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Thursday, September 11, 2008

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Re: [OregonDems_etc] The unofficial history of America™

This article was first posted on July 10 on this forum, and I was thinking about offering a rebuttal, but got fatigued thinking about it. I don't have time to do the topic justice at the moment - these creation myths are very important to people, and probably a thousand pages of evidence won't dissuade the faithful, so I'll just summarize my thoughts on the subject.

Everybody wants to get themselves back to the garden... whether it's the Woodstock festival Joni Mitchell missed, or the Garden of Eden, or the pastoral wonderland of the founding fathers. But is the ludic colonial past any more real than Adam and Eve's playground?

I remember years ago, when I was first exposed to Thomas Jefferson's writing about corporations, I really thought I had a powerful tool, wrap myself in the flag and bludgeon the wingnuts with the words of one of the sky gods of the creation.

Some people, like Kalle Lasn, still see it that way, but I don't. The founding fathers were the wealthiest men of the colonies, who were willing to let ordinary people make huge sacrifices so that they could have an empire of their own. It is striking how much things there were like things today.

I particularly disagree with the characterization of the Boston Tea Party. Rather than being one of Young America's finest hours, it was rather disgraceful. Wealthy merchants, unable to match the prices of the East India Company, frustrated in their ambitions to make more money, engaged in an action that would be called "terrorism" today, and disguised themselves as Indians while they did it - perfectly willing to let other people take the blame, trying to evade responsibility for their own actions. I would imagine that just like today, most of the colonists wanted tea at a price they could afford... I don't imagine that if Kalle Lasn and his Adbuster cohort firebombed a a WalMart, people would feel a lot of solidarity for his actions.

Jefferson had a sweet deal with his plantations and his multitude of slaves - he understood that industrialism with centralized production in urban settings, represented a new locus of power that challenged his order. It's fairly hard to figure out a different way that large scale industrial production could be organized, other than through the creation of corporations.

I am fully aware of the abuses of power by the corporations. I am also aware of the abuses of power by the founding fathers, and I don't think it helps the case against corporations by repeating the creation myths.

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:33 AM, <sissonltd@comcast.net> wrote:

The unofficial history of America™

http://silent-nation.com/the-unofficial-history-of-america

The unofficial history of America™, which continues to be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.

By Kalle Lasn

The history of America is the one story every kid knows. It's a story of fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a dream. A story of early settlers hungry and cold, carving a home out of the wilderness. Of visionary leaders fighting for democracy and justice, and never wavering. Of a populace prepared to defend those ideals to the death. It's the story of a revolution (an American art form as endemic as baseball or jazz) beating back British Imperialism and launching a new colony into the industrial age on its own terms.

It's a story of America triumphant. A story of its rise after World War II to become the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, "the land of the free and home of the brave," an inspiring model for the whole world to emulate.

That's the official history, the one that is taught in school and the one our media and culture reinforce in myriad ways every day.

The unofficial history of the United States is quite different. It begins the same way — in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial America — but then it takes a turn. A bitplayer in the official history becomes critically important to the way the unofficial history unfolds. This player turns out to be not only the provocateur of the revolution, but in the end its saboteur. This player lies at the heart of America's defining theme: the difference between a country that pretends to be free and a country that truly is free.

That player is the corporation.

The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against British monarchs and the British parliament but against British corporations. We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland. The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies) , radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck. The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein. Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial, invisible, intangible," mere financial too ls. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered." The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn't buy stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place.

In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but subordinate role. The people — not the corporations — were in control. So what happened? How did corporations gain power and eventually start exercising more control than the individuals who created them? The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century — the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that "corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggreg ated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed."

President Lincoln's warning went unheeded. Corporations continued to gain power and influence. They had the laws governing their creation amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate profits could no longer be limited. Corporate economic activity could be restrained only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and privileges they did not have before.

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech.

This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution — that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates — had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it "could not be supported by history, logic or reason." One of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of democratic government.

Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place. By 1919, corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and produced most of America's wealth. Corporate trusts had become too powerful to legally challenge. The courts consistently favored their interests. Employees found themselves without recourse if, for example they were injured on the job (if you worked for a corporation, you voluntarily assumed the risk, was the courts' position). Railroad and mining companies were enabled to annex vast tracts of land at minimal expense.

Gradually, many of the original ideals of the American Revolution were simply quashed. Both during and after the Civil War, America was increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government and business interests. The shift amounted to a kind of coup d'état — not a sudden military takeover but a gradual subversion and takeover of the institutions of state power. Except for a temporary setback during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (the 1930s), the US has since been governed as a corporate state.

