Enough of the Myth of American

Morality
Awakening the Global Slave
By Bill Noxid 

August 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- It's Time

for Americans to stop making false proclamations about this
Country that only demonstrate their ignorance and unwillingness
to face what happened yesterday, much less the historical truth of
the United States. Since the brief shift of direction toward exposing
truth during the end of the Bush era and 2008 Presidential
campaign, this country has wildly – even spastically – swung back
in the direction of madness and deception, and it is certainly no
mystery why.

In the last ten years this country (or the corporate slavers) has
committed more crimes against Man, God, and Planet than is still
possible to conceive, yet what ‘seems’ to be most Americans are
content to pretend none of it happened. Granted, a good portion
of that ‘appearance’ is due to corporate control of media and mis-
education from diversionary propaganda, but there is no shortage
of examples of good old fashioned ignorance and denial.

Two stolen national elections, false-flag operations (and 3 Trillion

dollars) to start two colonial corporate wars, policy of torture for
false confessions, destruction and dissolution of constitutional
privacy into a covert corporate surveillance industry, deliberate
economic collapse through industry wide mortgage and insurance
fraud, 24T to refinance the Globo-Econo-Criminals that crashed it
in the first place, destruction of the illusion of finance, fairness,
and justice, and any number of other staggering overt efforts have
been exposed and acknowledged, yet people have ‘forgotten’ all of
it and have been drawn back into their comfortable delusions
about what this country is and what this country does.

Obviously it’s a psychological dysfunction to ignore this amount of

reality, and were I on any other planet, I have no doubt it would
be diagnosed as such. However the roots of delusion on this
planet stretch back to the beginnings of ‘recorded history,’ and this
country is a perfect example of why that is. So many societies
have been destroyed and their historical knowledge replaced with
the conqueror’s propaganda that virtually no historical reality
remains.

“Christians, landing upon their coasts, seized as many as they

found, men, women, and children, and transported them to
America. It was about 1551 that the English began trading to
Guinea. They set the men on shore, to burn their towns and take
the inhabitants. In 1556, Sir John Hawkins sailed with two ships to
Cape Verd, where he sent eighty men on shore to catch Negroes,
but they met with such resistance, that they had seven men killed,
and took but ten Negroes.”

“It was some time before the Europeans found a more

compendious way of procuring African slaves, by prevailing upon
them to make war upon each other, and to sell their prisoners. Till
then they seldom had any wars; but were in general quiet and
peaceable. But the white men first taught them drunkenness and
avarice, and then hired them to sell one another. Nay, by this
means, even their Kings are induced to sell their own subjects.”
John Wesley: Christian Theologian / Methodist Founder - 1774

Here we see one of the cornerstones of the ‘modern’ world, and

one of the foundational lessons learned by the colonial slavers. In
fact, our Global Society is built on it. Just look at the planet and
you can see how well and how often it has been applied over the
last 500 years. All over the world in all of the colonized countries
we have Blacks fighting Blacks for no apparent reason, Kings
driving Bentleys while their people have no food, and guns and
bullets for everyone, yet none of them have any shoes. All the
while the corporate slavers quietly steal the resources and labor as
they fund all sides of the conflicts, and these two simple
paragraphs from John Wesley explain why that is. This practice of
division, diversion, and the self-perpetuation of slavery and
violence has been the primary method of colonization for hundreds
of years.

Divide and concur is used in almost every operation against our

own people as well. In this country (and on this planet) it is a very
simple matter to create racial division by playing to the engrained
belief developed over 500 years of slavery that White people are
superior to Black people, and that Black people are inherently
scary and dangerous. This division is easy to trigger (because
many consciously or subconsciously still very much believe it is
true), and it easily creates strife over artificially induced divisions
while preventing unity in seeking out the real tyrants and
criminals. Although the equally poor, disaffected, and ignorant
White people in this country are as enslaved as anybody else,
playing to their belief (‘remembrance’) that they are superior to
Black people harkens back to the ‘good ol’ days,’ and is as
American as baseball and apple pie.

There have been innumerous examples of just how easy it is to

vilify Black and Brown people in this country without any evidence
or basis in reality, but one glaring example that haunts the planet
is the false flag operation of 9/11. Only a couple of days after the
event, all evidence and signs pointed to a massive large scale
operation that involved local, State, National, and International
Governments, yet all of it was trumped by one planted passport
supposedly found on the street from a building disintegration that
didn’t leave so much as a keyboard in tact.

“They hate our Freedom” was all it took to convince the people of
this county that brown people 5,000 miles away in caves with box
cutters defeated the NSA, CIA, and United States Military, and ten
years of evidence has yet to dissuade them from their delusional
belief. The ignorance and hate emanating from the @Park51
Community Center ‘controversy’ demonstrates conclusively that
just as it was ten years ago, still no evidence is required to
demonize an entire race or religion of brown people because
American White people ‘feel’ violated based on their self-delusion
and lack of historical knowledge. The whole world is expected to
capitulate to American unreasonable and outrageous demands
because the people are too ignorant and fearful to know the truth
of anything.

The very people responsible for starting the two colonial wars are
the ones scapegoating Muslims for the violence, and the
American Islamophobic masses are all too eager to believe. The
slavers are betting (and to this point are correct) that the masses
are too medicated and exhausted to reevaluate who was
responsible for 9/11, and like I said – fear of ‘Black and different’
is an easy sell. By fabricating a conflict over whether it is
‘sacrilege’ to allow a Muslim Community Center to be built four
blocks from WTC in an old Burlington Coat Factory, the
misdirected masses never get around to asking the real questions
about 9/11 like why is there evidence of 100 Tons of Nano-
thermite in WTC dust, or how could the building (WTC Building 7)
that housed the SEC (All Worldcom and Enron investigation
evidence), the Secret Service, the IRS, and the Office of
Emergency Management be wired for demolition prior to the
event, so that Larry Silverstein and the ‘Fire Department’ were
able to ‘pull it’ into it’s own footprint – just like both Towers.

The real conversation gets lost in the lowest common

denominators of hate and ignorance, and that is the corporate
slavers’ intention. Rather than figure out why all of the supposed
hijackers are still alive, it’s easier for the people to believe box
cutters made three of the most soundly constructed buildings on
the planet turn to powder, and made the air force disappear for a
day. Rather than question why all of the steel beams from WTC
were immediately trucked off in guarded convoys and shipped to
China for meltdown without any forensic investigation, it’s easier
for them to blame an entire ‘dark, foreign, and strange’ religion
that had nothing to do with it. All of this while heaping religious
and moral hypocrisy upon religious and moral hypocrisy with one
group trying to get a Catholic Bishop to mediate whether Muslims
can build a Community Center, while another plans a Koran Book
Burning.

The slavers know this, and that’s why this trumped up

‘controversy’ is all over the news along with issues like Dr. Laura’s
fight for her First Amendment right to tell ‘niggers’ they are too
sensitive and shouldn’t marry outside of their race. Division and
diversion away from their own motives and actions are the intent,
and division and diversion are the result. If the denial in this
country were not equivalent to a 15 meter thick titanium shield, it
would be easily understood why turning half the population
against the Alien Muslim Marxist Communist Kenyan Terrorist
Manchurian (‘Nigger’) President is so easy to do, while ten years of
actual fascist takeover went unnoticed.
To the top 2% (The Slave Owners) however, we are all slaves
regardless of color or geographic location. As I said some time ago
in “Free in Our Time,” everyone on this planet is in Slavery
whether they are cognizant of it or not. The ill-gotten wealth,
power, and legacy that were built upon 500 years of injustice and
the institution of slavery didn’t magically disappear at any point, it
evolved into the system you call ‘Capitalism.’ There was no magic
reset period where 500 years of conquest, theft, and crimes
against Creation were suddenly made right, and everyone was
made ‘equal’ and ‘whole.’

The empire and system of slavery still very much exists, and the
fact that you remain enslaved to it is easy to define. Individuals in
this country (and on this Planet) have “jobs” which occupy most of
their waking life to produce goods and services for the Institution
of the Corporation for generally meager compensation, which they
promptly give right back to the Institution of the Corporation for
the same goods and services. At best you live in indentured
servitude, but in reality you are still on the Plantation.

To even jest that equality exists in any form on this planet is

preposterous. This system has been designed and evolved with
the specific purpose of steering all money, power, privilege, and
influence in one direction, and no ‘equality’ can result from such a
system. For instance, if you set out to play a game of Monopoly,
but your opponents Grandparents previously killed the last people
that were playing the game, took all the money and property, built
houses and hotels on all of it, and left you nothing but 2 dollars
and starting off in jail, there’s no chance of you “working your way
up” in the game. There’s no chance of you ever becoming “equal”
to your opponent.

However this is precisely the situation the descendants of slaves

and colonization face in this country and on this planet, except it’s
even considerably worse than that. Continuing the Monopoly
analogy, imagine that in addition to this resource deficit you were
also enslaved for 500 years prior to the game and forbidden to
learn how to play, count money, or read the names of the
properties under penalty of death. Imagine that an hour before
the game you are handed the instructions that you cannot read,
are told you are now ‘free’ to play, and told that you are now
‘equal’ to he who has enslaved you. For 40 minutes of that hour
while you are trying to learn how to read, your opponent’s father
is whipping you with a tree branch and setting your relatives on
fire in an effort to scare you out of playing at all. Clearly there is
nothing resembling equality in the nature of this game, and there
is no intent for there to be.

This is the farcical delusion they call the “Land of the Free.” This is
the miracle of the “Free Enterprise” system. Criminality
masquerading as Civilization and always one step from being
discovered as the fraud it is. This is the reason for the sudden
burst of propaganda, tax-payer funded ‘terror’ attacks, and every
divisive issue since the 1950s being rolled out in the hopes of
continuing to derail Evolution. If the people of this planet actually
realize the simplicity and outrageousness of their own
enslavement, the Slavers know they are not long for this world.
They need to reignite the fear and hatred that fueled the origin of
their way of life and business, lest the truth of that business be
revealed for all to see.

