Good day HotCoffee,

Another day, another you can't make this stuff up.

The migrant horde marching toward the United States is suing the country in which they have not yet arrived. The fleftie/socialists tell us they are all poor, uneducated, and barely have more than one change of clothes but somehow they have an amazing understanding of our intricate and complicated legal system.

President Trumps brilliant quote on the topic,

“We have our military now on the border,” Trump said to cheers from the audience. “And I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight.”

Till later,

The truly detestable and racist comments on this dead, sad little blog are from the fetid backwaters of the alt-right swamp -- proven liars, bigots, dead-enders and, well, Trumpified dummies.

Speaking of whom, heeere's old and demented Granny Gobshite, the gutless, "lily white" wonder, flappin' her gums and not saying anything....

Jesus says...

Thom Hartmann quotes - from Goodreads (Fair Use)

“Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it”
― Thom Hartmann

“Master Stanley used to tell me that what I was doing was nowhere near as important as the place within myself from where I was doing it. For example, a person could be teaching others out of a selfless motive, or out of a desire for power or glory: the former had a positive impact on the world, whereas the latter had a negative impact, even though the same identical teaching may have been imparted. “It’s the spirit that’s important,” he would say. “It’s even more important than the act. Going to work in a gas station and providing for your family out of love is more important than creating a mighty religious work out of a desire for glory or power.” ― Thom Hartmann, The Prophet's Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

“And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going "out to nature" to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late

“Many people today think that the Tea Act—which led to the Boston Tea Party—was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by the American colonists. That's where the whole "Taxation Without Representation" meme came from.

Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade and to exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea that it was unable to sell and holding in inventory.

In other words, the Tea Act was the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“It’s ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves “democratic socialist” in their organization—Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden—actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses.”
― Thom Hartmann, Rebooting the American Dream

“Both Jefferson and Adams were wary of priests in all forms, as they both knew theocracies are enemies of democracy. Jefferson pointed out that the Indians shared their wariness:”
― Thom Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy

“The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“An important book for understanding the history of our economic boom & bust cycles. It's an eye-opening account of how we are repeating the mistakes of the 1760's, 1850's, and 1920's. The author is a brilliant writer and is so good at explaining even the most complex subjects in a compelling & easy to understand way. The next crash will be painful but it's important to understand what is being done to us, and how we can learn from history and take action.”
― Thom Hartmann

“June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Bankers’ ” noted, “The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths.”107”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“the Occupy Movement flared up and began setting up tents in public parks all around the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Seattle. But it actually happened exactly eighty years earlier, when the nation was drowning in President Hoover’s Great Depression, and not President Bush’s Great Recession. These settlements weren’t called “occupations” at the time, they were called “Hoovervilles.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“There is more carbon in the atmosphere trapping heat and moisture than ever before in the 165,000 years of human history.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, “persons” and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it’s perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It“His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Corporations haven’t limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment—passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution—protects their right “against discrimination” by a local community that doesn’t want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“I hold it to be impracticable”4 to try to define it or any right narrowly in a Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn’t say that corporations are people. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written with that idea; corporations aren’t mentioned anywhere in the document or its Amendments. For America’s first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, “No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans.” In fact, the Founders were quite clear (as you can see from Hamilton’s debate earlier) that only humans inherently have rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it’s in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit “new” rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“since 1886, the Bill of Rights has been explicitly applied to corporations. Perhaps most astoundingly, no branch of the U.S. government ever formally enacted corporate personhood “rights”: • The public never voted on it. • It was never enacted into law by any legislature. • It was never even stated by a decision after arguments before the Supreme Court.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“for one hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact conclude that “corporations are persons.” But this book will show that the Court never stated this: it was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, a commentary called a headnote.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child“We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we’re releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated].”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we’re causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.

Which is exactly what happened.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“The clause that grants all “persons” equal protection under the law, in context, seems to apply pretty clearly only to human beings “born or naturalized” in the United States of America. But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head,”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“in previous decades a chemical company took to the Supreme Court a case asserting its Fourth Amendment “right to privacy” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s snooping into its illegal chemical discharges.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“If this trend continues, it’s probably just a matter of time before a corporation (maybe one of the many mercenary forces that emerged out of George W. Bush’s Iraq War?) claims the Second Amendment right to bear arms anywhere, anytime, and your credit card company’s bill collector shows up at your home with a sidearm.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Humans are born with human rights. Those human rights are inherent—”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights“nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn’t even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They’re explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights“Breaking Big Money's Grip on America is "a brilliant analysis of where we are and where we need to go. Read this book.”
― Thom Hartmann

“The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].”They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it.And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing?The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states.Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional.President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional.The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people—representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy—the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich,” Moyers”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy.

After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich....

As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.”
― Thom Hartmann, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

“As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites. The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy. After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich.... the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.” ― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined and as independent as myself, who, not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield up their opinions to mine. Mutual concessions is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”*” ― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights “There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.”
― Thom Hartmann, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

“generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can’t do to you. [It] says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“The Constitution doesn’t give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, “natural rights” that are held “The year Reagan was sworn into office, 1981, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. ... Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods.This has resulted in an enormous trade imbalance, one that has grown from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion deficit by 2012.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“It’s estimated that the Arctic, within seven years and maybe as soon as 2015, will have its first ice-free summer in the last 700,000 years (keep in mind that humans have only been on this planet for 165,000 years). Earlier projections predicted ice-free summers as far out in the future as 2080.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“natural persons.” The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Dickens knew there were vast reserves of methane hydrate trapped frozen in sea-beds all around the world and wondered what would happen if a lot of that frozen methane on the sea floor had melted from a solid into a gas, and bubbled up from the ocean’s depths? Would it be enough to account for the “signature” of carbon-12 that geologists were finding in the rocks associated with the Permian Mass Extinction? So he went back to the lab and melted frozen methane in water warm enough. The results were dramatic. The gas not only dissolved into the water, but it also rose up out of the water and into the air. Dickens published a paper in 1999 suggesting that a 5 degree Celsius increase in ocean temperatures would have been adequate to melt enough methane hydrate crystals to create the Permian carbon-12 signature. And such a massive release of methane, itself a greenhouse gas vastly more potent than CO2, would also trigger a catastrophic, swift warming of the planet.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don’t even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“Most Americans — 78% to be exact — drive fewer than 40 miles per day. Which means that for more than three-quarters of us, we really don’t need gasoline at all. Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don’t even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped.Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him.

Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.”
― Thom Hartmann

“as the consequences of global warming further manifest themselves, political will for a hard cap will undoubtedly build, just like it did with sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain in the 1980s. It’s rarely discussed in the press, but President George Herbert Walker Bush successfully pushed through a cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide which radically reduced acid rain.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinctionhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1433.Thom_Hartmann?page=1

Hey DianeR,

I'll be back later. when the DumbSh*t is done wapping Thoms blog in his Toilet Paper!

To much horse manure at the moment....the stench is overwhelming...PEW!

Will Smith says...