In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain power. They merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed into ever larger and more complex units of resource extraction, production, distribution and marketing, to the point where many of them became economically more powerful than many countries. In 1997, fifty-one of the world's hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top five hundred corporations controlled forty-two percent of the world's wealth. Today corporations freely buy each other's stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial, economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful as they damn well please. Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible, undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak of dissent from a stunned and inured populace.

At Morain Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois, a student named Jennifer Beatty stages a protest against corporate sponsorship in her school by locking herself to the metal mesh curtains of the multimillion-dollar "McDonald's Student Center" that serves as the physical and nutritional focal point of her college. She is arrested and expelled.

At Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, a student named Mike Cameron wears a Pepsi T-shirt on the day — dubbed "Coke Day" — when corporate flacks from Coca-Cola jet in from Atlanta to visit the school their company has sponsored and subsidized. Mike Cameron is suspended for his insolence.

In suburban shopping malls across North America, moms and dads push shopping carts down the aisle of Toys "R" Us. Trailing them and imitating their gestures, their kids push pint-size carts of their own. The carts say, "Toys 'R' Us Shopper in Training."

In St. Louis, Missouri, chemical giant Monsanto sics its legal team on anyone even considering spreading dirty lies — or dirty truths — about the company. A Fox TV affiliate that has prepared a major investigative story on the use and misuse of synthetic bovine growth hormone (a Monsanto product) pulls the piece after Monsanto attorneys threaten the network with "dire consequences" if the story airs. Later, a planned book on the dangers of genetic agricultural technologies is temporarily shelved after the publisher, fearing a lawsuit from Monsanto, gets cold feet.

In boardrooms in all the major global capitals, CEOs of the world's biggest corporations imagine a world where they are protected by what is effectively their own global charter of rights and freedoms — the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI). They are supported in this vision by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other organizations representing twenty-nine of the world's richest economies. The MAI would effectively create a single global economy allowing corporations the unrestricted right to buy, sell and move their businesses, resources and other assets wherever and whenever they want. It's a corporate bill of rights designed to override all "nonconforming" local, state and national laws and regulations and allow them to sue cities, states and nation al governments for alleged noncompliance. Sold to the world's citizens as inevitable and necessary in an age of free trade, these MAI negotiations met with considerable grassroots opposition and were temporarily suspended in April 1998. Nevertheless, no one believes this initiative will remain suspended for long.

We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the right thing, we plead. Please don't cut down any more ancient forests. Please don't pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don't move your factories and jobs offshore either). Please don't use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids. Please don't play governments off against each other to get a better deal. We've spent so much time bowed down in deference, we've forgotten how to stand up straight.

The unofficial history of America™, which continues to be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.

--
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Friday, August 29, 2008

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] A challenge

Matt Love wrote:
at 12:35pm yesterday

"Why is the news on the CBC getting so bad? It's starting to sound just like NPR - you know, Fox News for the wine and bree set. Is it for the same reasons - are they afraid of Harper, has he threatened to bust a Bush on their asses if they don't toe the line? Their reporter from the Olympics was prattling and spitting about China and their double crosses and so on - but criticism of the US is ever-so-polite. The coverage of the Democratic Convention has been nauseating. Why should they repeat lies about the US government? Just one tiny little example, it burns my ass because they've said it over and over again. Obama is not the first black to be his party's nominee for president. He wasn't even the first one in this election.

At first I just thought the problem was here in Alberta, but I'm starting to conclude your whole country is being run like a vacation home for neocons."

Prove I'm wrong.

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[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Countdown to Loofah Day

Alexander Cockburn declares "Loofah Day."

I know this is not a political disorganization, but Bill (Mr. Shut Up) O'Reilly is an agent of the lockdown, a force of social repression as well as political. I just think it would be so much fun to spontaneously assemble in front of the Fox offices, waving a loofah, maybe shouting out things like "YOU HAVE REALLY SPECTACULAR BOOBS!" and other O'Reilly witicisms. Like "SHUT UP!" Maybe call and response.

Countdown to Loofah Day

Whereas millions of Americans despise Bill O'Reilly as a loathsome polluter of the airwaves, fanning ignorance and hatred with every word he utters,

Whereas no opportunity should be missed to expose this contemptible scoundrel to ridicule,

Whereas at 11.06 pm on September 1, 2004 the above-mentioned O'Reilly made a lewd phone call to his Fox producer Andrea Mackris, depicting a prospective sexual encounter between the two of them in which "You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I'd join you and you would have your back to me and I would take the little loofa thing… and kinda' soap your back … and I would put it around front, kinda' rub your tummy with it and then with my other hand I would start to massage your boobs, get your nipples really hard… 'cuz I like that and you have really spectacular boobs….I'd be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind… and then the other hand with the felafel thing"….