This is why their biggest fear is what they call ‘redistribution of

wealth.’ They want to keep all of that Monopoly money to
themselves. The slavers are very well aware that everything they
have is built on the backs and bodies of slaves and that all of the
‘property’ they claim is stolen. The fact that part of an 18 th century
slave ship was just found under WTC Ground Zero (something that
should have gotten considerably more press than the
Islamophobia diversion) is literal proof of that. They know if that
reality is understood by the masses, ‘redistribution’ is exactly what
would and should happen. So when you see the likes of Lady Lynn
Forester De-Rothschild show up on MSNBC portending to be a
Democrat and the voice of the little people, pay close attention to
the language they use. Once you understand the truth of their
motivations, the language and fears of the slavers becomes easy
to see.

 "It’s an outrageous Failure of the President to put confidence into

the small businesses where people who have money (the ones
withholding 2T in idle funds while the slaves starve) would be
willing to spend money. To give people confidence that the
Government is behind the creation of wealth (meaning giving them
the 1T tax cut) instead of really the distribution of wealth
(spending it on ANY worthwhile social, educational, humanitarian,
or infrastructure project)."

“Let the private sector (the slave owners), let the genius of
American entrepreneurial spirit take over, not the sense of
entitlement (humanity and equality) that president Obama always
talks about. He talks about our need to give, we are people who
build (steal). That’s what made America, America. This Democrat
is messing with the sauce of American goodness, American
greatness.”

What made America, America, was genocide, slavery, theft, and

deception. You may not like our history, but it doesn’t change the
reality of it. Every time the President (or anyone else) proclaims
“This is America” like it places us above reproach, it demonstrates
the pathological denial that he and this country suffer from. Until
you face the truth of this country’s origin and Modus Operandi,
whatever you believe in is based on a Disneyland fraud. If that
seems harsh, it’s your own fault for spending 500 years in denial.

Based on this country’s historical record, the evidence of the

resulting state of humanity and the planet, and the magnification
of the behavior exhibited over the last ten years, neither this
country nor this religion can feign moral superiority (or even
perspective) on any matter at all until it faces the incalculable
mountain of deception and fraud upon which its empire was built.
Descendants of slavers who are still slavers, yet deny they are
slavers or descendants of slavers, can no longer be afforded ‘free
speech rights’ or moral standing to continue their denial, diversion,
and deception. 
 

Last of the Combat Troops Leaving Iraq? - Only in your

Dreamshttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26200.ht
m

Nano-thermite ( lots of it ) found in 9-11 WTC

dust http://ow.ly/j51I

WTC 7 - Pull It By Larry Silverstein http://ow.ly/recP

Collapse of WTC building 7 http://ow.ly/reck

Ancient remains of slave ship found under WTC

site http://ow.ly/2tkdG

Fallout of Hate Is Spreading Across America from "Ground

Zero" http://ow.ly/2t5sk

Dove World Outreach Center plans Koran Book Burning on Sept

11 http://ow.ly/2ssoT

Obama Denial Displayed: Leading with Post-Racial Bi-Partisan

Myopia http://ow.ly/1VE3o

Lady Lynn Forester De-Rothschild: Voice of the Little

People? http://ow.ly/2tyYd

Assassinate the Alien, Health Care carrying, President

Game http://ow.ly/2skcU

Free in our Time… Bill Noxid http://ow.ly/2t5BF

This writing is posted on my blog:  http://ow.ly/2tAqM

Online Journalism--Where Advertisers Make
Content Too!
05/18/2010 by Peter Hart

A long New York Times Magazine piece (5/16/10) about start-up

online journalism outlets brings us some troubling news about the
wall between editorial content and advertising:
One thing many of these new strategies have in common is a
willingness to transgress time-honored barriers--for instance, by
blurring the division between reporting and advertising. True/Slant
offers to let advertisers use the same blogging tools that
contributors do, to produce content that, while labeled, is blended
into the rest of the site. Such marketing deals are central to the
company’s plans for future revenue growth. "Everywhere I go, the
whole notion of enabling marketers to create content on a news
platform is well received," Lewis Dvorkin says. "It's the way the
world is moving."
Not long ago, such an idea would have been considered heretical,
and in many newsrooms, it still is. But clearly, attitudes are
shifting. "Hopefully we're breaking down the silliness of how
church and state was historically implemented," says Merrill
Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently
building a network of local news sites. Once, most journalists took
a posture of willful ignorance when it came to the economics of
the industry: They never wanted to sully themselves by knowing
the business. The recession has, through fear and necessity, made
capitalists out of everyone.

For proof that catering to advertisers is not "heretical" in the rest

of the media, and that journalism is the worse for these "shifting"
attitudes, read FAIR's new Fear & Favor report in the May issue of
Extra!
http://www.fair.org
Extra! May 2010

Fear & Favor 10th Annual Report

Hidden interference in the newsroom

By Peter Hart
By now, the structural deficiencies in a corporate media system
heavily dependent on commercial advertising and controlled by
sprawling conglomerates should be obvious.

Dramatic reductions in advertising and subscription revenue in

recent years mean news outlets are even less likely to push back
against commercial intrusions in the functioning of the newsroom.
Journalists trying to hold on to their jobs in a shrinking newsroom
are less likely to speak up about interference from owners or other
powerful interests. The examples of non-journalistic interference in
the newsroom—which FAIR has been compiling for the past
decade—are emblematic of a media system trying to find new
ways to serve advertisers and marketers, in a desperate effort to
increase revenue any way it can.

The conflicts this will surely create were starkly illustrated when
Politico (7/3/09) revealed that Washington Post publisher
Katharine Weymouth was to have a dozen off-the-record “salons”
at her home, bringing together lobbyists, politicians and key Post
reporters and editors. The get-togethers were to be “underwritten”
by corporations with a financial stake in public policy—starting with
a discussion of healthcare paid for by health giant Kaiser
Permanente (Washington Post, 7/3/09). As the promotional
literature put it, such underwriters would be able to “build crucial
relationships with Washington Post news executives in a neutral
and informal setting.”

The Post’s plans collapsed in the wake of negative publicity, but

the paper’s willingness to compromise its independence was plain
to see. Other media outlets have engineered similar gatherings;
Newsweek magazine, for example, has partnered with Shell to
present discussions on energy (Extra!, 9/09).

As FAIR notes every year, the anecdotes gathered here do not

represent a full accounting of the problems in the media business.
These are a sampling of incidents that have been reported in one
venue or another.

The Boss’s Business

• Journalists working for owners with interests other than

newsgathering are usually aware of their owner’s ties to
commercial ventures or civic campaigns. A December 2, 2009,
memo from publisher David Thompson to the staff of the
Oklahoman newspaper offered the chance to volunteer to work on
a campaign for a bond initiative called MAPS3 that the paper was
supporting:
As we have said all along, OPUBCO [Oklahoma Publishing
Company] employees should feel free to vote as they please next
Tuesday, but if you are in favor of MAPS3 and would like an
opportunity to earn paid Volunteer Leave to support this initiative,
this is a worthy opportunity for you!

• Sometimes the owner’s interests directly affect what’s printed in

the paper. The New York Times reported (8/31/09) that Long
Island paper Newsday, which was bought by Cablevision in 2008,
decided it would no longer accept advertising from Verizon—
whose FiOS television service is a Cablevision competitor. As the
Times noted, this was not the first time there were questions
about the way Cablevision was running Newsday:
In January, the top three editors at Newsday did not report for
work for a few days amid reports that they had been fired or had
resigned in a dispute with Cablevision over the paper’s coverage of
the New York Knicks basketball team, which is also owned by the
company. The editors returned to duty, and neither they nor the
company offered a full explanation of what had happened.

• A newspaper that owns a cable company and a local sports

franchise is certainly a conflicted source of news. But what
happens when the local paper is owned by a powerful church? The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints owns the Utah-based
Deseret News, and the conflict inherent in that connection was
obvious when the Mormon church’s donations to an anti-gay
marriage ballot initiative in California received national media
scrutiny.

As Columbia Journalism Review reported (May–June/09), “the

Deseret News gave short shrift to the allegations, only quoting
sources who defended the Church, whereas the competing Salt
Lake Tribune, and other publications, published several articles on
the topic that let both sides express their positions.” The editorial
independence of the News has come under scrutiny in the last few
years, as editor-in-chief Joe Cannon has sought to bring the paper
in line with the church’s mission—an effort to make it “more
Mormon.” CJR noted that these efforts included reassigning two
editors, which sparked a newsroom protest and a byline strike on
February 25.

• An August 1 New York Times report revealed an example of

corporate interference involving two of cable television’s most
prominent foes. Fox News Channel star Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s
Keith Olbermann have spent several years trading criticism and
taunts. At MSNBC, executives at parent company General Electric
were specifically concerned about O’Reilly’s criticism of GE’s
business; according to the Times, executives from the rival
companies met in May of 2009 to hash out some sort of
“ceasefire” agreement.

As the Times reported, MSNBC president Phil Griffin “told

producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow
Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly,
according to two employees.” While Olbermann told the paper that
he was “party to no deal,” other MSNBC sources indicated
otherwise. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (8/3/09) reported that one
regular MSNBC guest “was recently told by a segment producer
that explicit mentions of Fox News were prohibited,” and that
“there has been talk among MSNBC employees ever since the GE
edict was issued about ways to protest it and to stand up for their
journalistic freedom.”
The “truce” seemed to vanish after the Times story was printed.
But Olbermann’s bosses at GE offered little in the way of
explanation, which raised obvious concerns about the
independence of journalists working for the company. If a star at
MSNBC can be convinced to rein in the kind of commentary that
made his show successful, would journalists further down the
corporate food chain be able to resist such pressure?

