices to the arguments. Then the justices hear oral arguments, which these days are limited to thirty minutes for each side, after which each justice and his or her staff retire to their offices to consider the arguments, more carefully look over the amicus briefs, and correspond with other justices about each case.

Eventually—typically over a period of a few months—a consensus emerges or a vote is taken, and on each case the Court decides who wins or loses. The justices then write agreements or dissents with or from the majority opinion, and when all is ready for the public they announce their decision.

Except in the Kasky case.

The Court did agree to hear the case, in the 2003 session. The justices heard the oral arguments on June 26. They accepted the amicus briefs—including filings from companies that included ABC, Inc.; the American Society of Newspaper Editors; the Associated Press; Forbes, Inc.; Fox Entertainment Group; Gannett Company; the Hearst Corporation; the McClatchy Company; the National Association of Broadcasters; the National Broadcasting Company (NBC); National Public Radio, Inc.; the New York Times Company; Newsweek, Inc.; PR Newswire; the Seattle Times Company; Time, Inc.; Tribune Company; U.S. News & World Report; and the Washington Post Company—all agreeing with Nike.

ExxonMobil, Bank of America, and Microsoft filed their own three-company brief on behalf of Nike, and similar separate filings came from the National Association of Manufacturers, Pfizer, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others.

Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a brief defending Nike’s right to “free speech” as a “person” in America.The legal department of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) filed a brief defending Nike’s “right to lie” (it is true that as persons we have a “right to lie” except in particular cases such as when under oath). Even the very liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote an impassioned op-ed supporting Nike’s right to deceive the public. All three mistakenly believed that corporations had had First Amendment rights since 1886, and all three were strong advocates of the First Amendment. And the AFL-CIO, of course, was a corporation itself, albeit a unique nonprofit form of incorporation.

There was also a loud public debate on the issue. Citizen activist groups picketed the Supreme Court, decrying corporate personhood and the entire idea that constitutional protections like free speech should be granted to corporations instead of being the exclusive province of humans, while the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post (among others) ran shrill editorials warning of dire consequences for the future of capitalism and democracy if corporations weren’t finally and fully granted the constitutional right of free speech.

The Court then heard the oral arguments, in which Kasky’s lawyers, Alan Caplan and Philip Neumark, revisited the series of very specific lies that they asserted Nike had told the American public in their original lawsuit. They said that Nike:

In order to maintain and/or increase its sales, made misrepresentations by the use of false statements and/or material omissions of fact, including but not limited to the following:

(a) claims that workers who make NIKE products are protected from and not subjected to corporal punishment and/or sexual abuse;

(b) claims that NIKE products are made in accordance with applicable governmental laws and regulations governing wages and hours;

(c) claims that NIKE products are made in accordance with applicable laws and regulations governing health and safety conditions;

(d) claims that NIKE pays average line-workers double-the-minimum wage in Southeast Asia;

(e) claims that workers who produce NIKE products receive free meals and health care;

(f) claims that the GoodWorks International (Andrew Young) report proves that NIKE is doing a good job and “operating morally”; and

(g) claims that NIKE guarantees a “living wage” for all workers who make NIKE products.5

Nike, for its part, argued that when it hired former UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young to check them out, he found that everything was hunky dory: “Although some news organizations concluded that some allegations against Nike had merit, former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young concluded in an independent review commissioned by Nike that the charges were largely false.”6

Further, Nike’s lawyers said that when the California Supreme Court concluded that it was okay for Marc Kasky to use the consumer protection laws to hold Nike accountable for what it said to the public, it was way too broad a use of the laws against fraud or deception in commerce. Nike’s lawyers wrote: “The California court’s conclusion that government may regulate all statements of fact by commercial entities that could influence consumers sweeps far too broadly…”

Nike’s lawyers also didn’t like the law in California that let an individual act as if he were the attorney general: “The private attorney general provisions of the UCL and FAL thus violate the First Amendment because they omit not only any requirement that the plaintiff have suffered harm, but also any other meaningful constraint on the ability of private plaintiffs to bring lawsuits…” which could impose a “crushing burden” on a multibillion-dollar corporation like Nike.

And, finally, calling implicitly on the doctrine that a corporation is a person protected by the Bill of Rights, Nike argued: “Even if petitioner’s [Nike’s] statements could be characterized as ‘commercial speech,’ the legal regime approved by the California Supreme Court violates the First Amendment.” In other words, “We’re a company, which is the same as a person, and so we have the First Amendment right to say whatever we want, just like anybody else. To say that we have to only say things that are accurate violates our First Amendment right of free speech.”