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights
by Thom Hartmann

Discover more about "Unequal Protection"

Buy from Amazon

Presidents and others, and their comments on corporations

fas-cism (fash'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism. [Ital. fascio, group.] -fas'cist n. -fas-cis'tic(fa-shis'tik) adj.
-- The American Heritage Dictionary 1983 Houghton Mifflin Company

"There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses."
-- James Madison

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army.
Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."
-- Andrew Jackson

"I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion - the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government - would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities."
-- Martin Van Buren

"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
-- Grover Cleveland

"The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural person and the fictitious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act.
"Man is the handiwork of God and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose; the corporation is the handiwork of man and created to carry out a money-making policy.
"There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter.
"A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view."
-- Secretary of State and 3-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan

"I again recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party. Let individuals contribute as they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly."
-- Theodore Roosevelt

"The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign - that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole - some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct."
-- Theodore Roosevelt

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
--Theodore Roosevelt, 19-Apr-06

"We are a business people. The tillers of the soil, the wage workers, the business men - these are the three big and vitally important divisions of our population. The welfare of each. division is vitally necessary to the welfare of the people as a whole.
"The great mass of business is of course done by men whose business is either small or of moderate size. The middle sized business men form an element of strength which is of literally incalculable value to the nation. Taken as a class, they are among our best citizens. They have not been seekers after enormous fortunes; they have been moderately and justly prosperous, by reason of dealing fairly with their customers, competitors, and employees. They are satisfied with a legitimate profit that will pay their expenses of living and lay by something for those who come after, and the additional amount necessary for the betterment and improvement of their plant. The average business man of this type is, as a rule, a leading citizen of his community, foremost in everything that tells for its betterment, a man whom his neighbors look up to and respect; he is in no sense dangerous to his community, just because he is an integral part of his community, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. His life fibers are intertwined with the life fibers of his fellow citizens
"So much for the small business man and the middle-sized business man. Now for big business.
"It is imperative to exercise over big business a control and supervision which is unnecessary as regards small business. All business must be conducted under the law, and all business men, big or little, must act justly. But a wicked big interest is necessarily more dangerous to the community than a wicked little interest. 'Big business' in the past has been responsible for much of the special privilege which must be unsparingly cut out of our national life.
"I do not believe in making mere size of and by itself criminal. The mere fact of size, however, does unquestionably carry the potentiality of such grave wrongdoing that there should be by law provision made for the strict supervision and regulation of these great industrial concerns doing an interstate business, much as we now regulate the transportation agencies which are engaged in interstate business. The antitrust law does good in so far as it can be invoked against combinations which really are monopolies or which restrict production or which artificially raise prices.
"The important thing is this: that, under such government recognition as we may give to that which is beneficent and wholesome in large business organizations, we shall be most vigilant never to allow them to crystallize into a condition which shall make private initiative difficult. It is of the utmost importance that in the future we shall keep the broad path of opportunity just as open and easy for our children as it was for our fathers during the period which has been the glory of America's industrial history -- that it shall be not only possible but easy for an ambitious men, whose character has so impressed itself upon his neighbors that they are willing to give him capital and credit, to start in business for himself, and, if his superior efficiency deserves it, to triumph over the biggest organization that may happen to exist in his particular field. Whatever practices upon the part of large combinations may threaten to discourage such a man, or deny to him that which in the judgment of the community is a square deal, should be specifically defined by the statutes as crimes. And in every case the individual corporation officer responsible for such unfair dealing should be punished.
"We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. We have only praise for the business man whose business success comes as an incident to doing good work for his fellows. But we should so shape conditions that a fortune shall be obtained only in honorable fashion, in such fashion that its gaining represents benefit to the community.
"We stand for the rights of property, but we stand even more for the rights of man. We will protect the rights of the wealthy man, but we maintain that he holds his wealth subject to the general right of the community to regulate its business use as the public welfare requires."
-- Theodore Roosevelt

"That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.
"And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
"Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution - all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.
"For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
"There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
"The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
"Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.
"Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
"An old English judge once said: 'Necessitous men are not free men.' Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
"For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
"Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
"The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
"Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America.What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
"The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.
"But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.
"For more than three years we have fought for them. This convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that the fight will go on.
"The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.
"We do not see faith, hope, and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.
"Faith - in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships.
"Hope - renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.
"Charity - in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.
"We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.
"We are poor indeed if this nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.
"In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.
"It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.
"Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales.
"Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
"There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
"In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.
"I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
"I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Democracy maintains that government is established for the benefit of the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom in the exercise of his abilities. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice."
--Harry Truman

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

A SUMMARY
When it was created, the American form of government was an experiment. Only once before in the 6000+ year history of western civilization had people tried an egalitarian form of government, and that experiment - in Athens almost 2400 years ago - died out when its people were conquered by Alexander the Great.

The crux of the experiment was the idea that people could govern themselves without kings, popes, wealthy feudal lords, or warlords.

Thus, government would be made of, by, and for the people and not for any particular special interest group other than the people.

In order for the experiment to work, it was necessary that humans be given unique and special rights and powers - the powers and rights of personhood, guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere in the Constitution. (It took us almost two hundred years to extend them to minorities and women, but the model/archetype/idea, at least, was in place.)

But then something bizarre happened.

In 1886 the court reporter of the U.S. Supreme Court claimed that the court had ruled that "corporations are persons" in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case. If you read the case itself, you find that in fact the court ruled no such thing. But the reporter wrote it up in the headnotes of the case - not a legal document, but only a commentary on the case - and subsequent generations of corporate attorneys claimed it was so. Over time, it became so.

The consequences of this were tremendous.

Corporations are legal fictions created with the sole purpose of being a vehicle for the aggregation of wealth. They can live forever. They can change identity in a day. They can cut off parts of themselves and from them grow new selves. They can own others of their own kind. They don't need fresh air or clean water and don't fear illness or death.

Yet now, because of this misinterpretation of an 1886 Supreme Court case, corporations have the rights of "persons."

Corporations now have free speech rights (even though they are not voters or citizens), and can work to influence political campaigns and write laws. They have privacy rights and can deny OSHA and EPA inspectors access to their properties. They have 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination and double jeopardy. They have 14th amendment rights to equal protection under the law and can thus prevent local communities from " discriminating " against them in favour of small, local businesses.

The result of this legal error has been the virtual takeover of our political and legal processes by corporations. But some humans are working to take back government and return us to the intentions of this nation's Founders. The movement is to deny corporate personhood and restore human rights to humans.

An excerpt from Unequal Protection - Introduction

It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart.
- Anne Frank, from her diary, July 15, 1944

This book is about the difference between humans and the corporations we humans have created. The story goes back to the birth of the United States, even the birth of the Revolution. It continues through the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in the 1780s, and reaches its first climactic moment 100 years later, after the Civil War. The changes that ensued from that moment continue into the 21st century, where the results continue to unfold. And very few citizens of the world are unaffected.

In another sense, this book is about values and beliefs: how our values are reflected in the society we create, and how a society itself can work, or not work, to reflect those values.

