Saturday, January 23, 2010

Why Five Members of SCOTUS Are Nuttier Than Fruit Cakes!!

by len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

In the worst decision since Bush v Gore, the US Supreme Court has worked a 'miracle'. Five 'justices' --John G. Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Antony Kennedy --have conspired to turn mere words on paper into living, breathing 'human beings' and have decreed that these corporations, mere 'legal abstractions', have the same rights of free speech as do living breathing human beings. Who is the 'conspiracy theorist', who is nuttiest when five ideologues in robes can dictate to you that you treat mere 'abstractions' --pieces of paper --as if they were people?

The crooks on K-street may resume their on-going auction of the United States knowing that their nefarious bargains have been blessed by the 'high court', a cult of weird robed people who believe weird things! 'Corporations' --mere abstractions --are given license to sell out the nation and call it 'free speech'!

Should you dare to use the term 'conspiracy' to describe the activities of these crooks on K-street --the lobbies for Israel and other foreign entities --you will be labeled a 'conspiracy theorist'! But SCOTUS, meanwhile, gets away with calling words on paper a 'person' and giving them rights! I ask you: who is nuttier? You for believing what volumes of federal laws have called 'conspiracies'? Or --the SUPREME court who believes an embossed piece of paper with a corporate seal from Delaware on it is a real, living breathing person? I will tell you what I think! I think that five members of the Supreme Court of the United States are nuttier than fruit cakes!

Conspiracies Exist: SCOTUS IS One!

The Supreme Court itself has said 'conspiracies eixst' in numerous decisions that you can look up for yourself at Findlaw or Cornell University Law Library online. When there are thousands of pages of case law having to do with conspiracies, the notion that they don't exist is just plain stupid! The only folk trying to discount 'conspiracies' are ring wing nuts who are clearly up to their necks in numerous treasonous conspiracies to undermine American democracy and wage wars of naked aggression and oil plunder! The latest SCOTUS decision is the result and the proof of my charge.

Certain types of conspiracies were made 'legal' long ago. They are called 'corporations' and 'geniuses' on the high court think that they are 'real folk' and treat them accordingly. In fact, corporations are just ink on paper! If that! Today --you can form a corporation online and save the ink! The Supreme Court will think you are 'real' and may even grant you privileges that you have not earned or deserve. If you can afford an office on K-street or if you have enough corporate money to buy some Reps and/or Senators, you might even enlist the US military for a little invasion and resource theft on your behalf! You could line your pockets with the sacrifice of American lives and the lives of your victims.

SCOTUS has said that those 'conspiracies of rich men' are people --living, breathing people --who have rights and among those presumably inalienable rights is the right to bribe office seekers with monies that have most certainly bilked out of you and millions of other people, real people with hearts, lungs, mouths, and opinions. In an absurd Kafkaesque world of GOP manufacture, mere ink and paper have more rights, more power, more clout more impact upon the world than do you, a real person in a real word!
Less than two years after Buckley, Bellotti re-affirmed the First Amendment principle that the Government lacks thepower to restrict political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity. 435 U.S., at 784–785. Thus the law stood until Austin up-held a corporate independent expenditure restriction, bypassing Buckley and Bellotti by recognizing a new governmental interest inpreventing “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of [corporate] wealth . . . that have little or no correlation to thepublic’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” 494 U. S., at 660. Pp. 25–32. (c

This Court is confronted with conflicting lines of precedent: a pre-Austin line forbidding speech restrictions based on the speaker’s corporate identity and a post-Austin line permitting them. Neither Austin’s antidistortion rationale nor the Government’s other justifica-tions support §441b’s restrictions. Pp. 32–47.

--SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION, APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, No. 08–205.
Nevertheless, when a 'conspiracy of rich men' has been granted privilege and status, you will be told that 'conspiracies' do not exist! If that were so, why has the US Supreme Court handed down so many cases defining them and applying to them the laws of these United States? And why are there so many US laws having to do with 'conspiracies' if 'conspiracies' did not exist?The fascist domination of American life and debate is possible because people have 'bought into' the pernicious notion of 'corporate personhood'. This notion facilitates More's 'conspiracy of rich men'.