All of this was laid before the Court. There were multiple dimensions to the case, but at its heart was the issue of whether a corporate “person” had the same “right to lie,” guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as you and me. If I can tell my wife that she looks great in a dress that I really think is ugly (but know she loves), Nike had the right to tell Americans that it was treating its workers well (even though it wasn’t and knew it).

But something caught in the Court’s throat. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, with six of his colleagues, decided that the Court had made a big mistake when it granted a writ of certiorari, the declaration that the case was legitimate and appropriate for the Court to hear.

Remember that it was Rehnquist who, in the earlier First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti case (mentioned in chapter 1), had said that he disagreed with what he believed was the decision of the Supreme Court in 1886, that corporations were persons. And, interestingly, the attorneys who crafted the amicus brief on behalf of Marc Kasky took special pains to point out—with the hope that Rhenquist would read it and have a “EUREKA!” moment—that the Court had actually never created corporate personhood in 1886.

Quoting from the first edition of this very book, Kasky’s attorneys wrote directly to Rehnquist in their brief:

Indeed, the initial grant of “personhood” under the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations was, to a certain extent, a judicial mistake. Corporate person-hood is generally attributed to the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886), although the Court in that case specifically declined to address the issue. In Santa Clara County, Santa Clara County sued the Southern Pacific Railroad Company for failure to pay taxes, and the railroad presented the Court with six defenses, including the argument that corporations were persons under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because one of the other five defenses was successful, the Court had no occasion to decide the question of corporate personhood and specifically declined to do so:

If these [other] positions are tenable, there will be no occasion to consider the grave questions of constitutional law upon which the case was determined below; for, in that event, the judgment can be affirmed upon the ground that the assessment cannot properly be the basis of a judgment against the defendant.

As the judgment can be sustained upon this [other] ground, it is not necessary to consider any other questions raised by the pleadings and the facts found by the court.

Id. at 411, 416. Indeed, in a companion case, Justice Field in a concurring opinion lamented that the “tax cases from California” did not “decide the important constitutional questions involved.” County of San Bernardino v. Southern Pac. R. Co., 118 U.S. 417, 422 (1886) (Field, J., concurring).

Nevertheless, it appears that the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, included a headnote stating, “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” See Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights 107 (2002) (quoting J.C. Bancroft Davis, 118 United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term 1885 and October Term 1886 394 (Banks & Brothers Publishers).7

In other places in the brief, its authors took special pains to point out how Santa Clara had been misinterpreted over the years. (One sentence, for example, begins, “Notwithstanding the mistaken ‘personification’ of corporations in Santa Clara, the Court’s subsequent rulings reveal that this Court has not consistently applied the implications…”)

Every step along the way helped telegraph to Rehnquist that his dislike of what he thought had been decided in 1886 in Santa Clara was a good gut instinct because he was right. Corporations aren’t persons, and the Court had not said they were in 1886!

Nobody knows what happened when this bombshell hit Rehnquist’s desk, as the Court is notoriously secretive. But something big happened because Rehnquist leapt into action—and that action was to decide not to decide the Kasky case. Inexplicably, astoundingly, and virtually without precedent, Rehnquist and most of his colleagues issued a very, very terse statement.

The single sentence the Court issued said only: “The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted.”

In other words, “When we decided to listen to these arguments and look over this case, granting it legal certification before us, we screwed up. Therefore we’re tossing out the certification and going to pretend we never even heard this case or read its briefs.”

While this dismissal represented the thinking of the majority of the Court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer were incensed. Breyer wrote: “In my view…the questions presented directly concern the freedom of Americans to speak about public matters in public debate, no jurisdictional rule prevents us from deciding those questions now, and delay itself may inhibit the exercise of constitutionally protected rights of free speech without making the issue significantly easier to decide later on.”

But regardless of Breyer’s or O’Connor’s concern that the Court was kicking the can down the road, the case came to a halt, and Kasky and Nike settled out of court almost immediately when the California courts granted Kasky the legal right to access Nike’s internal files(known as a grant of discovery). The amount of money Nike paid Kasky’s lawyers to stop at that point and not pursue discovery, rather than legally riffle through Nike’s internal papers, was never disclosed, and Kasky, for his part, agreed with the decision to stop discovery when Nike made a seven-figure gift to an organization that worked to help sweatshop workers around the world.

The world was safe for corporate liars (although California’s citizens were still free to go after them in a limited fashion). Corporate personhood hadn’t been challenged. And the weird coalition of liberals (Bob Herbert and the ACLU) and conservatives (NBC, ABC, the Chamber of Commerce, and others) who worried that ending a corporation’s right to call on the First Amendment would be a disaster for America all breathed a sigh of relief.

Until 2010.

Notes:...