Intentions and culture
A culture is a collection of shared beliefs about how things are. These beliefs are associated with myths and histories that form a self-reinforcing loop, and the collection of these beliefs and histories form the stories that define a culture. Usually unnoticed, like the air we breathe, these stories are rarely questioned. Yet their impact can be enormous.

For example, for six to seven thousand years, since the earliest founding of what we call modern culture, there were the stories that 'it's okay to own slaves, particularly if they are of a different race or tribe,' and 'women should be the property of, and subservient to, men.'

But as time goes on, circumstances and cultures change: beliefs are questioned and aren't useful begin to fall away. This book will raise questions about some of our shared beliefs, asking, as many cultures have asked throughout history: 'Do we want to keep this belief, or change to something that works better for us?'

The story of corporate personhood
Here we find the nub of this book, continuing a theme in my earlier writings. In The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, I identified those stories (among others), and suggested that true cultural change comes about when we first wake up to our own self-defeating beliefs'and then go about changing them. I also pointed out that the story that 'we are separate and different from the natural world' is a toxic one, brought to us by Gilgamesh, then Aristotle, then Descartes, and it no longer serves us well.
In The Prophet's Way, I detailed how the story that 'we are separate from divinity or consciousness' can perpetuate a helplessness and a form of spiritual slavery that's not useful for many individual humans or the planet as a whole. Mystics tell us a different story through the ages - the possibility of being personally connected to divinity. I suggested that, for many people, the mystic's story could be far more empowering and personally useful.

And in my books on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), I suggested that neurologically different children are actually a useful asset to our culture (using Edison, Franklin, and Churchill as classic examples), and that we do ourselves a disservice - and we wound our children in the process - by telling them they have a 'brain disorder' and tossing them into the educational equivalent of the trash basket. (And the most recent studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health are explicitly backing up my position.[i])
In Unequal Protections I'm visiting with you the stories of democracy and corporate personhood - ones whose histories I only learned in detail while researching this book. (It's amazing what we don't learn in school!) Corporate personhood is the story that a group of people can get together and organize a legal fiction (that's the actual legal term for it) called a corporation - and that agreement could then have the rights and powers given living, breathing humans by modern democratic governments. Democracy is the story of government of, by, and for the people; something, it turns out, that is very difficult to have function well in the same realm as corporate personhood.

A new but highly contagious story
Unlike the cultural stories I've written about earlier, this last story is more recent. Corporate personhood tracks back in small form to Roman times when groups of people authorized by the Caesars' organized to engage in trade. It took a leap around the year 1500 with the development of the first Dutch and then other European trading corporations, and then underwent a series of transformations in the United States of America in the 19th Century whose implications were every bit as world-changing as the institutionalization of slavery and the oppression of women in the holy books had been thousands of years earlier.

And, in a similar fashion to the Biblical endorsement of slavery and oppression of women, this story of corporate personhood - which only came fully alive in the 1800s - was highly contagious: it has spread across most of the world in just the past half-century. It has - literally - caused some sovereign nations to rewrite their constitutions, and led others to sign treaties overriding previous constitution protections of their human citizens.

Giving birth to a new 'person'
Imagine. In today's America and most other democracies, when a new human is born, she's given a social security number (or its equivalent) and instantly, from the moment of birth, protected by the full weight and power of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (or their equivalent). Those rights, which have been fought for and paid for with the blood of our young men and women in uniform, fall fully upon her at the moment of birth.

This is the way we designed it; it's how we all agreed it should be. Humans get human rights. They're protected. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful, if not protected. And in American democracy, like most modern democracies, our system is set up so that it takes a lot of work to change the Constitution, making it very difficult to deny its protections to the humans it first protected against King George II and against numerous threats - internal and external - since then.

Similarly, when papers called articles of incorporation are submitted to governments in America (and most other nations of the world), another type of new 'person' is brought forth into the nation (and most countries of the world). Just like a human, that new person gets a government assigned number (instead of a social security number, in the US it's called a Federal Employer ID Number or EIN).

Under our current agreements, the new corporate person is instantly endowed with many of the rights and protections of personhood. It's neither male nor female, doesn't breathe or eat, can't be enslaved, can't give birth, can live forever, doesn't fear prison, and can't be executed if found guilty of misdoings. It can cut off parts of itself and turn them into new 'persons,' and can change its identity in a day, and can have simultaneous residence in many different nations. It is not a human but a creation of humans. Nonetheless, the new corporation gets many of the Constitutional protections America's founders gave humans in the Bill of Rights to protect them against governments or other potential oppressors:

Free speech, including freedom to influence legislation
Protection from searches, as if their belongings were intensely personal
Fifth Amendment protections against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, even when a clear crime has been committed;
The shield of the nation's due process and anti-discrimination laws
The benefit of the Constitutional Amendments that freed the slaves and gave them equal protection under the law.

Even more, although they now have many of the same 'rights' as you and I - and a few more - they don't have the same fragilities or responsibilities, either under the law or under the realities of biology.

What most people don't realize is that this is a fairly recent agreement, a new cultural story, and it hasn't always been this way:

Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn't say companies are people
The U.S. Constitution wasn't written with that idea; corporations aren't even mentioned.
For America's first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said 'No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans.'

It's only since 1886 that the Bill of Rights and the Equal Protection Amendment have been explicitly applied to corporations.

Even more, corporate personhood was never formally enacted by any branch of the US government:

It was never voted by the public
It was never enacted by law
It was never even stated by a decision of the Supreme Court

This last point will raise some eyebrows, because for a hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact include the statement 'Corporations are persons.' But this book will show that this was never stated by the Court: it was added by the reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, called 'headnotes.' And as any law student knows, headnotes have no legal standing.

This book is about how that happened and what it's meant as events have unfolded. And, like most things that are bent from their original intention, there have been many far-reaching consequences that were never intended. Constitutional mechanisms that were designed to protect humans got turned inside out, so today they do a much better job of protecting corporations, even when the result is harm to humans and other forms of life.

Should we keep the story of corporate personhood or the story of democracy?
The real issue, rarely discussed but always present, is whether corporations truly are persons in a democracy. Should they stand shoulder to shoulder with you and me in the arena of rights, responsibility, and the unique powers and equal protections conferred upon humans by the founders and framers of the United States Constitution and other democracies around the world that have used the USA as a model? And is it possible to have a viable and thriving democracy if we keep the story of corporate personhood, or have we already lost much of our democracy as a result of it?

In researching this book I was amazed to learn that America's founders and early Presidents specifically warned that the safety of the new republic depended on keeping corporations on a tight leash - not abolishing them, but keeping them in check. When I showed early drafts of this book to different people, most of them were surprised to see how prophetic those early presidential warnings had been.

The essence of this book is the history of the corporation in America, its conflicts with democracy, and how corporate values and powers have come to dominate our world, for better or worse. Along the way over the past two centuries, those playing the corporate game at the very highest levels seem to have won a victory for themselves - a victory that is turning bitter in the mouths of many of the six billion humans on planet Earth. It's even turning bitter, in unexpected ways, for those who won it, as they find their own lives and families touched by an increasingly toxic environment, fragile and top-heavy economy, and hollow culture - all traceable back to the frenetic systems of big business that resulted from the doctrine that corporations are persons.

