Next week the Los Angeles City Council will vote on a resolution that calls on Congress to amend the Constitution to clearly establish that only living persons — not corporations — are endowed with constitutional rights and that money is not the same as free speech. If this resolution is passed, Los Angeles will be the first major city in the U.S. to call for an end to all corporate constitutional rights.
The campaign in Los Angeles is the latest grassroots effort by Move to Amend, a national coalition working to abolish corporate personhood. “Local resolution campaigns are an opportunity for citizens to speak up and let it be known that we won’t accept the corporate takeover of our government lying down,” said Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, a national spokesperson for Move to Amend. “We urge communities across the country to join the Move to Amend campaign and raise your voices.”
Los Angeles Poised To Be The First Major U.S. City To Call For End To Corporate Personhood
2 DecJudge Blocks Citigroup Settlement With S.E.C. – NYTimes.com
28 NovThe judge, Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the S.E.C.’s $285 million settlement, announced last month, is “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest” because it does not provide the court with evidence on which to judge the settlement.
via Judge Blocks Citigroup Settlement With S.E.C. – NYTimes.com.
The Age of the Superfluous Worker – NYTimes.com
25 NovAmerica will have to finally get serious about preserving and creating jobs — and on a larger, and more lasting, scale than Roosevelt’s New Deal. Private enterprise and government will have to think in terms of industrial policy, and one that emphasizes labor-intensive economic growth and innovation. Reducing class sizes in all public schools to 15 or fewer would require a great many new teachers even as it would raise the quality of education.
In the long run, reducing working time — perhaps to as low as 30 hours a week, with the lost income made up by unemployment compensation — would lead to a modest increase in jobs, through work sharing. New taxes on income and wealth are unavoidable, as are special taxes on the capital-intensive part of the economy. Policies that are now seemingly utopian will have to be tried as well, and today’s polarized and increasingly corporate-run democracy will have to be turned into a truly representative one.
Civilian-Military Gap Grows as Fewer Americans Serve – NYTimes.com
25 NovA smaller share of Americans currently serve in the Armed Forces than at any other time since the era between World Wars I and II, a new low that has led to a growing gap between people in uniform and the civilian population, according to a new survey. …
“What we have is an armed services that’s at war and a public that’s not very engaged,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center. “Typically when our nation is at war, it’s a front-burner issue for the public. But with these post-9/11 wars, which are now past the 10-year mark, the public has been paying less and less attention.”
Sounds like an argument to bring the troops home and set them to work rebuilding America.
via Civilian-Military Gap Grows as Fewer Americans Serve – NYTimes.com.
Bob Schieffer, Ron Paul and journalistic “objectivity” – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com
24 NovWhen it comes to views not shared by the leadership of the two parties, as in the above excerpt from the Paul interview, everything changes. Views that reside outside of the dogma of the leadership of either party are inherently illegitimate. Such views are generally ignored, but in those rare instances where they find their way into the discourse — such as this Paul interview — it is the duty of “objective” reporters like Schieffer to mock, scorn and attack them. Indeed, many journalists — such as Tim Russert and David Ignatius — excused their failures in the run-up to the Iraq War by pointing to the fact that the leadership of both parties were generally in favor of the war: in other words, since war opposition was rarely found among the parties’ leadership, it did not exist and/or was inherently illegitimate. Relatedly, only members in good standing of the political establishment command deference; those who are situated outside that establishment — and only them — are to be treated with mockery and contempt (that is what explains the overt scorn by “objective journalists” toward, for instance, the Occupy movement).
via Bob Schieffer, Ron Paul and journalistic “objectivity” – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
What’s in a Name? “Pepper Spray”
24 NovThe police use of so-called pepper spray is much in the news and on the web these days, especially as a result of its use at University of California at Davis. According to The New York Times“Megyn Kelly on Fox News dismissed pepper spray as ‘a food product, essentially.” That same story also reports:
To the American Civil Liberties Union, its use as a crowd-control device, particularly when those crowds are nonthreatening, is an excessive and unconstitutional use of force and violates the right to peaceably assemble.
A food product? Excessive and unconstitutional? One and the same product. I understand the name’s derivation, that the active ingredient—technically, oleoresin capsicum—is the chemical that causes the ‘bite’ in peppers. The use of THAT name, of course, automatically associates the spray with food. Not only is food innocuous, it’s necessary for life. So the name tells us that this agent is, at most, an exaggeration or amplification of something that’s good for us: “Eat your spinach, it’s good for you.” We don’t think that such an agent could put someone in the hospital or induce possibly permanent nerve damage. How would these stories play out if the spray was known as ‘liquid pain’ or ‘torture spray’? How would the officers using the agent think of themselves and their actions if they thought of the agent as torture spray rather than as a food derivative?
Are U.S. corporations good citizens? – Salon.com
22 NovThe time is ripe for a reevaluation of the role of the corporation in American society. The passion motivating Occupy Wall Street protesters tells us this, as does the spectacle of a political and economic system that is so clearly broken.
Therefore, in the spirit of contributing to enhancing consumer enlightenment as to how our corporations rank as responsible citizens, Salon is launching a new series: The Corporate Citizen Challenge — an attempt to rate the good citizenship performance of America’s biggest companies.
Look for the first installment the week after Thanksgiving. We’ll start with the big financial institutions that benefited the most from government bailouts. We’ll evaluate them according to a series of metrics: job creation, dollars spent lobbying, total taxes paid, executive compensation, impact on the environment, and others.
The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying – Salon.com
20 NovThe protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The state reactions to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it.
Occupy Wall Street Protesters, Even in Churches, Can’t Escape Watch of Police – NYTimes.com
19 NovSeveral area churches have been sheltering protesters in the days since the city banned sleeping in Zuccotti Park, and church officials said they were alarmed by the idea that the police might be monitoring their conduct.
“It is disconcerting that they would actually enter the sanctuary,” said the Rev. James Karpen, known as Reverend K, senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, on West 86th Street. “Here we had offered hospitality and safety, which is our business as a church; it just felt invasive.”
via Occupy Wall Street Protesters, Even in Churches, Can’t Escape Watch of Police – NYTimes.com.
A Horrific Crash Sets Off Online Anger in China – NYTimes.com
19 NovAs China sped toward its new status as the world’s second largest economy, the already yawning gap between the rich and poor grew wider. By sociologists’ calculations, income inequality here is not that far from levels that have spurred social unrest in other nations.
But some things are not easily reduced to statistics. There is an argument, buttressed by the Gansu tragedy, that what truly eats at people here is not so much the rich-poor gap as the canyon that separates the powerful from the powerless.
“Most Chinese aren’t angry about rising inequality,” said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who specializes in research on Chinese social trends. “It’s not rich versus poor. It’s the system of power and procedural injustices that they’re upset about.”
And in fact, many episodes in the litany of scandal and misfortune that has consumed Chinese Web surfers in recent years had little to do with money.
via A Horrific Crash Sets Off Online Anger in China – NYTimes.com.
Truth and Traditions 