• Sometimes it’s a boss’s personal relationship that needs to be

protected. When Newsweek posted a Web interview with MSNBC
host Joe Scarborough (6/5/09), it mentioned up top that
Scarborough had been a defense attorney for an anti-abortion
murderer (Gawker, 6/9/09). With the murder of abortion provider
George Tiller in the news, the mention made journalistic sense.

That’s when Newsweek editor Jon Meacham intervened. Saying

that he was contacted by “a member of Scarborough’s team”
(Gawker, 6/9/09), Meacham had the discomfiting detail removed
from the top of the story. When the subject is a friend who
regularly invites you on his TV program, the journalistic rules can
be bent.

• Other times bosses themselves make news. On December 8,

Bloomberg reported that a Chicago underwriting company called
Mesirow had mishandled a municipal bond, potentially costing the
city millions of dollars. As Michael Miner noted in the Chicago
Reader (12/11/09), Mesirow’s CEO is Jim Tyree, who also happens
to lead the group of investors that owns the Chicago Sun-Times
media company.

So how did that paper play the news about the boss’s botched
bond deal? As Miner noted, the over-1,800-word Bloomberg piece
was cut to 259 in the Sun-Times, with enough space reserved for
Tyree to respond. Did Tyree give the paper any pointers on how to
cover his business deals? “Not on this nor on anything else,” he
said. But how much guidance does a journalist or editor interested
in keeping a job really need?

In Advertisers We Trust
• Reminders that advertisers have undue influence on the news
business are constant, and that message can be sent any number
of ways. In December, a memo from Dallas Morning News editor
Bob Mong and senior vice-president of sales Cyndy Carr (Dallas
Observer blog, 12/3/09) announced a change in policy to
employees of the A.H. Belo Corporation: Some editors would
henceforth report directly to the company’s sales managers. The
sales team will “be working closely with news leadership in product
and content development.” The memo caused “uneasiness” among
some news staffers, according to Mong, but others were, well, at
ease—one editor was “excited about the idea of working with a
business partner on an arts and entertainment segment.” The
memo itself called the rearrangement “one of several key
strategies we have implemented this year to better serve our
advertising clients.”

• These blurry lines between advertising and news seem to be

getting ever blurrier. In the past year, NBC Universal sought to
make special advertising packages tied to specific “causes.” One
example—Campbell’s Soup would sponsor health segments on the
Today show (Wall Street Journal, 10/19/09).

• When Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 8/1/09) exposed that former

Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was making appearances on
MSNBC without disclosing his new job at a PR outfit, Wolffe was
unusually direct about his former profession:
“The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate
activities is not really in touch with what’s going on. Every
conversation with journalists is about business models and
advertisers,” he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008
election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to
advertisers. “You tell me where the line is between business and
journalism,” he said.

• That attitude is commonplace in news media these days. The

panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe always rather conspicuously
consumed Starbucks drinks on the air, and at some point decided
to make that arrangement official—and profitable. As New York
Times reporter Brian Stelter (6/1/09) put it, host Joe Scarborough
“sips Frappuccinos on camera so often that some viewers have
wondered whether it is a form of product placement, paid for by
the coffee company. Starting Monday, it will be.” The $10 million
deal included “Starbucks graphics and mentions during each hour”
of the show.

Would the arrangement cause any sort of conflict? MSNBC

president Phil Griffins assured the Times that the show “would
continue to cover Starbucks as a news item if warranted. ‘They
understand that we have standards.’” One such “standard”
involved interviewing the CEO of the company soon after the deal
was reached (AP, 6/1/09).

• On April 9, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page

advertisement for the NBC drama Southland that was made to
look like a news article; careful readers saw an NBC logo and the
small label “Advertise-ment.” Worse, it was revealed (New York
Times, 4/10/09) that the concept for the ad came not from NBC
but from the paper’s advertising department. NBC official Adam
Stotsky sounded ecstatic: “What was great about this ad unit is it
gave us a quote-unquote ‘editorial voice.’”

L.A. Times readers left queasy about the arrangement hardly had
time to recover; three days later, the New York Times (4/11/09)
reported that the L.A. paper’s entertainment section was
“accompanied by a four-page advertisement for the movie The
Soloist that is laid out like a news section.” The “ad” included an
interview with a columnist from the paper, whose work inspired
the film. Like the front-page ad, the concept was developed by the
paper. For what it’s worth, the advertising arrangements seem to
have offended many of the journalists at the L.A. Times; the
Soloist ad ran over the objections of the paper’s editor, and 100
reporters wrote a letter of protest (New York Times, 4/26/09).

• Making news decisions with an eye toward the needs of

advertisers was the subject of a Wall Street Journal report
(11/2/09) about actions at the Detroit Free Press. Upon learning
that insurance company Humana Inc. was interested in advertising
alongside any reporting about a Medicare open enrollment period,
the paper decided to do a special section on the topic, giving
Humana the kind of marketing opportunity it apparently craved.
That the news staff got wind of Humana’s interest was no
accident; as the Journal reported, the Free Press has a “Client
Solutions Group” that was established “in part to act as a liaison
between the business and news staffs.”

The Journal also noted that the Free Press had run consecutive
education features in its Sunday editions in late September—
stories that appeared above ads for the retail giant Target, touting
the company’s education initiatives. That arrangement seemed to
be similar to the Humana deal, though the precise nature of the
deal remained somewhat murky. Not so murky, on the other hand,
was a comment from Detroit Free Press editor and publisher Paul
Anger: “One of the things I think newsrooms have to realize…is
we’re here to cover the news in an unvarnished way, but we’re
also here to facilitate commerce.”

• How far such facilitation might go remains a concern. Las Vegas

TV station KVBC filed an FCC complaint against three of its rivals
(KVVU, KLAS and KTNV) “charging that the stations sold airtime to
an advertiser inside their newscasts and used reporters to conduct
interviews presented as objective news stories without disclosing
that the segments were purchased” (Las Vegas Review-Journal,
10/9/09). The complaint alleges that the stations conducted
interviews that were essentially paid for—dressing up
advertisements as news. The station seemingly learned of this
when advertising staffers were told that they needed to
“guarantee the news coverage” the same way its rivals were
apparently doing.

• An example of the blending of TV advertising and news was

reported in the Tulsa World (4/5/09), thanks to a deal that
Oklahoma television company Griffin Com munications made with
the state government insurance provider Insure Oklahoma. The $3
million deal resulted in promotional spots airing within the
newscasts on two Griffin-owned stations that looked exactly like
news segments; they even hired a former newscaster from the
station to appear in the spots. There is disclosure—of a sort,
according to the World: “After the stories, the news anchor
typically reads a disclosure statement in-forming viewers that the
segment is sponsored by the station’s parent company, Griffin
Communications, and the Okla-homa Health Care Authority.”
Griffin CEO David Griffin told the paper, “We don’t sell the news.
We never have, and we never will.…The spots that run match up
to our commitment to Insure Oklahoma.”

• Of course, the clearest lesson a reporter might learn about not

offending an important advertiser is one that ends in that reporter
being out of a job. Colorado journalist Bob Berwyn was fired from
the Summit Daily News days after writing a column critical of local
ski resorts (CBS4Denver.com, 12/9/09). The column did not sit
well with Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz, who apparently warned that
it might reconsider its advertising relationship with the paper.

• As Hartford Courant consumer columnist George Gombossy

alleged that he was fired from his paper after 40 years of
experience for writing critically about the Sleepy’s mattress
company. Officials at the paper deny the allegation, but a New
York Times report (8/18/09) recalled some troubling backstory:
Gombossy says he’d been previously ordered to meet with a
company he had criticized—a company that happened to be an
advertiser. The Courant acknowledged that it was standard policy
to alert major advertisers in advance of critical reporting.

See FAIR's Archives for more on:

Fear & Favor
How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America,
Too

By Chris Hedges

April 05, 2010 "Truthdig" - -Ralph Nader’s descent from being

one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to
being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup.
Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to
thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once
consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent
corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be
destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process
with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the
hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.

“The press discovered citizen investigators around the mid-1960s,”

Nader told me when we spoke a few days ago. “I was one of
them. I would go down with the press releases, the findings, the
story suggestions and the internal documents and give it to a
variety of reporters. I would go to Congress and generate
hearings. Oftentimes I would be the lead witness. What was
interesting was the novelty; the press gravitates to novelty. They
achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the
newsworthy material. They covered it. The legislation passed.
Regulations were issued. Lives were saved. Other civic movements
began to flower.”

Nader was singled out for destruction, as Henriette Mantel and

Stephen Skrovan point out in their engaging documentary movie
on Nader, “An Unreasonable Man.” General Motors had him
followed in an attempt to blackmail him. It sent an attractive
woman to his neighborhood Safeway supermarket in a bid to meet
him while he was shopping and then seduce him; the attempt
failed, and GM, when exposed, had to issue a public apology. 

But far from ending their effort to destroy Nader, corporations

unleashed a much more sophisticated and well-funded attack. In
1971, the corporate lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Lewis Powell wrote an eight-page memo, titled “Attack on
American Free Enterprise System,” in which he named Nader as
the chief nemesis of corporations. It became the blueprint for
corporate resurgence. Powell’s memo led to the establishment of
the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and
power to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The
Powell memo outlined ways corporations could shut out those
who, in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual
and literary journals,” were hostile to corporate interests. Powell
called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and
conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked
government regulation and environmental protection. His memo
led to the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics
and economists in universities and on the airwaves, as well as
drive out those in the public sphere who questioned the rise of
unchecked corporate power and deregulation. It saw the
establishment of organizations to monitor and pressure the media
to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests.
And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote
corporate interests in the courts and appointment of sympathetic
judges to the bench. 