Corporations do much good in the world, and in my lifetime I've started more than a dozen corporations, both for-profit and non-profit. So it's important to say right up front that in this book I'm not advocating dismantling the modern business corporation. It's a societal and business organizing system that has, in many ways, served us well, and has the potential to do much good in the future, along with other business systems such as guilds and partnerships.

What I am suggesting, however, is that we should put corporations into their rightful context and place, as they had largely been until 1886. They are not human, even though they are owned and managed by humans. They are an agreement, not a living being. Corporations are just one of many methods humans can use to exchange goods, earn wealth, and create innovation; it's simply not appropriate that this single form should be granted 'personhood' at a similar level to humans under the United States Constitution or that of any other nation that aspires to democracy.

It's my contention that corporations are not legally the same as natural persons, and that the 1886 Supreme Court reporter's comment in the Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad case was both in error and revealed a weakness in the 14th Amendment that needs to be fixed by democratic citizen involvement today, if that is still possible.

As always, it's up to us to change the beliefs that no longer serve us. Indeed, in California and Pennsylvania, citizens have recently stood up and, through their local governments, begun to pass ordinances, laws and resolutions that deny corporations the status of personhood. They don't ban corporations; they just say 'Corporations are not persons.'

Why would this be such an issue? Why all the attention and effort?

If I've done my job well, by the end of this book your questions will be answered in full, and some positive, useful, forward-looking action steps will be well heard, clearly visible, and in hand. And, perhaps, the world will have one less toxic story in circulation, as people wake up from it and take action to undo its consequences.

An excerpt from Unequal Protection: America's First Anti-Globalization Protest - The Boston Tea Party

I shall therefore conclude with a proposal that your watchmen be instructed, as they go on their rounds, to call out every night, half-past twelve, 'Beware of the East India Company.'
-Pamphlet signed by 'Rusticus,' 1773

Now that Bush administration Treasury Secretary and former Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill has publicly called for the complete elimination of all corporate income taxes (and the elimination of Social Security), many people are wondering if history is repeating itself in a way that may be particularly dangerous for democracy.

Conventional wisdom has it that the 1773 Tea Act - a tax law passed in London that led to the Boston Tea Party - was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by American colonists. In reality, however, the Tea Act gave the world's largest transnational corporation - The East India Company - full and unlimited access to the American tea trade, and exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the Company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea they were unable to sell and holding in inventory.

The primary purpose of the Tea Act was to increase the profitability of the East India Company to its stockholders (which included the King and the wealthy elite that kept him secure in power), and to help the Company drive its colonial small-business competitors out of business. Because the Company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on the tea it sold in the American colonies, it was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants and tea houses in every town in America.

This infuriated the independence-minded American colonists, who were wholly unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the world's largest multinational corporation, The East India Company. They resented their small businesses still having to pay the higher, pre-Tea Act taxes without having any say or vote in the matter. (Thus, the cry of 'no taxation without representation!') Even in the official British version of the history, the 1773 Tea Act was a 'legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America' with a goal of helping the East India Company quickly 'sell 17 million pounds of tea stored in England''

America's first entrepreneurs' protest
This economics-driven view of American History piqued my curiosity when I first discovered it. So when I came upon an original first edition of one of this nation's earliest history books, I made a sizeable investment to buy it to read the thoughts of somebody who had actually been alive and participated in the Boston Tea Party and subsequent American Revolution. I purchased from an antiquarian book seller an original copy of Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773, published in New York by S. S. Bliss in 1834.

Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next fifty years, this account (published 61 years later) is singularly rare and important, as it's the only actual first-person account of the event by a participant that exists, so far as I can find. And turning its brittle, age-colored pages and looking at printing on unevenly-sized sheets, typeset by hand and printed on a small hand press almost two hundred years ago, was both fascinating and exciting. Even more interesting was the perspective of the anonymous ('by a citizen of New York') author and of Hewes, whom the author extensively interviewed for the book.

Although Hewes' name is today largely lost in history, he was apparently well known in colonial times and during the 19th century. Esther Forbes' classic 1942 biography of Paul Revere, which depended heavily on Paul Revere's 'many volumes of papers' and numerous late 18th and early 19th century sources, mentions Hewes repeatedly throughout her book. For example, when young Paul Revere went off to join the British army in the spring of 1756, he took along with him Hewes. 'Paul Revere served in Richard Gridley's regiment,' Forbes writes, noting Revere's recollection that the army had certain requirements for its recruits. 'All must be able-bodied and between seventeen and forty-five, and must measure to a certain height. George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes could not go. He was too short, and in vain did he get a shoemaker to build up the inside of his shoes; but Paul Revere 'passed muster' and 'mounted the cockade.''

And when it came to the Boston Tea Party, Forbes notes, 'No one invited George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes, but no one could have kept him home.' She quotes him as to the size of the raiding party, noting 'Hewes says there were one hundred to a hundred and fifty 'indians'' that night.
Hewes apparently came to Boston through the good graces of America's first president. 'George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes fished nine weeks for the British fleet until he saw his chance [to escape] and took it,' writes Forbes. 'Landing in Lynn, he was immediately taken to [George] Washington at Cambridge. The General enjoyed the story of his escape - 'he didn't laugh to be sure but looked amazing good natured, you may depend.' He asked him to dine with him, and Hewes says that 'Madam Washington waited upon them at table at dinner-time and was remarkably social.' Hewes was one of the many Boston refugees who never went back there to live. Having served as a privateersman and soldier during the war, he settled outside of the state.'

And there, outside the state, was where Hewes lived into his old age, finally telling his story to those who would listen, including one who published the little book I found.

That frightful night
Reading Hewes' account, I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. With few exceptions, the Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company and the government that 'unfairly' represented, supported, and served the company while not representing or serving them, the residents.

Hewes noted that many American colonists either boycotted the purchase of tea, or were smuggling or purchasing smuggled tea to avoid supporting the East India Company's profits and the British taxes on tea, which, according to Hewes' account of 1773, 'rendered the smuggling of [tea] an object and was frequently practiced, and their resolutions against using it, although observed by many with little fidelity, had greatly diminished the importation into the colonies of this commodity. Meanwhile,' Hewes noted, 'an immense quantity of it was accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company in England. This company petitioned the king to suppress the duty of three pence per pound upon its introduction into America''

That petition was successful and produced the Tea Act of 1773: the result was a boom for the transnational East India Company corporation, and a big problem for the entrepreneurial American 'smugglers.'

