On January 21, as a part of our Nationwide Day of Action to overturn Citizens United v. FEC and end corporate rule, Public Citizen is working with local activists to ‘apprehend’ corporate impostors posing as ‘people’ with the same constitutional rights as the rest of us.
We'll be exposing these impostors to the light of day in cities and towns throughout the nation, and together with local activists we'll be calling on their elected officials to support a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United and end corporate domination of our democracy.
Comment: For those in NYC who are interested, visit this event webpage and this flyer (front & back). This is not just a one day event but will become an on-going effort to publicly expose corporate connections to the political and legal systems and move from protest to reconciliation.
The defining political issue of 2012 won't be the government's size. It will be who government is for.
Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.
But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn't about government's size. It's the growing perception that government isn't working for average people. It's for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.
In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.
Corporations are artificial creations of the state and receive special protections from the state. Thus, claims attorney and author Jeff Clements, corporations should not have the same Constitutional rights as individuals even though some argue that they are simply organized associations of individuals.
In this interview with Michael Ostrolenk, Mr. Clements outlines his belief that many of the abuses of crony capitalism are allowed by corporations exploiting these illegitimate “rights.”
He also exposes how tobacco industry attorney turned Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, helped to spearhead the creation of a constitutional right to corporate “speech” which was recently strengthened by theCitizens United decision. Read more about this issue (and buy his new bookCorporations Are Not People) at Mr. Clement’s website.
My close friend Mike Lofgren writes an important essay describing the nature of ‘truth' in the Orwellian echo chamber that is closing the American mind in the 21st Century.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.orgstates that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.
In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:
“As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”
One’s only reaction to this statement is to blink in disbelief and wonder: is Panetta that stupid, or does he think that we, the supposedly self-governing citizens of this country, are that stupid?
Adriana discusses her thinking about heterarchy, including initial thoughts about five laws of heterarchy.
A heterarchy is a system of organization replete with overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendancy, and/or divergent-but-coexistent patterns of relation. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same “horizontal” position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role.
“Hierarchies seem to be like oxygen: they’re all around us, pervasive, visible only to those who study them. Hierarchies are the most efficient system for management and distribution of scarce resources… given that the physical world is defined by scarcity of all sorts, it goes a long way toward explaining hierarchy as our default organizational structure….There is potential to come up with alternatives to our hierarchical organizational defaults, and I think that would be good news for all those trapped in stifling and disempowering organizations.”
Lots of people seem to be getting value out of these posts on personal resilience, so I will keep adding them.
Question:
Do you know of any service that will check a person's exposure on the web? I wasn't always as careful with my online activities as I'm trying to be now, and it'd be nice to know what sort of damage control I'm looking at in terms of going forward with my personal brand.
Answer:
Type your name into Google. Take a look at the first 3-5 pages of links you get (as well as the images). If you don't see that much, don't worry about it. If you see anything that you control and can delete, do it now. It will take a couple of months, but it will eventually fade away. Other than that, there isn't much you can do about it.
An economic model that seeks to include the cost of negative externalities into the pricing of goods and services. Supporters of this type of economic system feel products and activities that direct or indirectly cause harmful consequences to living beings and/or the environment should be accordingly taxed to reflect the somewhat hidden costs.