“It was off to the races,” Nader said. “You could hardly keep count
of the number of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks. These
think tanks specialized, especially against the tort system. We
struggled through the Nixon and early Ford years, when inflation
was a big issue. Nixon did things that horrified conservatives. He
signed into law OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency and
air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of the people
from the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last
Republican president to be afraid of liberals.”
The corporations carefully studied and emulated the tactics of the
consumer advocate they wanted to destroy. “Ralph Nader came
along and did serious journalism; that is what his early stuff was,
such as ‘Unsafe at Any Speed,’ ” the investigative journalist David
Cay Johnston told me. “The big books they [Nader and associates]
put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was
terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, ‘We see
how you do this.’ You gather material, you get people who are
articulate, you hone how you present this and the corporations
copy-catted him with one big difference—they had no regard for
the truth. Nader may have had a consumer ideology, but he was
not trying to sell you a product. He is trying to tell the truth as
best as he can determine it. It does not mean it is the truth. It
means it is the truth as best as he and his people can determine
the truth. And he told you where he was coming from.”
The Congress, between 1966 and 1973, passed 25 pieces of
consumer legislation, nearly all of which Nader had a hand in
authoring. The auto and highway safety laws, the meat and
poultry inspection laws, the oil pipeline safety laws, the product
safety laws, the update on flammable fabric laws, the air pollution
control act, the water pollution control act, the EPA, OSHA and the
Environmental Council in the White House transformed the political
landscape. Nader by 1973 was named the fourth most influential
person in the country after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice
Earl Warren and the labor leader George Meany.
“Then something very interesting happened,” Nader said. “The
pressure of these meetings by the corporations like General
Motors, the oil companies and the drug companies with the
editorial people, and probably with the publishers, coincided with
the emergence of the most destructive force to the citizen
movement—Abe Rosenthal, the editor of The New York Times.
Rosenthal was a right-winger from Canada who hated
communism, came here and hated progressivism. The Times was
not doing that well at the time. Rosenthal was commissioned to
expand his suburban sections, which required a lot of advertising.
He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations, and he did
not like me. I would give material to Jack Morris in the Washington
bureau and it would not get in the paper.”
 
Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Noam Chomsky from
being quoted in the paper and met frequently for lunch with
conservative icon William F. Buckley, demanded that no story built
around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a
corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate,
refused to comment on Nader’s research. This tactic meant the
stories were never published. The authority of the Times set the
agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from
the Times, other major papers and the networks did not feel
compelled to report on his investigations. It was harder and harder
to be heard.
“There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of
journalism,” Nader lamented. “We worked with the press to
expose corporate abuse on behalf of the public. We saved lives.
This is what journalism should be about; it should be about
making the world a better and safer place for our families and our
children, but then it ended and we were shut out.”
“We were thrown on the defensive, and once we were on the
defensive it was difficult to recover,” Nader said. “The break came
in 1979 when they deregulated natural gas. Our last national stand
was for the Consumer Protection Agency. We put everything we
had on that. We would pass it during the 1970s in the House on
one year, then the Senate during the next session, then the House
later on. It ping-ponged. Each time we would lose ground. We lost
it because Carter, although he campaigned on it, did not lift a
finger compared to what he did to deregulate natural gas. We lost
it by 20 votes in the House, although we had a two-thirds majority
in the Senate waiting for it. That was the real beginning of the
decline. Then Reagan was elected. We tried to be the watchdog.
We put out investigative reports. They would not be covered.” 
“The press in the 1980s would say ‘why should we cover you?’ ”
Nader went on. “ ‘Who is your base in Congress?’ I used to be
known as someone who could trigger a congressional hearing
pretty fast in the House and Senate. They started looking towards
the neoliberals and neocons and the deregulation mania. We put
out two reports on the benefits of regulation and they too
disappeared. They did not get covered at all. This was about the
same the time that [former U.S. Rep.] Tony Coelho taught the
Democrats, starting in 1979 when he was head of the House
Campaign Finance Committee, to start raising big-time money
from corporate interests. And they did. It had a magical influence.
It is the best example I have of the impact of money. The more
money they raised the less interested they were in any of these
popular issues. They made more money when they screwed up
the tax system. There were a few little gains here and there; we
got the Freedom of Information law through in 1974. And even in
the 1980s we would get some things done, GSA, buying air bag-
equipped cars, the drive for standardized air bags. We would
defeat some things here and there, block a tax loophole and
defeat a deregulatory move. We were successful in staunching
some of the deregulatory efforts.”
Nader, locked out of the legislative process, decided to send a
message to the Democrats. He went to New Hampshire and
Massachusetts during the 1992 primaries and ran as “none of the
above.” In 1996 he allowed the Green Party to put his name on
the ballot before running hard in 2000 in an effort that spooked
the Democratic Party. The Democrats, fearful of his grass-roots
campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an
absurdity that found fertile ground among those who had
abandoned rational inquiry for the thought-terminating clichés of
television.
Nader’s status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked
assault by corporations on the working class. The long-term
unemployment rate, which in reality is close to 20 percent, the
millions of foreclosures, the crippling personal debts that plague
households, the personal bankruptcies, Wall Street’s looting of the
U.S. Treasury, the evaporation of savings and retirement accounts
and the crumbling of the country’s vital infrastructure are taking
place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses
and compensation are enjoyed by the corporate overlords. We will
soon be forced to buy the defective products of the government-
subsidized drug and health insurance companies, which will remain
free to raise co-payments and premiums, especially if policyholders
get seriously ill. The oil, gas, coal and nuclear power companies
have made a mockery of Barack Obama’s promises to promote
clean, renewal energy. And we are rapidly becoming a third-world
country, cannibalized by corporations, with two-thirds of the
population facing financial difficulty and poverty. 
The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who
represented the best of our democracy was broken with it. As
Nader pointed out after he published “Unsafe at Any Speed” in
1965, it took nine months to federally regulate the auto industry
for safety and fuel efficiency. Two years after the collapse of Bear
Stearns there is still no financial reform. The large hedge funds
and banks are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to once again
engage in the speculative games that triggered the first financial
crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate
press, which abets our vast historical amnesia, does nothing to
remind us how we got here. It speaks in the hollow and empty
slogans handed to it by public relations firms, its corporate
paymasters and the sound-bite society.
“If you organize 1 percent of the people in this country along
progressive lines you can turn the country around, as long as you
give them infrastructure,” Nader said. “They represent a large
percentage of the population. Take all the conservatives who work
in Wal-Mart: How many would be against a living wage? Take all
the conservatives who have pre-existing conditions: How many
would be for single-payer not-for-profit health insurance? When
you get down to the concrete, when you have an active movement
that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot
of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is
that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They
largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.”
“The real tragedy is that citizens’ movements should not have to
rely on the commercial media, and public television and radio are
disgraceful—if anything they are worse,” Nader said. “In 30-some
years [Bill] Moyers has had me on [only] twice. We can’t rely on
the public media. We do what we can with Amy [Goodman] on
“Democracy Now!” and Pacifica stations. When I go to local areas
I get very good press, TV and newspapers, but that doesn’t have
the impact, even locally. The national press has enormous impact
on the issues. It is not pleasant having to say this. You don’t want
to telegraph that you have been blacked out, but on the other
hand you can’t keep it quiet. The right wing has won through
intimidation.”
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. http://www.truthdig.com
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Consumer Culture & TV Programming
By: Robin Anderson
Reviewed by: J. A. Progler
Broadcasted on BICNews 28 July 1997

Westview Press: Boulder, CO, US. 1995.

Pp.306. Pbk: US$17.95.

Nature of television in a dysfunctional society: link between

advertising and programming
In 1922, an American farmer and electronics tinkerer by the name
of Philo T Farnsworth invented a scanning device that would lead
to the development of television. Farnsworth's 'image dissector'
solved many of the problems faced by European and American
technicians who sought a way to electronically transmit images.
Control of Farnsworth's invention would determine the success or
failure of all television development.

In 1939, Farnsworth licensed his device to American media mogul

David Sarnoff of RCA. At the time TV was a novelty but by the
late-1950s it had grown into a powerful mass media. When later
asked what he thought about how his invention had progressed,
Farnsworth, who died in obscurity in 1971, said he refused to
watch TV and expressed disgust at its crass commercialization and
the manipulation of the medium by the advertising industry.
During Fransworth's lifetime, creeping commercialization came to
infect every aspect of TV, and consumerism had become a way of
life for most Americans.

Robin Anderson, associate professor of communications at

Fordham University in New York City, examines this phenomenon
in Consumer Culture & TV Programming, part of a series from
Westview Press on Critical Studies in Communication and in the
Cultural Industries. She addresses timely questions about the
extent to which the advertising industry controls television, and
the cultural environment that allows corporations to shape public
perception.

Anderson sums up a key dimension of the relationship she seeks

to reveal: 'It is to say... that in selling commercial time to
advertisers to sell products, broadcasters are also selling a product
- their audiences.' In other words, in the world of TV broadcasting,
the product is you. By way of sophisticated marketing surveys,
advertisers and broadcasters profile audiences which are then
targeted with specifically designed campaigns. These profiles are
bought and sold like any other commodity in the American cultural
industries, except that most Americans do not realize that their
eyeballs are being traded for high profits. 