As Hewes notes: 'The [East India] Company, however, received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America'' allowing it to wipe out its small competitors and take over the tea business in all of America. 'Hence,' he told his biographer, 'it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity, which by the aid of the public authority, might, as they supposed, easily be landed, and amassed in suitable magazines. Accordingly the Company sent its agents at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, six hundred chests of tea, and a proportionate number to Charleston, and other maritime cities of the American continent. The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course''

Interestingly, Hewes notes that it wasn't just American small businesses and citizens who objected to the new monopoly powers granted the East India Company by the English Parliament. The East India Company was also putting out of business many smaller tea exporters in England, who had been doing business with American family-owned retail stores for decades, and those companies began a protest in England that was simultaneous with the American protests against transnational corporate bullying and the East India Company's buying of influence with the British Parliament.

Hewes notes: 'Even in England individuals were not wanting, who fanned this fire; some from a desire to baffle the government, others from motives of private interest, says the historian of the event, and jealousy at the opportunity offered the East India Company, to make immense profits to their prejudice.

'These opposers [sic] of the measure in England [the Tea Act of 1773] wrote therefore to America, encouraging a strenuous resistance. They represented to the colonists that this would prove their last trial, and that if they should triumph now, their liberty was secured forever; but if they should yield, they must bow their necks to the yoke of slavery. The materials were so prepared and disposed that they could easily kindle.'

The battle between the small businessmen of America and the huge multinational East India Company actually began in Pennsylvania, according to Hewes. 'At Philadelphia,' he writes, 'those to whom the teas of the [East India] Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.

'At New-York, Captain Sears and McDougal, daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will [against the East India Company], between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty [who had all joined forces and in most cases were the same people]. Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed, and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.'

Resistance was organizing and growing and the Tea Act was the final straw. The citizens of the colonies were preparing to throw off one of the corporations that for almost two hundred years had determined nearly every aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They were planning to destroy the goods of the world's largest multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the guns of the government that supported it.

A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and signed by an enigmatic 'Rusticus.' One issue made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England's largest transnational corporation and its behavior around the world:

'Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. ' Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them

The pamphleteering worked

After turning back the Company's ships in Philadelphia and New York, Hewes writes, 'In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm.'

He writes about the sentiment among the colonists who opposed the naked power and wealth of the East India Company and the British government that supported them: 'Why do we wait? they exclaimed; soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. Hundreds of years may roll away before the ministers can have perpetrated as many violations of our rights, as they have committed within a few years. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage, or be disgraced with our brethren of the other colonies, who have their eyes fixed upon us, and will be prompt in their succor if we show ourselves faithful and firm.

'This was the voice of the Bostonians in 1773. The factors who were to be the consignees of the tea, were urged to renounce their agency, but they refused and took refuge in the fortress. A guard was placed on Griffin's wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. It was agreed that a strict watch should be kept; that if any insult should be offered, the bell should be immediately rung; and some persons always ready to bear intelligence of what might happen, to the neighbouring towns, and to call in the assistance of the country people.'
'Rusticus' added his voice, the May 27, 1773 pamphlet saying: 'Resolve therefore, nobly resolve, and publish to the World your Resolutions, that no Man will receive the Tea, no Man will let his Stores, or suffer the Vessel that brings it to moor at his Wharf, and that if any Person assists at unloading, landing, or storing it, he shall ever after be deemed an Enemy to his Country, and never be employed by his Fellow Citizens.'

Colonial voices were getting louder and louder about their outrage at the giant corporation's behavior. A pamphlet titled The Alarm wrote on October 27, 1773, 'It hath now been proved to you, That the East India Company, obtained the monopoly of that trade by bribery, and corruption. That the power thus obtained they have prostituted to extortion, and other the most cruel and horrible purposes, the Sun ever beheld.'

The corporation challenges the people
And then, Hewes says, on a cold November evening, the first of the East India Company's ships of tax-free tea arrived.

'On the 28th of November, 1773,' Hewes writes, 'the ship Dartmouth with 112 chests arrived; and the next morning after, the following notice was widely circulated.

'Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbour. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o'clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.'

The reaction to the pamphlet - back then one part of what was truly a 'free press' in America - was emphatic. Hewes account was that, 'Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly which was on the 16th of December, 1773, was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present.'

Hewes continued: 'This notification brought together a vast concourse of the people of Boston and the neighbouring towns, at the time and place appointed. Then it was resolved that the tea should be returned to the place from whence it came in all events, and no duty paid thereon. The arrival of other cargoes of tea soon after, increased the agitation of the public mind, already wrought up to a degree of desperation, and ready to break out into acts of violence, on every trivial occasion of offence....

'Finding no measures were likely to be taken, either by the governor, or the commanders, or owners of the ships, to return their cargoes or prevent the landing of them, at 5 o'clock a vote was called for the dissolution of the meeting and obtained. But some of the more moderate and judicious members, fearing what might be the consequences, asked for a reconsideration of the vote, offering no other reason, than that they ought to do every thing in their power to send the tea back, according to their previous resolves. This, says the historian of that event, touched the pride of the assembly, and they agreed to remain together one hour.'

The people assembled in Boston at that moment faced the same issue that citizens who oppose combined corporate and co-opted government power all over the world confront today: should they take on a well-financed and heavily armed opponent, when such resistance could lead to their own imprisonment or death? Even worse, what if they should lose the struggle, leading to the imposition on them and their children an even more repressive regime to support the profits of the corporation?

There are corporate spies among us!
There was a debate late that afternoon in Boston, Hewes notes, but it was short because a man named Josiah Quiney pointed out that some of the people in the group worked directly or indirectly for the East India Company, or held loyalty to Britain, or both. Quiney suggested that if they took the first step of confronting the East India Company, it would inevitably mean they would have to take on the army of England. He pointed out they were really discussing the possibility of going to war against England to stop England from enforcing the East India Company's right to run its 'ministerial enterprise,' and that some who profited from that enterprise were right there in the room with them.

In Hewes' book, he wrote: 'In this conjuncture, Josiah Quiney, a man of great influence in the colony, of a vigorous and cultivated genius, and strenuously opposed to ministerial enterprises, wishing to apprise his fellow-citizens of the importance of the crisis, and direct their attention to probable results which might follow, after demanding silence said, 'This ardour and this impetuosity, which are manifested within these walls, are not those that are requisite to conduct us to the object we have in view; these may cool, may abate, may vanish like a flittering shade. Quite other spirits, quite other efforts are essential to our salvation. Greatly will he deceive himself, who shall think, that with cries, with exclamations, with popular resolutions, we can hope to triumph in the conflict, and vanquish our inveterate foes. Their malignity is implacable, their thirst for vengeance insatiable. They have their allies, their accomplices, even in the midst of us - even in the bosom of this innocent country; and who is ignorant of the power of those who have conspired our ruin? Who knows not their artifices? Imagine not therefore, that you can bring this controversy to a happy conclusion without the most strenuous, the most arduous, the most terrible conflict; consider attentively the difficulty of the enterprise, and the uncertainty of the issue. Reflict [sic] and ponder, even ponder well, before you embrace the measures, which are to involve this country in the most perilous enterprise the world has witnessed.''