===

https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-protection-the-corporate-conquest-of-america/

...While corporations can live forever, exist in several different places at the same time, change their identities at will, and even chop off parts of themselves or sprout new parts, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, according to its reporter, had said that they are “persons” under the Constitution, with constitutional rights and protections as accorded to human beings. Once given this key, corporations began to assert the powers that came with their newfound rights.

First Amendment. Claiming the First Amendment right of all “persons” to free speech, corporate lawsuits against the government successfully struck down laws that prevented corporations from lobbying or giving money to politicians and political candidates.1

Fourth Amendment. Earlier laws had said that a corporation had to open all its records and facilities to our governments as a condition of being chartered. But now, claiming the Fourth Amendment right of privacy, corporate lawsuits successfully struck down such laws. In later years they also sued to block Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws allowing for surprise safety inspections of the workplace and stopped Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inspections of chemical factories.2

Fourteenth Amendment: Claiming Fourteenth Amendment protection against discrimination (granting persons equal protection), the J. C. Penney chain store successfully sued the state of Florida, ending a law designed to help small, local business by charging chain stores a higher business license fee than that for locally owned stores.3

Women Ask, “Can I Be a ‘Person,’ Too?”

Interestingly, during the era of theSanta Clara decision granting corporations the full protections of persons under the Constitution, two other groups also brought cases to the Supreme Court, asking for similar protections. The first group was women. This was a movement with a fascinating history, its roots in the American Revolution itself.

in March 1776 thirty-two-year-old Abigail Adams sat at her writing table in her home in Braintree, Massachusetts, a small town a few hours’ ride south of Boston. The war between the American colonists and their opponents—the governors and the soldiers of the East India Company and its British protectors—had been going on for about a year. A small group of the colonists gathered in Philadelphia to edit Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence for the new nation they were certain was about to be born, and Abigail’s husband, John Adams, was among the men editing that document.

[vid Also See Thom Hartmann’s Video:]

abigail had a specific concern. With pen in hand, she carefully considered her words. Assuring her husband of her love and concern for his well-being, she then shifted to the topic of the documents being drafted, asking John to be sure to “remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than [were] your ancestors.”4

Abigail knew that the men drafting the Declaration and other documents leading to a new republic would explicitly define and extol the rights of men, but not of women, and she and several other well-bred women were lobbying for the Constitution to refer instead to persons, people, humans, or “men and women.” Her words are well-preserved, and her husband later became president of the United States, so her story is better known than those of most of her peers.

By late April, Abigail had received a response from John, but it wasn’t what she was hoping for. “Depend upon it,” the future president wrote to his wife, “[that] we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”

Furious, Abigail wrote back to her husband, saying, “If perticular [sic] care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion…”

All of Abigail’s efforts were ultimately for nothing. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced on June 7, 1776, a resolution that the colonies be free and independent states governed solely by free men, based on a document written by Thomas Jefferson and edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Adams played a strong role in the heated debate over the following month, which concluded with a vote to adopt the gender-specific language of Lee’s resolution on July 2, 1776. Congress formalized it two days later as the Declaration of Independence.

Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and the other men of the assembly explicitly demanded rights for male citizens—and not for female citizens—when they crafted the Declaration. “Men” was not a generic reference to humans; the authors meant humans of the male gender. They wrote: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…”

The men had won. Among the earliest laws of the Colonies were several legislating that men had power over women:5

A married woman was not allowed to make out a will because she was not allowed to own land or legally control anything else worthy of willing to another person.

Any property a woman brought into the marriage became her husband’s at the moment of marriage, and would revert to her only if he died and she did not remarry. But even then, she would get only one-third of her husband’s property, and what third that was and how she could use it were determined by a male, court-appointed executor, who would supervise for the rest of her life (or until she remarried) how she used the third of her husband’s estate she “inherited.”

When a widow died, the executor would either take the property for himself or decide to whom it would pass; the woman had no say in the matter because she had no right to sign a will. Women could not sue in a court of law except under the same weak procedures allowed for the mentally ill and children, supervised by men.

If the man of a family household died, the executor would decide who would raise the wife’s children and in what religion. She had no right to make those decisions and no say in such matters. If the woman was poor, it was a virtual certainty that her children would be taken from her.

It was impossible in the new United States of America for a married woman to have legal responsibility for her children, control of her own property, own slaves, buy or sell land, or even obtain an ordinary license.

Women Work for, Then Against, the Fourteenth Amendment

After the American Revolution, educated women picked up Abigail Adams’s chant and began to quietly foment her “rebellion.” They wrote poems and seemingly innocuous letters to the editors of newspapers, speaking indirectly about their demands for equal rights. Word spread. By the early 1800s, women’s voices were getting louder, and many were demanding an amendment to the Constitution to give equal rights to women or prohibit discrimination against women.