In the first three chapters, Anderson provides some necessary

background on the broadcasting and advertising industries.
Especially useful is chapter Three, 'Emotional Ties That Bind:
Focus Groups, Psychoanalysis, and Consumer Culture.' Anderson
uncovers an army of smug technocrats with PhDs in psychology
who are mobilized by the advertising and broadcast industries to
define, profile, segment and target audiences according to viewing
and consuming habits. Much of this process is quite guileful and it
is a wonder that Americans are not out in the streets to protest
the way they are manipulated by advertising, whether to sell
deodorant or the latest political figurehead.

In developing a general model of advertising discourse, Anderson

looks at several product campaigns. For example, an ad campaign
for a male baldness treatment 'evokes feelings of regret, anxiety,
and frustration by depiciting an unpleasant childhood memory' and
then 'promises relief from such long-held disappointments' by
offering the product as a form of 'psychic healing.' She concludes
that this 'pseudotherapeutic discourse, common to many
advertisements, promises emotional comfort through the use of
products that are inherently incapable of providing such comfort.'

In the view of TV advertisers, Americans appear to be a miserable

lot, suffering from baldness, bad breath, body odor, obesity,
indigestion, headaches, and hemorrhoids, and also from a host of
emotional anxieties and psychological disorders, for which a vast
array of products is offered as relief. But as Anderson notes, 'the
product and its functional qualities are irrelevant.' It is the linkages
that are important: 'Keying into psychic desires, needs,
frustrations, and anxieties, and then tying those feelings to
products, has become the strategy of choice for an industry always
searching for the most effective mode of persuasion.'
Ongoing marketing research in the 1980s has developed the 'soft
sell' as the preferred mode of persuasion for advertisers whose
products would otherwise be virtually indistinguishable. Anderson
exposes the specialists working behind the scenes:
'Anthropologists and psychologists employed by ad agencies spend
hundreds of hours probing their subject to determine the hidden
desires that motivate behaviour.' For example, researchers at
Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the largest American advertising firms,
'strive to find ways to connect cigarettes with relaxation and to
associate fast food with a feeling of safety.' Such insidious
connections are standard fare.

Although her generally materialist analysis overlooks the spiritual

dimensions of culture, Anderson suggests that the 'lack of
resources and of meaningful mental health care has left a void in
American life. And many people have no means of learning the
discursive and emotional strategies necessary to achieve emotional
and personal fulfillment. It is no wonder that, given the great need
for psychological assistance but with so few providers of those
services to the general public, the media in the 1980s became the
main forum for expressing such needs. The discourse of therapy is
now particularly pervasive on television, where talk shows,
dramatic series, and advertising language have capitalized on
human dissatisfaction and picked up the mantle dropped by the
therapeutic profession.' And so products become therapy pills.

Subsequent chapters cover specific instances of programming

content geared toward selling products. Of particular interest is
the fairly recent phenomenon of 'product placement.' Not satisfied
to simply interrupt programmes with advertising spots, sponsors
sought ways to weave products into plot lines. A vast middle-man
industry has emerged that previews television scripts for potential
product references, and solicits advertisers to pay for having their
products featured. When a TV star drinks a particular brand of
soda, or munches on a certain kind of cereal, this is no accident.
Each product appearing in a programme is there because of
sophisticated negotiations and careful planning. 

While junk food and trendy items turn up in sitcoms, the scripts
for dramatic programmes frequently sell hi-tech products, such as
cellular phones and automobiles. Again, this is absolutely insidious
and done with the utmost care to convince consumers that
product placement simply makes programming more true to 'real
life.' But avid television viewers seem unable to distinguish
between real life and fantasy, and the advertising industries in
cahoots with broadcasters have constructed this public perception.

In addition to product placement, advertising intervenes in

programming in more subtle ways. It is important to sponsors that
programmes provide the 'proper atmosphere' for their product
messages. One keystone of the consumer edifice is the notion that
all problems are individual in nature, and therefore subject to
individual choices and remedies. Individualism is absolutely
necessary for the survival of a consumer-based society. But this is
a false sense of individuality. The contradictory message is to be
yourself and buy this product like millions of others who also want
to express their individuality through mass consumption. Personal
identity is intertwined with product consciousness to such a degree
that American youths pay for the 'privilege' of wearing logos on
their clothing as a marker of personal style. 

Another advertising mainstay is a phony sense of 'family values.'

Anderson suggests that 'for American culture, as everyday life is
ruptured from the political context, the family has become the site
of struggle for meaning that embodies all the contradictions of the
discourse of persuasion. Presented as utopian fantasy, it is
simultaneously the source of all dysfunction. Even if pleasure is to
be found within its confines in the present, family structures of the
past are responsible for our dysfunction... As the flashpoint of our
culture, family life backs us into a corner, trapping us in a search
for happiness within a fantasy built from fragments of the
shattered dreams of our childhood.'

These shattered dreams are exploited by talk shows. In a chapter

on 'The Television Talk Show: From Democratic Potential to
Pseudotherapy', Anderson shows that any potential for
contributing to meaningful public discourse is lost in the rush for
ratings and ad revenues. Initially conceived for stars and
celebrities to hawk their latest media wares, talk shows in the
1980s and 1990s also became forums for people to reveal their
personal tragedies disconnnected from social, political or economic
realities.

In the final analysis, as Anderson articulates, 'talk shows - like

advertising and entertainment programming - address real needs
but do not fulfill those needs. Talk shows respond to the need for
a public forum on issues of common concern, but, like traditional
news formats, they fail to connect personal experience with the
larger socioeconomic context. Therefore, they cannot help
individuals understand their own lives in relation to the social,
political, and economic forces that shape them. The TV therapist
has come to replace the expert (or political official) as the voice of
wisdom. Talk shows speak with a therapeutic language that
examines only a privatized landscape of human experience, further
rupturing individual needs from collective solutions. Instead of
understanding and knowledge, television talk offers its viewers the
voyeuristic pleasure of gazing into the private lives of society's
victims. In essence, television's therapeutic discourse prevents the
public from understanding social issues and participating in the
answers to social problems.'

After chapters on 'Reality-based Police Shows,' 'Privacy and the

Culture of Surveillance,' and 'Advertising the Persian Gulf War,'
Anderson returns to the talk show format and its relationship to
the 1992 US presidential elections. The same problems with the
therapeutic format persist: 'The discourse of TV therapy is now so
pervasive that it penetrates the formulation and definition of public
problems. And politicians have learned to stay within its
parameters. For instance, the amount of time taken up with the
talk-show testimonial style left Clinton no time to answer the
question about drugs in broader political terms. In effect, the talk
show strategy allowed him to avoid relating the problem of drugs
either to social or economic issues such as unemployment,
poverty, and rage or to substantive policy proposals.'

Consumer Culture & TV Programming is engaging and provocative.

Readers will no doubt enjoy Anderson's discussion of programming
content, but the real value of her work is in identifying the
therapeutic nature of television in a dysfunctional society. This is
the link between advertising and programming. They are
intertwined in ways that insure big profits for corporations while
preventing meaningful public discourse.
TV and consumer culture work together to ease the burdens of
living in a consumer society and a pseudo-democracy, while
simultaneously contributing to and perpetuating the severe social,
political, cultural, and economic problems that plague modern
American civilization. For that reason alone, this book should be
essential reading for Islamic scholars, activists, and believers alike,
particularly those living in areas where American-style TV
programming is pervasive. 

Anderson also provides insights which can inform decisions that

many Muslim organizations face regarding the role of television in
their social and political activities. Discussions of television that
focus only on using it for da'wah or avoiding morally questionable
programming content miss the real dangers of TV. While sex and
violence are pervasive, simply avoiding these programmes is not
enough to escape the effects of TV in a modern capitalist
democracy. 

TV acts as a sort of Satanic model that constructs a framework for

(mis) understanding problems, duties, behaviours and opinions.
This volume can help concerned Muslims avoid the self-deceptive
ruse of taking the discursive conventions of American television at
face value.
The Monopolization of America
By Russell Mokhiber

February 14, 2010 "Corporate Crime Reporter" You walk

into your local convenience store and head to the cold walk-in
beer room in the back.

The choice is overwhelming.

Budweiser, Michelob, Bud Light, Busch Light, Stella Artois, Grolsch,

Kirin,Tsingtao, Corona, Negra Modelo, Rolling Rock, Widmer, Miller
and Coors.

In fact, all of these beers are controlled by two companies.

MillerCoors under the direction of South African Breweries (SAB)

and AnheuserBusch In Bev.

Two multinational corporations controlling the beer choices of 300

million Americans.

And it's not just beer.

One single multinational corporation dominates the world supply of

eyeglass stores.

One dominates the milk supply.

Barry Lynn goes down the list of industries.

And he finds a similar story across the board.

A handful of multinational corporations controlling each industry -

or the supply chains of each industry.

Such dominant monopolies were illegal just thirty years ago.

But that all changed with Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork.
A corporatist oligarchy took hold.

President Obama has promised aggressive antitrust enforcement.

But Lynn says it's pie in the sky.

"It will take more than a lawsuit or two to overthrow America's

corporatist oligarchy and restore a model of capitalism that
protects our rights as property holders and citizens," Lynn argues
in his new book - Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the
Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2010).

Antitrust law was developed to protect the political economy from

extreme concentrations of corporate power.

Then came Reagan and Bork.

In 1978, Bork said we should have a consumer welfare test.

If economic concentration is good for the consumer - think Wal-

Mart - then let it be.

Never mind the citizen.

In 1981, William Baxter, head of Reagan's Antitrust Division,

announced that he would be guided by "an efficiency test."

"When Baxter first talked to the press in 1981, he said - we are

going to impose an efficiency test," Lynn told Corporate Crime
Reporter last week. "Those were the words he used. It was only a
little bit later that they framed it as a consumer welfare test. And
Robert Bork came up with that. Bork's book - The Antitrust
Paradox - came out in 1978 and he floated this idea of a consumer
welfare test."