Mere legal abstractions are absurdly accorded rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, flesh and blood people. Corporations are given license to lie about misdeeds, incompetence and corporate criminality, literally, a 'conspiracy of rich men --the Tea Baggers and idiots who have bought into it; and the GOP consultants, firms, and focus groups who dreamed it all up. And, just as egregious, the Supreme Court itself where the majority fussed about a red herring: corporations losing a voice in the political process! The words 'censorship' and 'banned speech' was banded about as if they were truly concerned about it but would not have been if those affected had not been the GOPs corporate sponsors who were clearly most affected.

Is the Voice of 'Labor' Silenced?

One can only conclude that SCOTUS's problem with the law as it had been was that labor unions were on an equal footing with the big, conservative corporations! Before the Supreme Court itself subverted Federal Election laws, both corporations and labor unions were free to voice any political opinion about any issue or candidate whenever they wanted! We can't have that, now can we? Simply, the five right wing extremists on the court have, as they did with Bush v Gore, labored mightily to hatch a rationalization for lies and bulshit, a rationalization that sounds scholarly, legal and erudite but which is, in fact, a lod of codswallop and high falutin' sounding crap!!

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Who is SCOTUS protecting and favoring? The Carvellian quick respons: the richest one percent of the US population which, in fact, owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined. The Supreme Court of the Unites States, infiltrated by the likes of Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts, have partnered with the US right wing to rob the US population with "trickle down theory" and other nonsense utterly unsupported with fact or evidence.

Here are some assorted facts that paint the ugly picture.

  • In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. [Source: Source: Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ].
  • The top ten percent of the US population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. [Source: Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5].
  • One percent of the US population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. [Source: Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Business, 1993].
  • The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent....
  • Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
  • Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined...
    Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We've gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn't seen since the teens and 1920s.’" [Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999; addendum: since 1999, the date the source was published, the situation is much, much worse. Today --just ONE PERCENT own more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. GOP incompetence and criminality moves so fast these days, it's hard to keep up!].
  • The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. [Source: Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108].
  • Federal Reserve median family net worth by percentile for 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Federal Reserve Bulletin January 2003, pp. 1-36). Note the small gains for the bottom 75% of the population and larger gains for the upper 25% and that the 1998 to 2001 gains were largest.

    --US Wealth Distributions 1989-2001

Republicans bought the scam because it made them feel good about being greedy, shallow bastards. The appeal is obvious: trickle down rationalized greed but only after the fact; it made one feel good about one's worst impulses, motives, and elitist bigotry.
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Friday, January 22, 2010

Jim Hightower: 'A Black-Robed' Coup d'Etat'

by Jim Hightower

Last September, I wrote The Hightower Lowdown about how the Roberts' Court could throw out over 100 years of campaign finance law.

Remember their names: Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.

Yesterday, from within the dark isolation of the Supreme Court, these five men pulled off a black-robed coup against the American people's democratic authority. In an unprecedented perversion of judicial power, this court cabal has decreed that corporations have a free-speech "right" to dip into their corporate coffers and spend unlimited sums of money to elect or defeat candidates of their choosing.

Corporate interests already had too much money power over our political system. No other group in America comes anywhere near the spending clout that this relatively small clutch of wealthy special interests wields over our elections and government. So it's ludicrous for anyone – much less Supreme Court judges – to argue that the corporate voice is a victim of political "censorship." This is not merely judicial activism, it is judicial radicalism.

Thomas Jefferson warned about the dangerous rise of corporate power, declaring that must "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations." Today, I'm sure that founding patriots like Jefferson are not simply spinning in their graves at the Supreme Court's surrender to this aristocracy – they're trying to claw their way out of their graves to throttle all five of the traitors.