But women didn’t gain any legislative successes until 1868, and that turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. It was the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, which guaranteed due process of law to all “persons.” Oddly, when it was being drafted in 1866, suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had argued strongly against it because it was the first time the word male was used in the Constitution or any constitutional amendments.

The Fourteenth Amendment has two provisions, one guaranteeing due process of law to all persons and the other defining how lines would be drawn to decide how representation was to be apportioned in the House of Representatives. Section 2 includes the phrase “the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens.”

Stanton wrote in 1866, “If the word ‘male’ be inserted [in this amendment] it will take a century to get it out again.”6

Despite Stanton’s objections to its sexually discriminatory language, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed and ratified by enough states to become law. And Stanton was off in her prediction by only two years: the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required equal pay for women and men and prohibited discrimination against women by any company with more than twenty-four employees.

Women Test the Fourteenth Amendment

In an attempt to test the Fourteenth Amendment, Susan B. Anthony went to her local polling station and cast a vote on November 1, 1872. Justifying her vote on the grounds of the Fourteenth Amendment, on November 12 Anthony wrote, “All persons are citizens—and no state shall deny or abridge the citizen rights…”

Six days later, however, she was arrested for voting illegally. The judge, noting that she was female, refused to allow her to testify, dismissed the jury, and found her guilty. Lacking the resources available to huge corporations, she was unable to repeatedly carry her cause to the Supreme Court as the railroads customarily did, and that judge’s decision stood.

One year later, in the 1873 Bradwell v. Illinois decision, the Supreme Court ruled that women were not entitled to the full protection of persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote the Court’s concurring opinion, which minced no words: “The family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband. So firmly fixed was this sentiment in the founders of the common law that it became a maxim of that system of jurisprudence that a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head and representative in the social state…”

Corporations had full legal existence and the constitutional rights of persons, but women could derive these rights only through their husbands. They didn’t even exist as legal entities separate from their husbands. And the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t apply to them, even though the amendment explicitly said “persons.”

Women didn’t get the vote until 1920, and the Equal Rights Amendment that says, simply and entirely, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” has been introduced into Congress every year since 1923 but has never passed, blocked in every case by male legislators.

Freed Slaves Ask, “Can I Be a ‘Person,’ Too?”

The second group to petition the Supreme Court to be recognized as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment were the people for whom it was passed: freed slaves and their descendants. But ten years after giving corporations full rights of personhood, the Supreme Court ruled inPlessy v. Ferguson that any person more than “1⁄8th Negro” was not legally entitled to full interactions with white “persons.”

Justice Henry B. Brown delivered the near-unanimous (one dissenter) opinion of the Court, which established nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, saying, “Gauged by this standard we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.”7

Court reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis, in the headnote he wrote as commentary to the Plessy v. Ferguson case, said that the case had come about when Plessy, “being a passenger between two stations within the State of Louisiana, was assigned by the officers of the [railroad] company to the coach used for the race to which he belonged, but he insisted upon going into a coach used by the race to which he did not belong.”

Davis then quotes the Fourteenth Amendment and says afterward, “The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

This institutionalization of segregation by the 1896 Plessy case prompted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to note in 1938, “Of the cases in this Court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.”8

Notes:...

===

1 23

https://www.alternet.org/economy/wealthy-people/

why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider?

An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States.

In an article co-published with The Guardian, they noted:

:{“The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.”

Their efforts have had substantial success, as you can read in Documented’s article.

This effort, of course, is not unique to the one think tank they called out. From Donald Trump all the way down to the lowest Republican county official, efforts to make it harder for what John Adams called “the rabble” to vote and otherwise participate in democracy are in full swing across America.

But why? Why are some wealthy people so opposed to expanding democracy in America?

Most Americans — and lots of editorial writers — are convinced it’s simply because rich folks want to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep their regulations and taxes down. I proposed a motive like that in yesterday’s Daily Take.

And surely, for some, that’s the largest part of it. But that’s not the entire story.

I can’t claim (nor would I) to know the exact motives driving the various wealthy individuals funding efforts to reduce the Black, Hispanic, senior, and youth vote. But history does suggest that many are trying to “stabilize” America rather than just pillage her.

They are worried that America is suffering from too much democracy.

The modern-day backstory to this starts in the early 1950s when conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world.

The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, both in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating.

The middle-class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, fasterthan were the top 1%.

Kirk and colleagues like William F. Buckley postulated that if the middle-class and minorities became too wealthy, they’d feel the safety and freedom to throw themselves actively into our political processes, as rich people had historically done.

That expansion of democracy, they believed, would produce an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order — producing chaos, riots, and possibly even the end of the republic.