"It took Baxter a couple of years to get the messaging together.

They locked into the consumer welfare test. And it helped to bring
along so many folks in the consumer movement. And for some
reason, after focusing on safety, which is a fantastic thing that
Ralph Nader did, they began fixating on prices. And there is a
whole political analysis as to why they began fixating on prices.
What groups were they targeting with that fixation?"

"In 1981, that marked a revolutionary change in how we applied

our anti-monopoly laws. No longer was the primary consideration
political. The primary consideration was prices and consumer
welfare."

Lynn says that Bork didn't understand why the consumer

movement didn't come after him on the consumer welfare test.

"In 1993, Bork put out a second edition of the Antitrust Paradox,"
Lynn said. "And in the introduction, he says - I don't understand
what happened here. I thought the socialists were doing to come
out and fight us tooth and nail on this. And they never did. We
didn't think we were going to get this through. And we did."
Mention the word "socialist" in this context, and Lynn sees red.

"In this country, the group that tends to point its finger and calls
the other people socialists most effectively tends to win," Lynn
said.

"And when they win - they get to socialize their own risks."

"So, you have this elite in this country that for a generation has
been raving about socialism."

"And what were they doing in the meantime? They were

socializing all of their risks."

"As was laid bare to us in September 2008. Larry Summers put it

best - what the bankers did, he said, was they privatized all of
their profits and socialized all of their risks."

"You really have to target the other people and call them
socialists."

"We have just seen the most massive era of socialization in this
country that we've ever seen."

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based

Corporate Crime Reporter. He is also founder of
singlepayeraction.org. 

© 2010 Corporate Crime Reporter

 

Last Rites for the USA

By Cindy Sheehan

February 06, 2010 "Correo del Orinoco" -- A U.S. Supreme

Court case decision from 1886, The County of Santa Clara v. the
Southern Pacific Railroad (SPRR), is the reason today that the U.S.
is a corporate empire.

Many people mistakenly believe that corporations were given the

same rights (not just privileges) as persons in this Supreme Court
decision, but nothing could be farther from the truth - the reason
my nation is such a dysfunctional system now is not because of a
Supreme Court decision, nor a law passed by Congress, nor by a
referendum of the people: it's because of a single statement, one
sentence, spoken by a Supreme Court Chief Justice before the
hearing even began.

The founders of the U.S. did not like corporations and for the first
few decades of the existence of this nation, corporations were only
given limited "privileges" and not "rights," but after the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1868 - which
extended equal protection under the law to all male citizens of the
U.S regardless of race - attorneys for the corporations recognized
the opportunity that had been gifted to them and started to
scheme for corporate personhood.

After many assaults against common law, finally a perfect test

case came up before the Supreme Court, the previously
referenced case. The case was brought before the Supremes
because the SPRR (the Halliburton of the 19th Century) objected
to the fact the state of California would not allow it to deduct
mortgage costs on its vast holdings from its before tax income as
could private citizens.

The Supreme Court did not even try that case to grant corporate
personhood - the reason corporations now have 14th Amendment
protections is because of a statement made by Chief Justice Waite:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question
whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these
corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

This one sentence changed the frame of North American politics in

a very corrupt way. 1886 is when the "noble experiment" of
representative republicanism died. Despite some populist stabs at
"anti-trust" laws and labor unionism, today we find that the U.S.
system of government is "by and for" the corporations.

On Thursday, January 21, 2010 - a (little noticed) U.S. Supreme

Court decision took our critically ill republic that has been on life
support and effectively murdered it.

Our elections have been compromised and the presidential

candidates have been chosen for us by the tyranny of the
oligarchy for many decades, and we the people of the U.S. are
allowed to cast our votes to give us the appearance that we have
a voice in our nation, but now with the decision in the recent
United Citizens v. The Federal Elections Commission even any
appearance of representation for the people has been overturned.

In this decision, the Supreme Court removed limits from corporate

campaign expenditures stating that even limiting these
contributions in the first place put restrictions on a corporations'
1st Amendment rights to free speech.

Corporations have long held sway over our government and the
soft fascism of corporate control has been running things behind
the scenes.

However, the decision in United Citizens v. The Federal Elections

Commission that expanded a mouth-less and mindless
corporation's freedom of speech has effectively gagged 300 million
more of us that don't have billions of dollars to buy the votes of
our politicians who are just extensions of such crime cartels as
Goldman Sachs, anyway.

I believe that United Citizens v. The FEC will go down in the

history books as one of the most important, and most destructive
Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history and we should just drop
all pretense at democracy and call our leaders President Goldman
and VP Sachs.

Cindy Sheehan - Cindy Sheehan is a US peace activist and founder

of Peace of the Action, an anti-war organization that promotes
profound structural change in the US.
How Wall St Destroyed Private
Medicine
By Paul Craig Roberts

January 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- At my

annual check-up, my doctor handed me a sheet explaining the
reasons for office fee increases for Medicare Patients. It is worth
reporting at length.

Medicare fixes the prices for Medicare patients’ health care. All
office charges for Medicare, including office visit charges, have
been set by the Federal government since 1984. In real terms
(adjusted for inflation), these fixed prices are less today than they
were three decades ago.

During the last four years, there have been large decreases in
Medicare reimbursements for laboratory services provided in-
house by private physicians. Payments for in-office blood work, for
example, have been cut 35 to 47 percent. Yet, a physician’s
overhead continues to increase as a result of uncontrollable costs,
such as property taxes, building insurance, electricity,
maintenance, malpractice and workers compensation insurance.

As one result, my doctor had to close both the x-ray unit and the
state and federally licensed medical laboratory on his premises.
Now patients are inconvenienced by having to go to other
locations for services that formerly were provided by the doctor at
lower cost. A one day medical check-up is now a multiple day
event and more expensive.

While Medicare payments to doctors have been cut, regulations

have been increasing: “Almost every outside diagnostic procedure
(CT, MRI scan, sonogram) ordered by this office now has to be
pre-approved by some outside agency. Many medications are now
requiring pre-approval or step therapy. Each requires filling out 1-2
pages of forms and/or two or more phone calls. This requires
personnel time and therefore more cost. Consultant referrals are
requiring more paperwork and time to schedule.” 
My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he
does delivering health care.

While Medicare payments for in-office services to private doctors,

including those for blood work and x-ray units, were drastically
cut, payments to outside corporate facilities for the same services
were increased. It is obvious what is afoot. Corporate lobbies are
using their whores in Congress to shift income from physician
offices to corporate labs, corporate medical service providers, and
hospitals that are owned by national corporations.

Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases

the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy
private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies
in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician’s income is
diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health
care is being replaced with health business.

As a result of the way American medicine is being reconstructed,

patients will cease to have a doctor whom they know and who
knows them. Important information is lost in a system of
bureaucratized “health care” in which a patient sees whatever face
happens to be on duty at the corporate provider. Impersonal
health care thus brings a cost of its own, and its quality can be low
compared to private practice. Indeed, the U.S. is creating a “health
care” system that is more costly and less efficient than single-
payer national health systems. But it will enrich corporations and
provide play for Wall Street.

It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market

economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free
market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate
lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to
create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the
practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater
shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.

Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate

chains from Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being
destroyed by monopoly capital. The risks of starting a private
business today are many times higher than they were a half
century ago. Chains have turned Americans who once were
independent business men and women into employees.

The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private
lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly
transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health
insurance industry. The “solution” to tens of millions of Americans
being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to
purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most
of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private
policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers’
money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private
companies. 

In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of

private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist”
America.

In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are

understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the
government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests.
Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the
revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The
federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened
and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters
can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most
Americans.

Every aspect of the US military has been mined for private profit.
Supply and other functions for the military, such as those provided
by Halliburton and Blackwater, services once provided by the
military itself at low cost, have been privatized. These services
now cost many multiples of the cost to taxpayers of in-house
military provision. 

The “war on terror” enriches the armaments/security industry and

enables Israeli territorial expansion. The Israel Lobby and the
munitions industry are major sources of funding for U.S. political
campaigns. 

Prisons have been privatized in order to create profits for private

corporations. The prisons require high incarceration rates in order
to be profitable. Consequently, “freedom and democracy” America
not only has the highest incarceration rate and the highest
absolute number of prisoners in the world, but also a prison
population comparable in size to the prison population of Stalin’s
Gulag Archipelago. 

Congress allows private companies run by hardline Republicans to

count electronically without paper trails the votes in elections. It
has been proved over and over that the electronic voting
machines, with proprietary undisclosed codes, can rig any election,
especially if there are no exit polls or the captured media can find
a way to discredit the exit polls.

And now we have private health care destroyed by the greed for
profit. There are many reports of health care corporations, but not
private doctors, rationing and even denying health care to policy
holders in order to maximize profits. There are reports of people
with treatable forms of cancer who were not told by their
corporate health care providers in order to avoid the cost of their
treatment. These reports are in compliance with capitalist
America’s emphasis on profits uber alles, to hell with people, the
environment, honor and integrity.

Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and “free market

economists.” They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology,
that Wall Street finances venture capitalists who bring economic
progress and higher living standards. Wall Street does no such
thing, especially since financial deregulation turned Wall Street
into a speculative hedge fund.

Wall Street is concerned with annual bonuses. It will do anything

to get them. 

Today the interests of American capitalists are as far removed

from the interests of the population as the bureaucrats of state
owned firms under socialism. Neither can fail, no matter how
incompetent or inefficient, as they have the public purse as their
backup. 