Most Americans today believe that the colonists were only upset that they didn't have a legislature they'd elected that would pass the laws under which they were taxed: 'taxation without representation' was their rallying cry. And while that was true, Hewes points out, the needle in their side, the pinprick that was really driving their rage, was that England was passing tax laws solely for the benefit of the transnational East India Company corporation, and at the expense of the average American worker and America's small business owners.

Thus, 'Taxation without representation' also meant hitting the average person and small business with taxes, while letting the richest and most powerful corporation in the world off the hook for its taxes. It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors, plain and simple.

And the more the colonists resisted the predations of the East India Company and its British protectors, the more reactive and repressive the British government became, arresting American entrepreneurs as smugglers and defending the trade interests of the East India Company.

Among the reasons cited in the 1776 Declaration of Independence for separating America from Britain are: 'For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.' The British had used tax and anti-smuggling laws to make it nearly impossible for American small businesses to compete against the huge multinational East India Company, and the Tea Act of 1773 was the final straw.

Thus, the group assembled in Boston responded to Josiah Quiney's comment by calling for a vote. The next paragraph in Hewes' book says: 'The question was then immediately put whether the landing of the tea should be opposed and carried in the affirmative unanimously. Rotch [a local tea seller], to whom the cargo of tea had been consigned, was then requested to demand of the governor to permit to pass the castle [return the ships to England]. The latter answered haughtily, that for the honor of the laws, and from duty towards the king, he could not grant the permit, until the vessel was regularly cleared. A violent commotion immediately ensued; and it is related by one historian of that scene, that a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and that the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin's wharf.'

A first person account of the Tea Party
On what happened next, Hewes is quite specific in pointing out that not only were the protesters registering their anger and upset over domination by England and the Company, but they were willing to commit a million-dollar act of vandalism to make their point. Hewes says:

'It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin's wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea. When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.

'When we arrived at the wharf, there were three of our number who assumed an authority to direct our operations, to which we readily submitted. They divided us into three parties, for the purpose of boarding the three ships which contained the tea at the same time. The name of him who commanded the division to which I was assigned was Leonard Pitt. The names of the other commanders I never knew.

'We were immediately ordered by the respective commanders to board all the ships at the same time, which we promptly obeyed. The commander of the division to which I belonged, as soon as we were on board th

OpEdNews - 5/7/2017

"Republicans' Vicious and Immoral Health Care Bill Is Just Part of a Sinister Long Game.

By Thom Hartmann:

While Democrats are jubilant that the GOP passed a terrible healthcare/tax-cut bill through the House, which they think will cause voters to reject the GOP in 2018, it's a very, very premature celebration.

The Republicans are playing a longer game here, one based on a time-tested strategy first explicated by Machiavelli and fully put into place by Goebbels in the early 1930s, then fine-tuned by Reagan through the 1980s.

Sound like hyperbole (or a violation of Godwin's Law)? Check out this short clip of FDR's famous "Fala" speech in September of 1944:

Step two then becomes clear. The bill goes to the Senate and no matter what happens there, complain that it's being "watered down."

This sets up the perfect next part of the Goebbels/Machiavelli strategy -- claim victimhood, and place blame on those awful (and often racially different from all those white people at the White House ceremony) Democrats.

Because the Senate prevents some of the true horrors of the House GOP's plan from going into law, GOP voters don't realize (and Fox will never tell them) that it was really all just a hustle to satisfy the GOP billionaire donor class.

And, because of the Big Lie, every good thing that's still in Obamacare is thought, by Republican voters, to be the result of GOP efforts, as they now "own" health care. At the same time, they'll claim that Democratic obstruction is why whatever "bad" things happen happened. (And Drudge, et al, will be sure to find some horror stories in the fall of 2018.)

Step three happens in 2018 -- go after every Democrat running for the House or Senate for "obstructing Republican improvements and progress" on healthcare. It's another Big Lie, but, like Reagan's Big Lies about the evils of unions, the benefits of trickle-down economics, the urgency of exploding privatization of the military, not raising the SS retirement age, etc., it'll be believed by enough people to hold onto the House and Senate.

The proof that this strategy could work in this case is that it's already being used -- with success -- to obscure the true reason Republicans are trying so hard to "repeal and replace" Obamacare.

Here's what's really driving the GOP: The subsidies for middle class workers in Obamacare are largely funded by an almost 3 percent tax increase on capital gains income (and a small increase on the ordinary incomes of people in the top 1 percent).

This special 20 percent maximum capital gains tax rate is available only to people who "earn" their money with money/investments (rather than working and drawing a paycheck), and, thus, is almost exclusively paid at the full 20 percent rate only by the very, very, very rich. And that 3.8 percent top-end rate addition was a functional almost-15 percent tax increase on most billionaires.

They are not happy and they fund the GOP and its various corporate media propaganda arms.

But because the corporate media won't explain this ("it would seem partisan to point out facts inconvenient to Republicans," they whine), most Americans don't realize that the whole "health care debate" has little to do with health care -- it's really about cutting that 15 percent increased Obamacare tax on top-end capital gains income.

But because Republicans keep repeating the Big Lie that they're trying to get "more and better and cheaper" health care to Americans, most Americans don't realize it's really about a tax cut for the GOP donor class.

The success so far of this first half of the Big Lie technique should warn us loudly about the potential for GOP success with phase two, which begins now. Fox News is enthusiastically repeating the Republican lies from the Rose Garden Thursday, and right-wing hate radio is falling into line. Republican voters who live in the right-wing media bubble will absolutely believe these lies.

The only hope for Democrats to disrupt this process is to challenge the Big Lie and call it exactly that. The message needs to be simple ("It's a Big Lie -- it's really about cutting taxes on billionaires!"), repeated over and over again, and amplified by every media available, as most of the corporate TV media won't report on this in any honest way.

The entire agenda of the GOP has been, since the Reagan revolution (and, arguably, since the election of Harding, with the exception of Eisenhower), to exclusively serve the interests of the top 1 percent, while bringing along the rubes with "god, gays, and guns." And Democrats, while tacking toward the interest of the working class, need to point that out at every opportunity.

"Trumpcare -- The Big Lie" could be turned into the political equivalent of a bumper sticker and put everywhere. And the lies from the Rose Garden need to be challenged now, tomorrow, and every single day for the next 2 years by every elected Democrat in America by pointing out the reality of what's happening.

Otherwise, get ready for another 3 years of GOP rule.

That strategy is not only one the GOP has successfully used many times in the more recent past, from Nixon's "secret plan to end the Vietnam war" to Reagan's "reforms" of tax law, but one that they're clearly betting will continue to work for them (particularly with the help of Fox and right-wing hate radio).

Step one is to use the classic Goebbels "Big Lie" technique. That was on full display in the White House PR stunt after the House vote -- lie about lowering premiums, lie about expanding availability, lie about preexisting conditions, lie about how Obamacare is "failing." (Think Bush with Iraq, or the "Clear Skies Initiative," etc.)