The first chapter of Kirk’s 1951 book, The Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1793 on his way to get arrested in the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights of Man. It’s still in print (as is Burke).

Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on democracy, including limits on who could vote or run for office, and the British maximum wage.

That’s right,maximumwage.

Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they’d have enough spare time to use democratic processes to challenge the social order and collapse the British kingdom.

Too much democracy, Burke believed, was a dangerous thing: deadly to nations and a violation of evolution and nature itself.

Summarizing his debate with Paine about the French Revolution, Burke wrote:

“The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler [candle maker], cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively are permitted to rule [by voting]. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”

That was why Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay peopleover a certain amount, so as to keep wage-earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives.

It was explicitly to avoid too much democracy and preserve the stability of the kingdom. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel.)

Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American middle-class became wealthy enough to have time for political activism, there would be similarly dire consequences.

Young people would cease to respect their elders, they warned. Women would stop respecting (and depending on) their husbands. Minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.

When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously.

Skeptics of multiracial egalitarian democracy like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said of people like Kirk and his wealthy supporters:

“Their numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“

And then came the 1960s.

— In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in widespread use; this helped kick off the Women’s Liberation Movement, as women, now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in the workplace. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore.

— By 1967, young people on college campuses were also in revolt; the object of their anger was an illegal war in Vietnam. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing.

— The labor movement was feeling it’s oats: strikes spread across America throughout the 1960s from farm workers in California to steel workers in Pennsylvania. In the one year of 1970 alone, over 3 million workers walked out in 5,716 strikes.

— And throughout that decade African Americans were demanding an end to police violence and an expansion of Civil and Voting Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.

These four movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk’s 1950s warnings about the dangers of the middle class and minorities embracing democracy.

Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet. And the GOP turned on a dime.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “national crisis” these movements represented was put into place with the election of 1980: the project of the Reagan Revolution was to dial back democracy while taking the middle class down a peg, and thus end the protests and social instability.

Their goal was, at its core, to save America from itself.

The plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide down or at least remain frozen for a few decades; end free college across the nation so students would study in fear rather than be willing to protest; and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding participation in democracy.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?

:{“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”}:

While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and more powerful (and that’s certainly been the effect), the ideologues driving the movement also thought they were restoring stability to the United States, both socially, economically, and — most important — politically.

The middle class was out of control by the late 1960s, they believed, and something had to be done. There was too much democracy, and it was tearing America apart.

Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of the American Revolution (and for 1000 years before) and advocated by Edmund Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, Republicans saw a remedy to the crisis.As a bonus, it had the side effect of helping their biggest donors and thus boosting their political war-chests.

If working people, women, minorities, and students were a bit more desperate about their economic situations, these conservative thinkers asserted, then they’d be less likely to organize, protest, strike, or even vote. The unevenness, the instability, the turbulence of democracy in the 1960s would be calmed.

— To accomplish this, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times.

— He put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment benefits and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by working-class people.

— He ended the deductibilityof credit-card, car-loan and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and multimillionaires from 74% to 27%. (There were no billionaires in America then, in large part because of FDR’s previous tax policies; the modern explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s massive tax cuts for the rich.)

— He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American non-government workforce when he came into office to around 10% today.

— He brought a young lawyer named John Roberts into the White House to work out ways to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision. His VP brought in his son, George W., to build bridges between the GOP and the most fanatical branches of evangelical Christianity, who opposed both women’s rights and the Civil Rights movement.

— He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and NAFTA, which opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while cutting corporate donor’s labor costs and union membership.

And, sure enough, it worked.

— Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs shattered Black communities and our prison population became the largest in the world, both as a percentage of our population and in absolute numbers.

— His War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more over a couple of decades than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.

— And his War on Students jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today so saddled with more than $1.7 trillion in student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize their future by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, Republicans said, government itself is a remote, dangerous and incompetent power that can legally use guns to enforce its will.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, democracy was not the solution to our problems, but democracy — government — instead was the problem itself.

He ridiculed the once-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were:

“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, wealthy people associated with Kirk’s and Reagan’s Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify this message about the dangers of too much democracy.

As the reporting from documented.net indicates, they’re working at it with as much enthusiasm today as ever.

It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was repeating things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from groups like the Heritage Foundation, the group documented.net wrote about yesterday.

Fox News today carries on the tradition, warning almost daily about the danger of “people in the streets” or political movements like anti-fascism and BLM.

When you look at the long arc of post-Agricultural Revolution human history you discover that Burke was right when he claimed that oligarchy — rule by the rich — has been the norm, not the exception.