We MUST fight back. Many good groups are working on this issue, and we all have to get involved to fight against this corporate take over of our political system. Public Citizen has a petition we can sign. Common Cause is asking us to contact your congressperson and make sure they have signed on to the Fair Elections Now Act. I mentioned other good groups that are working on this issue. Get in touch with them. Let's fight the good fight... and win! Onward!

petition we can sign. Common Cause is asking us to contact your congressperson and make sure they have signed on to the Fair Elections Now Act. I mentioned other good groups that are working on t<

Thursday, January 21, 2010

SCOTUS and CONGRESS ABOLISH DEMOCRACY

by Jane Gray, via Facebook

Just hours ago, the Supreme Court gave Corporate America a green light to use its immense wealth to buy elected officials.

The court's shocking decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck down 60 years of legal precedent prohibiting corporations from making campaign expenditures to attack or support political candidates.

The court ruled that the First Amendment - designed to protect the speech of real, live humans - guarantees for-profit corporations the right to influence elections.

This is nothing short of a massive assault on the very foundation of American democracy.

Please watch this special video on what Public Citizen is doing in response to the Supreme Court's decision. Then sign our Citizen's Free Speech Petition calling for a constitutional amendment ensuring corporate power doesn't overwhelm our democracy. And forward my email to your family and friends so they can join our campaign, too.

We must fight back. The lines are clearly drawn. PEOPLE V. CORPORATIONS.

That's why Public Citizen is launching a historic campaign to pass a constitutional amendment on behalf of human beings. To restore human beings to the center of the political process. To say no to unfettered corporate power. And we need your help.

In the wake of the court's decision, corporations can pour virtually unlimited amounts of cash into political campaigns. If candidates challenge the corporate agenda, they will be buried under mountains of corporate cash. If candidates do the bidding of a corporation, they will be rewarded from corporate America's bottomless treasury.

The only surefire solution to a corporate takeover of American democracy is a constitutional amendment re-establishing that First Amendment protections (except for freedom of the press) do not apply to for-profit corporations.

Corporations are not human beings. Corporations should not be free to use their massive concentrations of financial power to drown out the voices of real people.

Please watch this special video on what Public Citizen is doing in response to the Supreme Court's decision.

After watching the short video, you can take immediate action by signing the Citizen's Free Speech Petition and stand with your fellow humans against corporate power.

And I need you to forward my email to your friends and family. Urge them to watch the video and sign the Citizen's Free Speech Petition, too.

In the coming weeks and months, you will be hearing more about Public Citizen's nationwide mobilization to protect the speech of human beings. You will be asked to participate, agitate and organize. The framers of the Constitution did not intend for the First Amendment to apply to for-profit corporations, and it shouldn't. We are not now going to surrender our democratic institutions to the control of powerful corporations.

Help us fight back.


Please watch this special video on what Public Citizen is doing in response to the Supreme Court's decision. Then sign the petition and forward this email to all your friends and family members.

Join Public Citizen's grassroots mobilization. Help us take back our democracy.

Join the campaign!


Robert Weissman, President

P.S. Please watch this special video on how you can take action. Then sign our Citizen's Free Speech Petition and urge your friends to do the same. Together, we can restore citizens' control to our political system and ensure corporate power doesn't overwhelm our democracy by amending our constitution to protect the free speech rights of citizens.

My own comments with regard to this outrage are inadequate. Nothing I might say is more to the point or more appropriate than the following from Che Guevara's treatise on Guerilla Warfare:
People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.

--Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Guerilla Warfare
Now --someone posted the 'official spin' on my FB page. It reads:
"Today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a landmark victory for free speech, making clear in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that under the First Amendment the government cannot stifle dissent by restricting the right of corporations to spend money on independent political speech."

--U.S. Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Free Speech In Citizens United Case
BULLSHIT!

Corporations are not people! Granting them rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, breathing, thinking people is nonsense and sophistry. I smell the work of a GOP consulting firm and focus group.