And, to make sure it sticks, Trump had Republican after Republican step up to the microphone and explicitly and clearly repeat the Big Lies.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Republicans-Vicious-and-I-by-Thom-Hartmann-Big-Lie_Health-Care-Repeal_Joseph-Goebbels_Lying-Lies-Prevarication-170507-320.html

OpEdNews - 10/10/2017 - From Alternet

"What the Corporate News Industry Won't Ever Tell Its Audience.

Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."

By Thom Hartmann:

We were watching the TV at the airline departure area.

"Is it a terrorist incident?" Wolf Blitzer asked. Nobody knows, was the apparent answer.

"Something's happened to the news," a woman around my age at the DC airport, said to Louise and me. "I don't know what it is, but we used to actually know a lot of detail about a lot of things going on, 30 years ago, and now it seems like all the media does is focus on one or two stories all day long and I feel like I'm uninformed."

"Like eating junk food?" I said.

"Yeah, exactly. Empty calories. Why doesn't the news give me the news?"

Louise and I were sitting in front of a TV watching CNN, which was doing hour-long (perhaps day-long?) coverage of a possible terrorist incident in London (turned out it was a traffic accident). Louise shook her head. "Now you've got him started," she said.

The woman, an employee of the airline, looked interested.

"Used to be," I said, "that radio and TV stations had to deliver actual news in order to retain their over-the-air broadcast license. It was called 'the fairness doctrine,' and Reagan stopped enforcing it in '87 and the Obama administration's FCC removed it altogether. Then the media consolidated like crazy, in part because Reagan had stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and no president since Jimmy Carter broke up AT&T has been willing to put it back into effect, and in part because of the media deregulation that Clinton signed in 1996."

"So?" she asked. "Why does that mean that all we get now is nonstop hype and opinion-drivel?"

"It used to be that the metric news organizations used to determine if they were 'doing their job' was how well the American public was informed. That was actually a serious metric, pre-1987, because your station's license depended on it. The public could -- and did -- complain that they weren't being well-informed, and stations jumped when those FCC complaints came in. But now, the only metric the 'news' business uses is how many viewers they have and, thus, how profitable they are for advertisers."

"But why does that mean all we get are the disasters and the dramas of Donald Trump and other crap like that?" She'd expanded her universe of media complaints.

I remembered a lesson that Bob Brakeman, the news director at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, where I used to work in the 1970s as a beat reporter and studio news presenter, taught me.

"When you're choosing what goes into your newscast, remember that there are three buckets of news," Bob, one of the best news guys I ever worked for, said (as best I can remember). "First, there are the facts: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Second is drama: who is hurt or hurting, who is angry, who is happy, who is trying to do what to whom. And the third is sports: who is winning and who is losing."

"Got that," I said. "So how do I determine what goes into a story?"

"The facts are the most important," Bob said. "The drama and sports, unless they're at the core of the story itself, just add to the interest appeal of the story. The drama could be interviewing a family who just lost their home to a tornado, or the sports could be who's expected to win or lose an election. But both should always be subordinate to the facts."

I explained this to our new friend in her airline uniform. "Okay," she said. "What happened to the facts?"

"Advertising," I said. "I remember driving down the autobahn in Germany in 1987 listening to American Forces Radio when the reporter announced that, because of Reagan's change in the Fairness Doctrine, CBS had moved their news division under the supervision of their entertainment division, and the other networks were expected to soon follow. So, now, networks don't give a damn at all about 'the facts' or 'what Americans need to know' to be informed and active citizens. They only care about what's going to get the most eyeballs. And that will always first be drama and sports."

"This is why we have Trump," Louise added. "As a reality TV-show star, he's an expert at delivering what Bob called 'drama' and 'sports' to the TV news networks. Who's in, who's out; who's ahead, who's behind. The media loved it, and gave him $2 billion in free TV time, while making billions themselves in advertising because he increased their ratings. Les Moonves, the head of CBS, actually bragged about how much money they were making by hyper-covering Trump in a stockholder phone call."

"The average American has no meaningful understanding of what's happening anywhere else in the world," I said, "nor do they realize what's being done right now in front of us by the EPA, Interior, and other government agencies that are taking apart over 70 years of work to clean up our world and build a middle class."

"I've noticed this on NPR," the airline woman said. "I used to love listening to their in-depth reporting, and particularly their investigative reporting. But now I'm hearing more and more spin from think-tanks, and less and less about the details of legislation and news."

"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."

"Same as corporate news?"

"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."

"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.

"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"

"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.

"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."

"Same as corporate news?"

"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."

"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.

"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"

"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.

"The internet isn't neutral any more," I said, "because of these corporate behemoths. And it's going to get a lot worse when Ajit Pai and his FCC decide that your internet service provider -- the company that brings internet into your home -- can decide to block or slow down sites they don't agree with...and all of today's successful ISPs are large, politically active, 'conservative' corporations."

I added: "When the only metric is profit, everything can be explained by profit. And profit doesn't give a damn about morality or democracy or you or me or even the future of our nation or world. It's essentially a sociopathic business model, which works out really well for sociopathic politicians and the sociopathic polluters who own them -- and the media they lavish billions onto."

"What do we do?" she said.

"End Reaganism," I said. "Start enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, break up the big media, put back into place local media ownership rules, and have Congress say explicitly that the Net Neutrality that's the law in every other civilized country on earth should also be the law here."

"And how do we do that?" she aske.

"Get politically active. Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."

She shook her head skeptically. "I've gotta get back to work."

We left to board our flight.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/What-the-Corporate-News-In-by-Thom-Hartmann-Advertising_Corporate-Media_Corporate-takeovers-buyouts_Internet-171010-99.html

OpEdNews - 10/10/2017 - From Alternet

"What the Corporate News Industry Won't Ever Tell Its Audience.

Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."

By Thom Hartmann:

We were watching the TV at the airline departure area.

"Is it a terrorist incident?" Wolf Blitzer asked. Nobody knows, was the apparent answer.

"Something's happened to the news," a woman around my age at the DC airport, said to Louise and me. "I don't know what it is, but we used to actually know a lot of detail about a lot of things going on, 30 years ago, and now it seems like all the media does is focus on one or two stories all day long and I feel like I'm uninformed."

"Like eating junk food?" I said.

"Yeah, exactly. Empty calories. Why doesn't the news give me the news?"

Louise and I were sitting in front of a TV watching CNN, which was doing hour-long (perhaps day-long?) coverage of a possible terrorist incident in London (turned out it was a traffic accident). Louise shook her head. "Now you've got him started," she said.

The woman, an employee of the airline, looked interested.

"Used to be," I said, "that radio and TV stations had to deliver actual news in order to retain their over-the-air broadcast license. It was called 'the fairness doctrine,' and Reagan stopped enforcing it in '87 and the Obama administration's FCC removed it altogether. Then the media consolidated like crazy, in part because Reagan had stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and no president since Jimmy Carter broke up AT&T has been willing to put it back into effect, and in part because of the media deregulation that Clinton signed in 1996."

"So?" she asked. "Why does that mean that all we get now is nonstop hype and opinion-drivel?"