And it’s generally provided at least a modicum of stability: feudal Europe changed so little for over a thousand years that we simply refer to that era as the Dark Ages followed by the Middle Ages without detail. It’s all kind of black-and-white fuzzy in our mind’s eye.

Popes, kings, queens, pharaohs, emperors: none allowed democracy because all knew it was both a threat to their wealth and power but also because, they asserted, it would render their nations unstable.

These historic leaders — and their modern day “strongman” versions emerging in former democracies like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, The Philippines, and Russia — are the model for many of today’s conservatives. And not just because they were rich.

Understanding this history gives us clues to how we can revive democracy in America. Step one is to help people realize that instability, like labor pains before birth, is not a bad thing for a democracy but most frequently is a sign of emerging and positive political and social advances.

Hopefully one day soon our vision of an all-inclusive democracy — the original promise of America, to quote historian Harvey Kaye — will be realized. But first we’re going to have to get past the millions of dollars mobilized by democracy’s skeptics.

I believe it’s possible. But it’s going to take all of us getting involved to make it happen. As both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama were fond of saying: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

Tag, we’re it.

===

hartmannsum (anno)

Hartmann bks sum 11 22

Hidd hist mono 2020

Nader intro roman what touches all must be approv by all

Mono tax 5k$/yr

Definition any single part of sys that dominates p 1

// cancer extraction

RR FTC stopped anti-mono

Consumers stripped of ability ~ mono

Pensions funds stolen

Hard to start sm biz

Early 1900 illegal corps to give $

Fox rw media

Teddy adam smith “ p6

Max profit at expense of all else

If get enough power → rival of govt b/c only check

Pt 1: FF ~ corp, nat mono good

Pt 2 FDR ~, bork; RR dereg destroy main st

Pt 3 show how stifle and sols

pt 1: EIC 1760’s domin global trade

TP 90k pounds, 24m cups, 1m$ now

Adam smith WoN: abolish privs of corps p 15 intimidate the legislature; danger “ 17

→ TJ bill of rts shd ban [no cite] in Fr 1786 ~ mono, pls keep in confidence/secret

Const = OS

Ltr TJ dec 1787 BoR

Madison // sys def: if any faction fed #10 = any gp of ppl who put own interest 1st, dom gov’t, weaken republic p 21

Patents

1880 std oil rock threat by law ohio so → NJ (charter mongering → DE, interlock bds; by 1900 26 trusts NJ DE controlled 80% of their mkts 27; ~ NY union 1894 pushed for NY to pull charter of std; stats on DE now; 1920’s - 80’s all states loosened p 30

Progressive teddy Tillman Act 1907 (WI 1905) felony give $ fed campaign; large fine, 2 yrs jail, if corp itself lose chart. 1921 harding got rid, tax 91-> 25% top; → roaring 20’s 1929 Gr Rep Depr // trump crash 2020 [2009?]

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pt 2 FDR dangers of fascism, for decentral “ p 34; 1/10 of 1% of corps owned 52% of assets of all of them; mfg 4% got 84% of profits of all of them 35; interlocking spheres of infl ~ sm biz;

Now worse: 1% of fam 58% of income growth 2009-14 37 bc of RR; 20 banks // 84% GDp; 12 have 70% of all bak asset; 4 corps 90% grain; 3 beef, walmart 25% groc mkt p 39

Post WW2 middle class origins p45 prod // wages peak 1970 9430 = 61K$ now; CEO ~ 91% put $ back in biz and wages

Trade liberalization/global japan plus big RR tax cut; since 70’s prod up 146% but wages flat [thus 2 workers, big corp profits] stats p 47 also 55; coke ceo gets 1kx worker;

Labor hist; anthro leisure → new feudalism

Stole govt: courts [election fraud bs] 2: pop support Powell memo → demon p 56; also high sch;

Fairness doct RR, 1996 telecomm act clinton elim mono rules; 9 most terrify words

Natural mono eg water, electricity; US pays more, pg&e kills pppl p 64; HI solar tax; Germany de-pvtize; US stopped by buckly, belotti, CU

Starve the beast/ dereg; EU healthcare soc so encourage bikes and ppl know smoking costs everyone [½ mill$?]

Libtards FEE funded by oil, steel chem etc; JBS welch on bd; milton f shill for real estate; libtard started 1946 CoC/NAM p73

Steven moore cap’l > democ

RR revo stats 76

BORK 81 uchic MF acolyte; pinochet; USSR → olig; consumer BS ploy; class war; efficiency //dodo; nixon solic genl → big infl RR admin [bosted by powell rwi] parrot by roberts

Pt 3:

Big ag mergers; hospitals non-profit, part of commons 101 → HMO nixon;

Media mono; air am; herit pays 2m$/yr rush, 1.3m hannity; fox lost 90m$/yr 5 yrs before profit [moonie]

Fox effect 2000 10k votes, won by 600 Fla; 106 perm and increasing (2006).