The Wall Street investment banks, which created with the

compliance of the regulatory authorities and the credit rating
agencies, “toxic” instruments that were sold world wide, thus
destroying the prospects of people in many countries, are devoid
of integrity and honor. Their only god is greed. And they control
the US government, which is too dependent on campaign
contributions to restore regulation.

The lobbies of greed rule America. The White House, Congress,

even the federal judiciary are impotent in the face of capitalist
greed. The recent Supreme Court decision permitting corporations
to use shareholders’ money in corporate treasuries to influence
elections increases the control that corporations have over the
outcome of elections and the decisions of the government of the
United
States.http://www.counterpunch.org/feingold01222010.html  

There is no government of the people, for the people, by the

people, only the rule of private interests.

Dr. Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan
administration, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research
Fellow in the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and held the William
E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International
Studies, Georgetown University. 
 
The Corporate Takeover of U.S.
Democracy
By Noam Chomsky

February 03, 2010 "In These Times" -- Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a
dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.

On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban
corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that
profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.

The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political
system.

To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of
democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast
treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing
their bidding.”

The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly
called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice
John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on
narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a
far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting
corporate contributions to federal campaigns.

Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing

more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions,
sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections,
hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the
small sector of the population that dominates the economy.

Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a

very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The
theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector
power coalesce to invest to control the state.

The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning

democracy.

The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens

acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered
by the First Amendment”—the constitutional guarantee of free speech,
which would include support for political candidates.

In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s
1886 decision that corporations—these “collectivist legal entities”—have
the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.

This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing

breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as
“a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the
American states as popular governments.”

Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of
corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from
shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the
board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later
years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably
by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for
example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to
be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)—quite unlike
a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New
York, or even minimal human rights.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America

in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield
a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the
country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”

In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s

masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.

The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and
power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s
election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who
run the government.

The voting data reveal a rather different story.

High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic
urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters
said they were `very interested’ in the election,” The Wall St. Journal/NBC
poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”
So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies:
For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for
the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.

The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving,
thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.

In manufacturing, one in six is out of work—unemployment at the level of

the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy
and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for
recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.

Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare—that is, the
vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.

It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts

election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is
turning against the program.

The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St.
Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling
of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.

These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was
favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by
64 percent; both programs were abandoned.

Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to
negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma
that he would not pursue that option.

Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per
capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries,
and health outcomes are at the low end.

But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered

on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually
unregulated private insurers—a costly system peculiar to the U.S.

The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the

serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the
looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion
and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy
can hardly be overestimated.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus)
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of
books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York
Times News Service/Syndicate.
Holding Corporations Accountable for
Apartheid Crimes
By Amy Goodman

January 13, 2010 "Truthdig" -- A landmark class action case is

under way in a New York federal court, with victims of apartheid in
South Africa suing corporations that they say helped the pre-1994
regime. Among the multinational corporations are IBM, Fujitsu,
Ford, GM and banking giants UBS and Barclays. The lawsuit
accuses the corporations of "knowing participation in and/or aiding
and abetting of the crimes of apartheid; extrajudicial killing;
torture; prolonged unlawful detention; and cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment." Attorneys are seeking up to $400 billion in
damages.

The late anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus, who died just weeks
ago, is a listed plaintiff. Back in 2008, he told me that "for [the
corporations], apartheid was a very good system, and it was a
very profitable system." As the U.S. observes the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr.'s birthday, marks the first anniversary in office of
the first African-American president and ponders the exposure of a
racial gaffe spoken by Sen. Harry Reid, the issue of race is front
and center, making this case timely and compelling.

The Alien Tort Statute dates from the U.S. Revolutionary War era
and allows people from outside the United States to bring a civil
suit against another party for alleged crimes committed outside
the United States. Cases have been brought in recent years to
address forced labor on an oil pipeline in Burma, the killing of
labor organizers in Colombia and the killing of activists in the Niger
delta. This suit alleges that the apartheid regime could not have
succeeded in its violent oppression of millions of people without
the active support of the foreign corporations.

Ford and General Motors built manufacturing centers in Port

Elizabeth, South Africa, where Dennis Brutus grew up. He told me,
"They were using ... very cheap black labor, because there was a
law in South Africa which said blacks are not allowed to join trade
unions, and they're not allowed to strike, so that they were forced
to accept whatever wages they were given. They lived in
ghettos ... actually in the boxes in which the parts had been
shipped from the U.S. to be assembled in South Africa. So you had
a whole township called Kwaford, meaning ‘the place of Ford.' "

Likewise with IBM and Fujitsu. The complaint states, "The South
African security forces used computers supplied by ... IBM and
Fujitsu ... to restrict Black people's movements within the country,
to track non-whites and political dissidents, and to target
individuals for the purpose of repressing the Black population and
perpetuating the apartheid system." Black South Africans were
issued passbooks, which the apartheid regime used to restrict
movement and track millions of people, and to enable politically
motivated arrests and disappearances over decades.

UBS and Barclays, the suit alleges, "directly financed the South
African security forces that carried out the most brutal aspects of
apartheid." The United Nations Special Committee Against
Apartheid stated, in 1979, that "we learn today that more than
$5.4 billion has been loaned in a six-year period to bolster a
regime which is responsible for some of the most heinous crimes
ever committed against humanity." Banks (including UBS) were
punished for helping the Nazis during World War II, so precedent
exists for reparations in the case of apartheid.

One of the plaintiffs' attorneys, Michael Hausfeld, told me: "Who is

a corporation and what are its responsibilities? If companies can
affect lives in ways that make those lives worse, so that people are
suppressed or terrorized ... you are basically ascribing to eternity
the fact that companies can act with both impunity and immunity."

South Africa went through a historic process after apartheid, the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by Nobel Peace
laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Thousands of people took
responsibility for their actions, along with scores of South African
corporations. Not one multinational company accepted the
invitation to speak at the TRC. The case, says Marjorie Jobson,
national director of the Khulumani Support Group, which is filing
the lawsuit, "takes forward the unfinished business of the TRC."
The election of Barack Obama, the son of an African, was a
historic moment in the fight against racism. But unless U.S. courts
are open to addressing wrongs, past and present, corporations will
still feel free to go abroad and profit from racist and repressive
policies.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2010 Amy Goodman

Corporate Personhood Should Be
Banned, Once and For All
Outrageous SCOTUS Decision Should
Reignite Most Necessary of Debates
By Ralph Nader

January 21, 2010 - -Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our
already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely
dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations
already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their  
political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and
shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also
draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate
money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp
already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.

This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a

grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all
end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on
politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent
corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and
drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters.
It is way overdue to overthrow “King Corporation” and restore the
sovereignty of “We the People”!

 
Supreme Court OKs Unlimited
Corporate Spending on Elections
The justices overturn a century of U.S. electoral law by a 5-4 vote.
Millions of extra dollars are expected to start flowing from big
business to this fall's races, much of it benefiting Republican
candidates.

By David G. Savage

January 22, 2010 "LA Times" - -Reporting from

Washington - Overturning a century-old restriction, the Supreme
Court ruled Thursday that corporations could spend as much as
they wanted to sway voters in federal elections.

In a landmark 5-4 decision, the court's conservative bloc said that

corporations had the same right to free speech as individuals, and
for that reason the government could not stop corporations from
spending to help their favored candidates.

The ruling, which will presumably apply as well to labor unions and
other organizations, is likely to have an effect on this year's
congressional elections. Many political analysts and election-law
experts predict that millions of extra dollars will flood into this fall's
contests, much of it benefiting Republican candidates.

Republicans praised the decision as a victory for wide-open

political speech, but Democrats slammed it as a win for big
money.

President Obama called the ruling "a major victory for Big Oil, Wall
Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful
interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to
drown out the voices of everyday Americans." He promised to seek
"a forceful response to this decision" from Congress. Some
Democrats talked about seeking legislation that would require
corporations to get approval from their shareholders before
spending money on politics.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader,
said that the court had restored proper rights to corporations and
unions. Previously, "the government was picking winners and
losers," McConnell said.

Until Thursday, corporations and unions were barred from

spending their treasury funds on broadcast ads, campaign workers
or billboards that urge the election or defeat of a federal
candidate.

The restriction dates to 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt

persuaded Congress to forbid corporations, railroads and national
banks from putting money into federal races. After World War II,
Congress extended the ban to labor unions. More recently, the
McCain-Feingold Act in 2002 added an extra limit on corporate and
union-funded broadcast ads in the month before an election. Such
ads were prohibited if they even mentioned a candidate running
for office.

Thursday's decision swept away all of these restrictions.

"The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of

the speaker's corporate identity," said Justice Anthony M.
Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion. While the case of
Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission dealt only with
corporations, the ruling will probably also free unions to spend as
they wish.

Two significant prohibitions were left standing. Corporations and

unions cannot give money directly to the campaigns of federal
candidates, or to political parties. And the court affirmed the
requirement that sponsors of political ads disclose who paid for
them. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on these points.

Thursday's decision was supported by five justices who were

Republican nominees: Kennedy and Thomas along with Chief
Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel
A. Alito Jr.

The dissenters included the three Democratic appointees: Justices

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
They joined a 90-page dissenting opinion written by Justice John
Paul Stevens, who was appointed by President Ford, a Republican.
Stevens, who will turn 90 in April, spoke in a halting voice as he
read part of his dissent in the courtroom Thursday.

He called the decision "a radical change in the law." He predicted

that the ruling would "cripple the ability of ordinary citizens,
Congress and the states to adopt even limited measures to protect
against corporate domination of the electoral process."

The decision displayed a deep division of opinion on the court

about the meaning of the 1st Amendment and the freedom of
speech.

The majority said that the Constitution broadly protected

discussion and debate on politics, regardless of who was paying
for the speech.