Secondly, people cannot match the amount of money's available to corporations to buy governmental 'winks and nods' or sway elections unfairly for venal corporate causes. SCOTUS has now given corporations --mere legal abstractions --the 'right' to BUY their politicians, political whores inside and around the government, on the open market!

POLITICAL PROSTITUTION

The GOP wrecked the economy, transferred wealth to just one percent of the population. Now the GOP has the nerve --the un-mitigated gaul -- to legalize political prostitution by making bribery by corporations legal. What venal sophistry! The government of the US is no longer legitimate. Revolution!

The fascist domination of American life and debate is possible because people have 'bought into' the pernicious notion of 'corporate personhood'. This notion facilitates More's 'conspiracy of rich men'.

Mere legal abstractions are absurdly accorded rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, flesh and blood people.


Corporations are given license to lie about misdeeds, incompetence and corporate criminality, literally, a 'conspiracy of rich men: the Tea Baggers and idiots who have bought into it; and the GOP consultants, firms, and focus groups who dreamed it all up, the liars whose offices line K-Street.

Don't try to peddle the bullshit story that this is a victory for 'free speech'. Rather --this is the DEATH of it!
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Loss of American Democracy

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

A primary focus of the Mexican revolution of 1910 was the thirty-one year Presidency of Porfirio Diaz. It was during Diaz's presidency, that power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a ruling elite just as power and wealth was concentrated in the hands of a ruling elite in the U.S. with the ascension of Ronald Reagan. In Mexico, some 100 years ago, the 'common people' were effectively disenfranchised, suffering injustices and deprivation throughout the countryside and in the cities.

Today, in the United States, as in Mexico 100 years ago, just one percent of the entire population owns more than about 95 percent of the rest of us combined. This 'ruling elite' is the result and sole beneficiary of Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982. The upward flow of wealth was reversed briefly in Clinton's second term but resumed with additional tax cuts under Bush. It is believed wrongly that tax cuts stimulate investment and thus employment. That is called 'Trickle Down Theory'. In fact, investment in American enterprise has declined following every GOP tax cut and, as a result, employment has likewise declined. The official numbers that prove my assertions may be found at the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Commerce Dept-Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Reagan's tax cut of 1982, for example, was followed by a depression of some two years in which millions lost their jobs. Residents in 'boomtown' Houston were forced to live in tent cities when their homes were foreclosed upon. Others lived under bridges within view of the gleaming skyscrapers of glittering, corporate Houston. The official stats at the Bureau of Labor Statistics will reveal Reagan to have been among the very worst post World War II Presidents in terms of GDP and job growth. Jimmy Carter, reviled by Reagan-heads, is, in fact, among the best US Presidents, second in terms of both GDP and job growth. In those categories, Carter outperforms all GOP Presidents since World War II.

Back to Mexico, where a new generation hoped that a new election, called for in the Mexican Constitution, would usher in a progressive, more egalitarian era. They were disappointed when the Díaz machine chose to exercise their power indefinitely. Madero demanded that Diaz renounce his power and step down. Madero formed the ''Anti-reeleccionista'' Party and campaigned against Diaz throughout Mexico.

Madero supported democracy and a 'rule of law', in other words, holding a freely elected government to account within the 'strict limits of the law'. Naturally, his success and popularity represented a threat to the entrenched government, the base, elite support behind Porfirio Diaz. Marero dared declare himself the rightful president until new elections could be held. Madero promised a return of lands confiscated by Diaz; he supported universal suffrage, and just one term for the office of President. Madero's call for an uprising on November 20th, 1910, marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.