High % Am want xyz, but do not pass; 2019 prez debate bribe no q tho eliz and bernie brought up; SHOUT OUT TO MTA P115;

~ AA ,women , labor; inequality list of neg efx 124; united health ceo 1b$ compensation 125

Entre down 53%;

Sol immune sys; boost labor; 200m$ lobby RR → 3B 128 restore commons; brk up IN corps;

CORP DEATH PENALTY 136 hist gilded; pres cleveland ‘ iron heel 138; 1ST 4TH 5TH 14TH

Preemption laws ~ local regs; boost competition endit

HIDDEN OLIG 2021

ABE " FWD DANGER WITHIN author and finisher

2) control media and campaign finance (incl 3rd party fronts); enact agenda

Phase 3: take control of govt p2

2nd try So cotton slavery olig → 20’s gt rep depr

3rd powell 1971 → trump bannon deconst admin state; pompeo (and pence) koch ; list corrupt admin cabinet eg bernhardt

Good news big shocks lead to rapid change eg panic → am revo; 1929 crash; BUT DANGER → FASC

COVID trump dereg, mcconn gave 3T$ [voodoo.]; corp no liability p10 ;trump attacked media, used natl guard to clear laf sq for staffer photo op [upside down] ~ 1st Amend.

~ govt kochs: since 81 gop oppose all govt funct and taxes to pay for them; So Korea used US covid playbook, trump got rid of teams and called it hoax by dems to hurt him; free mkt for personal protection abd ventillators; PPE

Olig will use police for protection; John Dean “authoritative followers” p16

Orban started ~ ussr? 1989 → jail migrant kids, danger to xian ID, media cops loyal to him; ~ Soros (who paid for him to study abroad] ukrine BS info → djt; jail misinfo, he can ignore any law p20

Olig win needs 3: control media, bribery, control of parts of courts p21 → grab exec branch → police state

Toynbee 80 yr cycle 4 gens -> smedly butler → 80 yrs since end ww2 powell scotus buckley belotti legalize bribery p23

Murdoch → media control, 4th brnch/estate

1996 telecomm ~ nadler, mccain, sanders

Fairness doct p 25 pgms in public interest, station editorials → = time; 1987 RR ended and 2011 BO took off bks? Unprofitable news → profitable infotainment [pundit, opinion/hype] [[soc med monetize hate]]

Clear chan, cumulus, air am Salem prager hugh h; sinclair; murdoch; foreign owner cap raised

CU stevens dissent tokyo rose multinat corps

Buckley belotti 1976-8 → RR → CU 2010 takeover complete p32

ALEC 1975 corp $

Gillen princeton

Fedsoc olin 1982 RR revo; 30% Mcconn (sounds low its thefed BS])

Govt trust stats; p39

J carter and gore “ 42-3

2nd olig So regional, kochs/RWI → nat’l thus 2nd civil war? Could win #3

PT 2: EIC locke, enlightenment: locke nature intended ppl to be free → TJ decl indep; transformation of world view → Am revo [a new story?!] john adams duties and obligations [to?] lord of the flies is BS says anthro 52-4; paine 1st principles

Slavery neg and most thought wd fade soon but cotton gin [note technol // olig waves; proto print ] gin did work of 50 ppl; 250$ slave → 1200 dred scott; calhoun

After civil war debt peonage and KKK [police slave patrols]

1951 russell kirk mod conservatism, ~ Brown v bd, pro apartheid; edmund burke

Mod slavery PIC; RR led to loss of ⅓ fm farm? SJ field slaughterhouse cases

Corps now use medical insurance to bind ppl 78

Debt collector 11b$/yr payday loans; college debt

3 men Ala hanged for possess Helper bk 82 slavery stunts states, makes ppl poor

Ehrlichman says war on drug to go after hippies and AA

PT4 OLIG

Get 14th (list barons) 94

Pres cleveland iron heel "

1-2 yrs corps had to prove serve public interest, thousands dissolved each yr [no cite]

Step 1: lies keep safe, gingrich lang memo; deconstr state; scapegoat to escape anger/acctability ~ POC; normalize outrageous acts/lang

Get cops on side; obedience/loyalty; militias

Pt 6 solutions:

Path to olig post powell/rr: 1 build rwi , pop media and academic

2 use $ to weaken camp fin law 3 own indiv pols → party 4 grab govt, weaken protections on ppl