"It used to be that the metric news organizations used to determine if they were 'doing their job' was how well the American public was informed. That was actually a serious metric, pre-1987, because your station's license depended on it. The public could -- and did -- complain that they weren't being well-informed, and stations jumped when those FCC complaints came in. But now, the only metric the 'news' business uses is how many viewers they have and, thus, how profitable they are for advertisers."

"But why does that mean all we get are the disasters and the dramas of Donald Trump and other crap like that?" She'd expanded her universe of media complaints.

I remembered a lesson that Bob Brakeman, the news director at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, where I used to work in the 1970s as a beat reporter and studio news presenter, taught me.

"When you're choosing what goes into your newscast, remember that there are three buckets of news," Bob, one of the best news guys I ever worked for, said (as best I can remember). "First, there are the facts: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Second is drama: who is hurt or hurting, who is angry, who is happy, who is trying to do what to whom. And the third is sports: who is winning and who is losing."

"Got that," I said. "So how do I determine what goes into a story?"

"The facts are the most important," Bob said. "The drama and sports, unless they're at the core of the story itself, just add to the interest appeal of the story. The drama could be interviewing a family who just lost their home to a tornado, or the sports could be who's expected to win or lose an election. But both should always be subordinate to the facts."

I explained this to our new friend in her airline uniform. "Okay," she said. "What happened to the facts?"

"Advertising," I said. "I remember driving down the autobahn in Germany in 1987 listening to American Forces Radio when the reporter announced that, because of Reagan's change in the Fairness Doctrine, CBS had moved their news division under the supervision of their entertainment division, and the other networks were expected to soon follow. So, now, networks don't give a damn at all about 'the facts' or 'what Americans need to know' to be informed and active citizens. They only care about what's going to get the most eyeballs. And that will always first be drama and sports."

"This is why we have Trump," Louise added. "As a reality TV-show star, he's an expert at delivering what Bob called 'drama' and 'sports' to the TV news networks. Who's in, who's out; who's ahead, who's behind. The media loved it, and gave him $2 billion in free TV time, while making billions themselves in advertising because he increased their ratings. Les Moonves, the head of CBS, actually bragged about how much money they were making by hyper-covering Trump in a stockholder phone call."

"The average American has no meaningful understanding of what's happening anywhere else in the world," I said, "nor do they realize what's being done right now in front of us by the EPA, Interior, and other government agencies that are taking apart over 70 years of work to clean up our world and build a middle class."

"I've noticed this on NPR," the airline woman said. "I used to love listening to their in-depth reporting, and particularly their investigative reporting. But now I'm hearing more and more spin from think-tanks, and less and less about the details of legislation and news."

"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."

"Same as corporate news?"

"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."

"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.

"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"

"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.

"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."

"Same as corporate news?"

"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."

"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.

"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"

"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.

"The internet isn't neutral any more," I said, "because of these corporate behemoths. And it's going to get a lot worse when Ajit Pai and his FCC decide that your internet service provider -- the company that brings internet into your home -- can decide to block or slow down sites they don't agree with...and all of today's successful ISPs are large, politically active, 'conservative' corporations."

I added: "When the only metric is profit, everything can be explained by profit. And profit doesn't give a damn about morality or democracy or you or me or even the future of our nation or world. It's essentially a sociopathic business model, which works out really well for sociopathic politicians and the sociopathic polluters who own them -- and the media they lavish billions onto."

"What do we do?" she said.

"End Reaganism," I said. "Start enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, break up the big media, put back into place local media ownership rules, and have Congress say explicitly that the Net Neutrality that's the law in every other civilized country on earth should also be the law here."

"And how do we do that?" she aske.

"Get politically active. Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."

She shook her head skeptically. "I've gotta get back to work."

We left to board our flight.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/What-the-Corporate-News-In-by-Thom-Hartmann-Advertising_Corporate-Media_Corporate-takeovers-buyouts_Internet-171010-99.html

Former Democrats Flock to See Trump, And Hope to Oust ManchinElizabeth Harrington Follow @LizWFB
November 3, 2018 8:00 am

HUNTINGTON, W.Va.—President Donald Trump urged West Virginia to oust Senator Joe Manchin during his final rally blitz before Election Day, and found an approving audience among disaffected Democrats.

Trump supporters who gathered at the Huntington Tri-State Airport were optimistic about Patrick Morrisey's chances of upsetting the Democratic incumbent on Tuesday. Some stood in line as early as 11:45 a.m. Friday, more than four hours before the rally began.

"I like Joe," Trump said. "The problem is, I'm just not going to get his vote. He's a friend of mine. I'm just not going to get his vote."

Allegiance to the president's agenda was on the minds of supporters, many of whom are former Democrats. The audience was full of them, some personally convinced to change parties by the president himself, like Gov. Jim Justice and Dorothy McPhee.

"I have been a Democrat sixty some years of my life," said Dorothy, who grew up in Winfield County. "I switched over a couple years ago to Republican because I no longer can tolerate the Democratic stand on a lot of things."

Dorothy said the most important issues to her are the economy, taxes, immigration, "draining the swamp," and the opioid epidemic.

She said Morrisey and Manchin both benefited from pharmaceutical companies, with Morrisey's prior lobbying work, and Manchin's big dollar donations from Mylan, the controversial EpiPen maker whose CEO is Manchin's daughter.

"But at least Morrisey will stand with the president," Dorothy said. "Joe waffles on everything. And I don't want that."

Once thought unlikely to unseat the popular West Virginia Democrat and former governor, the race has tightened in recent days. Morrisey, the state's attorney general, says he has climbed within the margin of error, a polling boost many Republicans saw after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

While Manchin ultimately voted for the Supreme Court nominee, Trump is still using the vote against him. The president recounted Manchin told him he "may" vote for Kavanaugh, but the Democrat waited to publicly support the judge until his confirmation was all but a certainty.

"There's nobody smoother than Joe," Trump said. "And he pressed that button, but I think it was about one eighth of one second after we had the final vote [needed] from Susan Collins."

"I said, ‘Joe that doesn't count.'"

Trump told the estimated 6,000 in attendance Morrisey would be a key vote for lower taxes, strong borders, and ending the war on "clean beautiful coal."

For his part, Morrisey said he would be a "strong conservative fighter for President Trump," versus Manchin, who he repeatedly calls, in Trumpian fashion, a "dishonest Washington liberal."

"Sen. Manchin has abandoned our West Virginia conservative values," Morrisey said, appealing to the state Trump won over Hillary Clinton by 42 points. "On the issue of life, he thinks it's a multiple-choice question."

Both Trump and Morrisey hit Manchin for his support of Clinton, even after she bragged about planning to put a lot of coal miners out of business. Supporters waved their "Trump Digs Coal" campaign signs, a noted addition in coal country to the usual "Women for Trump," "Drain the Swamp," and "Keep America Great" signs seen at rallies.

Some supporters traveled far to see the president, like Dennis Egert, a lifelong Democrat, union member, and veteran turned "Biker for Trump." Egert supported Obama twice before switching over to the Republican Party for Trump in 2016.

more at

https://freebeacon.com/politics/former-democrats-flock-see-trump-hope-ou...