It is at this point that Mexican history and US history diverge. In the United States, the entrenched powers were momentarily threatened by the election of 2000. Florida was Bush territory and the fix was supposed to have been in thanks to Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his ghoulish Secretary of State. How embarrassing it might have been had 'his' state cast its 'electoral votes' for Al Gore --a (gasp) Democrat. A 'White Riot' of GOP brownshirts were bussed to Florida, a trip paid for by the Bush Jr campaign. Their assignment: stop the recount while Bush was still ahead. As the GOP filed suit to stop the re-counters from doing the work legally assigned to them, a sitting Supreme Court justice would issue one of the most absurd if not stupid statements in American history:
Count first and rule upon legality afterwards is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance that democratic stability requires.

--Antonin Scalia
Excuse me! Elections are the purview of 'states' and the Florida Supreme Court had, in fact, heard the case and had, in fact, ruled upon its legality. What right had SCOTUS to rule upon what is, in fact, a state election to begin with? Scalia's idiocy if not his manhood was appropriately vivisected by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
I might join The Chief Justice were it my commission to interpret Florida law. But disagreement with the Florida court's interpretation of its own State's law does not warrant the conclusion that the justices of that court have legislated. There is no cause here to believe that the members of Florida's high court have done less than "their mortal best to discharge their oath of office," Sumner v. Mata, 449 U. S. 539, 549 (1981), and no cause to upset their reasoned interpretation of Florida law.

...

In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.

I dissent.

--GEORGE W. BUSH, et al., PETITIONERS v. ALBERT GORE, Jr., et al. on writ of certiorari to the florida supreme court, [December 12, 2000]; Justice Ginsburg, with whom Justice Stevens joins, and with whom Justice Souter and Justice Breyer join as to Part I, dissenting.
Clearly, SCOTUS had no standing, no right under law, to rule upon any decision by the Florida Supreme Court with respect to its own state laws and the conduct of its own elections.

Surely, if all the votes had been counted, Gore would have won and the nation spared the loss of republic, the wars of naked aggression, oil theft, capital war crimes and atrocities that followed upon Bush's assumption of the 'throne'.

Indeed, a revolution was fought in America and the enemies of Democracy, the treasonous enemies of the American republic, won! GOP brownshirts and 'white rioters' carried the day on behalf of the illegitimate regime of George W. Bush. It would properly be described as a coup d'etat! And the wrong side won! The men in 'white shirts' were neo-Nazis employed by the George W. Bush campaign!

Our fears were justified. Bush represented the interests of just one percent of the nation as Diaz had represented just one percent of the Mexican population in 1910. As might be expected, Bush paid for his support with tax cuts benefiting only the very rich ruling elite. Today, as a result of his policies and payoff, just one percent of the nation owns more than about 95 percent of the rest of us combined. This, likewise, describes the conditions in Mexico just prior to the Revolution of 1910. Things worked out a little differently in Mexico some 100 years ago.
On November 14th, in Cuchillo Parado in the state of Chihuahua, Toribio Ortega and a small group of followers took up arms. On the 18th in Puebla, Diaz's authorities uncovered preparations for an uprising in the home of the brothers Maximo and Aquiles Serdán, who where made to pay with their lives. Back in Chihuahua, Madero was able to persuade Pascual Orozco and Francisco ("Pancho") Villa to join the revolution. Though they had no military experience, Orozco and Villa proved to be excellent strategists, and they earned the allegiance of the people of northern Mexico, who were particularly unhappy about the abusive ranchers and landlords who ran the North.

In March of 1911, Emiliano Zapata led the uprising of the peasants of Morelos to claim their rights over local land and water. At the same time, armed revolt began in many other parts of the country. The "Maderista" troops, and the national anger which inspired them, defeated the army of Diaz within six months. The decisive victory of the Mexican Revolution was the capture of Ciudad Juarez, just across the river from El Paso, by Orozco and Villa. Porfirio Diaz then resigned as President and fled to exile in France, where he died in 1915.

With the collapse of the Díaz regime, the Mexican Congress elected Francisco León de la Barra as President Pro-Temp and called for national popular elections, which resulted in the victory of Francisco I. Madero as President and José María Pino Suárez as Vice-President.

The Mexican Revolution 1910

Abba: Fernando
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Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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