Stevens and the dissenters said that the majority was ignoring the
long-understood rule that the government could limit election
money from corporations, unions and others, such as foreign
governments.

"Under today's decision, multinational corporations controlled by

foreign governments" would have the same rights as Americans to
spend money to tilt U.S. elections, Stevens said.

For critics of the campaign funding laws, the Citizens United case
was an acorn that grew into an oak.

It began when Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a New York senator,

said that she was running for president. David Bossie, a longtime
Clinton critic, set up Citizens United as a nonprofit corporation, and
produced a DVD called "Hillary: The Movie," an attack on her as
vicious and untrustworthy.

Bossie lost a suit against the Federal Election Commission, which

was charged with enforcing the McCain-Feingold Act. A lower court
had said that the planned broadcast of the film was prohibited
because it was an electioneering communication aimed at voters
within 30 days of a presidential primary. Bossie appealed, citing
the 1st Amendment.

When his case first reached the Supreme Court, the conservative
justices voiced alarm that the government could restrict a movie,
or perhaps a book, that criticized a candidate simply because it
was paid for with corporate money. In September, they heard the
case for a second time to broadly consider the issue of corporate-
funded election ads.

Chief Justice Roberts said he was convinced that a broad free-

speech ruling was required. Otherwise, it "would allow censorship
not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets,
posters, the Internet and virtually any other medium that
corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views
on matters of public concern."

david.savage@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Business Aims to Relax Bans on
Products Made with Child & Slave
Labor
By David Sirota

November 12, 2009 "Open Left" November 11, 2009 --

We've seen corporations use "free trade" agreements to quietly
camouflage their push for exploitable labor in broader arguments
about globalization. What we haven't seen is corporate special
interests openly push for U.S. regulators to openly allow
companies to sell goods made with child and slave labor...until
now.

Check out this report from Inside U.S. Trade (no link- subscription
required) - it's straight from the I Shit You Not File:

Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions

banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced
labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a
customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max
Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA)...

These groups are examining the ramifications of the bill's

provisions, especially in light of the bill's requirements that a newly
created office in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
annually report to Congress on the volume and value of goods
made with child labor, forced labor or convict labor that have been
stopped at the border.

Business sources say this reporting requirement could cause DHS

to more actively seek out imported products made with child labor,
forced labor or convict labor...

One source did expect a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance
Committee markup of the bill, and speculated that U.S. industry
groups and foreign governments could form ad hoc coalitions to
help send a united message.
Those of us pushing for serious trade policy reform have argued
for years that businesses are aiming to create global economic
policies that allow them to troll the world for the most exploitable
forms of labor. As General Electric CEO Jack Welch famously said,
corporations want laws that allow them to "have every plant you
own on a barge" - one that can move from country to country
looking for the worst conditions to exploit. Such an international
economic regime would (and now does) allow the world's worst
governments to create artificial comparative economic advantages
through bad/immoral policies.

This is an important concept: Whereas comparative advantage

used to be about natural advantages (ie. one country has optimal
soil for grapes, another country has optimal soil for corn), "free
trade" encourages countries to create comparative advantage
through man-made laws. Some countries, for instance, creates a
comparative advantage by letting factories pollute as much as they
want, thus encouraging companies to move their factories there
from other countries where pollution controls are more serious.
Other countries create a comparative advantage by permitting
children to be enslaved, thus encouraging companies operating in
countries with more expensive non-slave labor to shift operations
to a place where they can make products with all but free labor.

The way to stop this is for the world's largest economies to

establish basic rules which everyone else will inevitably follow as a
price of admission to those economies' markets. If the United
States says companies cannot sell products in our market made
with child slave labor, most companies will cease making products
with child slave labor fearing the loss of access to our market
which would destroy their business.

Of course, that's why business has opposed every effort to put

basic labor, environmental and human rights standards into our
international trade agreements - and why business groups are now
preparing to try to weaken the laws barring products made with
child slave labor. They know that the less rules that exist in the
American market, the more cost-cutting exploitation they can
engage in.
That corporations' advocacy for deregulation has now become so
brazen that they are effectively pushing the U.S. government to
endorse child slave labor is predictable. This is what their
globalization agenda has always been all about. The only thing
surprising about it is that in a Washington so overtly dominated by
Big Money, it has taken them this long to be this blatant about
their objectives.
American Corporatocracy
By Paul A. Moore

January 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --Schools

teach that the United States of America is a democracy. The
government was established as "of, by, and for the people" and
later on, a President Abraham Lincoln called the nation's people to
join and die in a civil war that such a thing might never perish
from the earth. Aside from the extent the lesson was ever in
accord with the truth, it has today become an outright absurdity.
The Supreme Court has declared once and for all that the
corporations will rule. The United States of America is now better
described as a corporatocracy. The government is owned and
dictated to by these capitalist creations whose God is Mammon.

Corporations are, of course, different from people. They are

devoid of human emotion. They are constitutionally unable to
generate empathy. They feel nothing if people suffer exploitation,
if people live in misery, or if people die horribly. Union Carbide was
unaffected by the thousands dead and dying in Bhopal. It
registered only on the balance sheet, a $470-million loss taken for
the sake of future corporate viability under a new name, Dow
Chemical. The corporation will not be reasoned with, pleaded with,
or shamed into changing course even when life on the planet
hangs in the balance. McDonald's is in the process of teaching
Starbucks that even the pretense of a social conscience is a losing
marketing ploy.

The corporation recognizes and reacts only to threats to its air

supply-profits. So in one sense corporations do share something
with human beings. They have an instinct for self-preservation and
if they are deprived of a life giving element they die. While human
beings must have oxygen and water, the corporation's lifeblood is
those quarterly profits. The corporation must make a profit and
then ever greater profits into the future. Corporate profits must
grow, forever! Irrational, impossible, unsustainable but that is in
the nature of the beast-much as lemmings rush to the sea.

The parameters are the same in every corner of the globalized

economy. The greatest possible profit is a product of the highest
possible productivity and the lowest possible wage. US
corporations have moved everything that isn't nailed down to
lower wage countries. Nothing is made in today's de-industrialized
United States. American consumer's service calls are answered in
Ireland, India, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic. Major
League baseballs are made in Haiti and the recent deadly
earthquake won't change that. AirJordans come out of Nike's
sweatshops in Indonesia. Microsoft conducts 85% of its research
in the US so Bill Gates fights to lift H-1B visa restrictions to bring
the low wage high-tech workers here from India and Taiwan.
Halliburton is now headquartered in Dubai and preparing to
receive its old boss, Dick Cheney, in his retirement years.

To survive under their profit imperative corporations must

undertake a never ending process of consolidation. There is
consolidation by horizontal integration. For instance, numerous US
corporations once dotted the auto making landscape. In the recent
past it was down to the Big Three. Today Chrysler is doomed, Ford
is on life support, and General Motors is on its knees. In the
corporate world of the near future cars will be made in Japan, or
China, or India. Ultimately, the industry will settle in one corporate
entity.

There is consolidation by vertical integration and its champion is

Wal-Mart, the world's largest corporation. Wal-Mart has made a
partner of the Chinese government. Working together, the
partners have turned China into a vast subsistence-wage labor
camp. China supplies Wal-Mart so it has no need of domestic
vendors like the now destroyed Rubbermaid. Armed with the
lowest production costs, Wal-Mart's rise up on every other street
corner selling every commodity imaginable and every service the
corporation can get its hooks into. Wal-Mart lays waste to local
economies and then picks up the pieces to become the only
butcher, baker and candlestick maker in town. The corporation
recently moved to provide banking services in its stores.

The US government has been hollowed out during the rise to

absolute power of the corporations. Elections have become an
elaborate "reality show" that plays out on corporate television for
viewers entertainment. If you watch FOX, your reality is filtered
through Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, NBC is General Electric news,
CNN is Time/Warner news, ABC brings you into Disney's world,
and Viacom regularly checks the iconic CBS news department to
make sure Edward R. Murrow is still dead. That is when Viacom is
not preparing America's youth for slavery and death through MTV
and B.E.T.

The actual counting of the American people's votes is done by the

corporations. Little wonder giant defense contractor United
Technologies recently moved to take the job off Diebold's hands.
Corporate sentinels, the lobbyists, roam the halls of government
enforcing discipline among their hired hands, allowing the most
servile to feed longest at the public trough. So the Congress has
not passed legislation and the Supreme Court has not decided a
case, in which significant wealth was involved, in favor of the
people in thirty years. Each and every decision of US government
now transfers wealth from the people to the corporate masters.

The corporations now have in their sights the last remaining

institutional pillars of American democracy. The Business
Roundtable, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family
Foundation have been working mightily to crash the public
schools. Wall Street is funding the effort to gain control of the
Social Security trust fund for its investment bankers. And the
whole corporate gang is intent on "starving the beast" or killing
state and local governments. Their success in this effort is
probably best expressed in Hawaii where the number of days
children spend in school has been paired from 180 to 163, and in
Detroit where teachers will give $500 a pay period back to the
state, and in New Orleans where there are only a handful of public
schools left, and in the states from California to New York to
Florida where public school budgets have been slashed to the
bone.

Then finally, there is the most ominous development of all. The

corporations have begun forming their own Praetorian Guard. The
massacre of Iraqi civilians and the patrolling of the hurricane
ravaged streets of New Orleans have made Xe, formerly
Blackwater Worldwide, formerly Blackwater USA, the most famous
of the rising corporate armies. Contrary to any notion of cost
effectiveness, mercenaries protect US State Department personnel
in Iraq instead of the regular military. It seems not to make sense,
unless the corporatocracy is looking ahead to a day when they can
no longer trust the US military to carry out attacks on an American
people's resistance.

Paul A. Moore
Public School Teacher