5 police state to protect olig power THUS W HAVE TO BRK DARK $ p132

Sol: ~ murdoch, free press; FDR economic rights, health care, a job, educ; tax rich; hatch act boost own party; public $ for elections; support resistance white rose; restore election integrity 149; build fund long term not 3 yr seed grant; help good gop rebuild; boost prog dems

Kirk coda

Endit

HIDDEN SCOTUS 2019

Abe refuses to implement dred scot; mult eg ppl want xyz but corps do not; dark$ corrupts sys b/c of scotus; strikes down laws passed by congr and prez; [brn v bd myth/aberration]; FF TJ wary, suicide pact p7; property rights for commoners new;

PT ONE FF:

LOCKE COLLECTIVE, montesquieu, iroq confed; hamilton arg for ct

Marbury judges appted by outgoing not given papers by new admin? TJ horrified wrote to abigail despotic bench p26 suicide pact; not used till Taney 1856 in Dred Scott

Pwl memo buckley; martin linen prot ~ 2x jeopardy 5th amend; belloti 1st amend; white brennan and marshall dissent; fedsoc boost corp BS

1938 hugo black on 14th use p34

BORK 1987 nom; 1966 arg → 1977 cont tv v gte sylvania to kill anti-monop;

Originalism ~ Grant

Kochs → mcconn 44 judges one day 2/19

Normal jud ethics wd req thomas and scalia to recuse from CU etc (scalia junket john poindexter had cas before ct; p 47

Rep Louise Slaughter every term intro bill

CU CASE P 48- stevens sotomayer dissent; rbg breyer too; dissent called out 4 scotus; stevens said corp rts wd harm mkt of ideas b/c flooded p50 flood/blitz will → loss of faith their voice/vote matters; 2014 mccutcheon 51; fund change to us pol sys; JC “

1819 dartmouth case; commerce clause; const not written to protect hu rights so much as prop rights 58

Cleveland 1888 sotu → ppl’s masters

So econ power, stats 60; slavery, fug slave act; prigg bounty hunter → dred scott;

PT TWO SCOTUS RULES ~ PPL

Gilded age, unions suppressed, glut labor drove down wages; Allgeyer 14th right “liberty to contract; reinterp 14th due process to freedom of contract, no min wage, child labor[lochner] p 71 4 horseman originalists social darwin laizzez faire; 1935 ~ fdr agric adj act nat’ ind recovery act unconst; passed w ⅔ and ¾ congress; 80/70%; 1936 scotus struck dn ny state min wage women and children Morehead v NY; in 13 mos struck down most bills in hist; 1937 lab rel act and soc sec, cd kill new deal 74; after landslide reelect fdr asked to appt one just for each over 70 who wd not retire;[avg life expect 58]; country was much bigger so made sense to expand ct, plan wd get him 6; never voted on just owen roberts switch ; Wa state min wage law 5-4; 2 mos later Soc Sec ruled OK p 77; horseman ret → hugo black;

Scotus backed labor in 1937 and 1944 but 1949 taft hartley over truman veto 79; nat rtw comm walton 1968

Scotus v civil rights; plessy; jim crow; brn v bd; pwl get late call H&W affair died of illegal abortion, voted for roe; based on privacy 9th 14th;

Enviro: no rts of nture but general welfare of the ppl 94; nixon thot green try to destroy the sys but signed bills [safe sen lost?] th vetoed clean water act 1972?

Pruitt and anne gorsuch said epa shd not exist; made ant-grn gop 10 commandments 99

1999 BC not reg ghg → mass v (romney?) stevens maj ~ roberts, scalia thomas diss; alito and th say overturn p100;

Our children’s trust, 104 sj field quotes taney 103 [on rt side] rivers navigate for common use

Kennedy swing vote on env → brett k [gorsuch? Acb?]

How communities fight back: political process and regs 2 prop rights infringed by pollution and agw 3rd is hu rights arg CELDEF right to self gov’t 109 ~ corp person 110 vandana shiva mendocino; dillon’s rule

How ideologues seized ct: nixon sabotage lbj VN peace talks; 113 got 4 scotus picks incl powell; RR oct surprise → iran contra [in my heart i know innocent] → scalia and thomas [1st since nixon] b41 lawyer bill barr on iran contra [cheney] b41 sold WMD to saddam 119 cap weinberger et al pardon;

Gov jeb kath harris voter purge 124; gov bush tx gave lust of 8k felons for purge in fla 125

Weyrich i do not want everybody to vote 126; astro brooks bros riot; ted cruz and roberts on case [brett spox/][schlapp]] wapo recount gore 171 more votes 129 nyt 115

PART THREE to save planet democ and mod scotus

Add justices, term limit, cameras in ctrm; amend const; strip ct [make explicit in bill ct can’t overturn? Roberts on abortion] 150

AGW

List of scotus damage endit