Whereas this conversation was recorded by Ms Mackriss and subsequently exposed to public scrutiny in court documents,

Whereas this engendered mirth among the millions of O'Reilly haters and much satisfaction at his humiliation,

Be it proclaimed that September 1, 2008 will be recognized as Loofah Day and citizens should honor it by proceeding at noon to the nearest Fox studio with a loofah and, standing outside the Fox studio, brandish said loofahs in mirthfull derision of O'Reilly.

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Monday, August 18, 2008

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Chicken Glurge for the E-mail Forwarder's Soul

Old Barach died that young Barach might live on in history and glurge!

-Barach was a quiet man.

He didn't talk much.

He would always greet you with a big
smile
and a firm handshake.

Even after
living in our neighborhood for over 50 years, no one could really say they
knew him very well.

Before his
retirement, he took the bus to work each morning.

The lone sight of him
walking down the street often worried us.

He had a slight
limp from a bullet wound received in WWII.

Watching him,
we worried that although he had survived WWII, he may not make it through
our changing uptown neighborhood with its ever-increasing random violence,
gangs, and drug activity.

When he saw the
flyer at our local church asking for volunteers for caring for the gardens
behind the minister's residence, he responded in his characteristically
unassuming manner.

Without fanfare, he just signed up.

He was well
into his 87th year when the very thing we had always feared finally
happened.

He was just
finishing his watering for the day when three gang members approached him.

Ignoring their attempt to intimidate him, he simply asked, "Would you like
a drink from the hose?"

The tallest and
toughest-looking of the three said, "Yeah, sure," with a malevolent little
smile.

As Barach offered
the hose to him, the other two grabbed Barach's arm, throwing him down.

As the hose snaked crazily over the ground, dousing everything in its way,
Barach's assailants stole his retirement watch and his wallet, and then
fled.

Barach tried to
get himself up, but he had been thrown down on his bad leg.

He lay there
trying to gather himself as the minister came running to help him.

Although the
minister had witnessed the attack from his window, he couldn't get there
fast enough to stop it.

"Barach, are you
okay?

Are you hurt?"

the minister kept asking as he helped Barach to his
feet.

Barach just
passed a hand over his brow and sighed, shaking his head.

"Just some Young Republican
kids. I hope they'll wise-up someday."

His wet clothes
clung to his slight frame as he bent to pick up the hose.

He adjusted the
nozzle again and started to water.

Confused and a
little concerned, the minister asked,

"Barach, what are you doing?"

"I've got to finish my watering.

It's been very dry lately," came the calm reply.

Satisfying
himself that Barach really was all right, the minister could only marvel.

Barach was a man from a different time and place.

A few weeks
later the three returned.

Just as before their threat was unchallenged.

Barach again offered them a drink from his
hose.

This time they
didn't rob him.

They wrenched the hose from his hand and drenched him head
to foot in the icy water.

When they had
finished their humiliation of him, they sauntered off down the street,
throwing catcalls and curses, falling over one another laughing at the
hilarity of what they had just done.

Barach just
watched them.

Then he turned toward the warmth giving sun, picked up his hose, and went on with his watering.

The summer was
quickly fading into fall Barach was doing some tilling when he was startled
by the sudden approach of someone behind him.

He stumbled and fell into
some evergreen branches.

As he struggled
to regain his footing, he turned to see the tall leader of his summer
tormentors reaching down for him.

He braced himself for the expected attack.

"Don't worry
old man, I'm not gonna hurt you this time."

The young man
spoke softly, still offering the tattooed and scarred hand to Barach.

As he helped Barach get up, the man pulled a crumpled bag from his pocket and
handed it to Barach.

"What's this?" Barach asked.

"It's your stuff," the man explained.

"It's your stuff back.
Even the money in your wallet."

"I don't understand," Barach said.

"Why would you help me now?"

The man shifted
his feet, seeming embarrassed and ill at ease.

"I learned something from
you," he said.

"I ran with that gang of Young Republican thugs and hurt people like you we picked
you because you were old and we knew we could do it But every time we came
and did something to you, instead of yelling and fighting back, you tried
to give us a drink.

You didn't hate us for hating you.

You kept showing
love against our hate."

He stopped for
a moment.

"I couldn't sleep after we stole your stuff, so here it is back."

He paused for
another awkward moment, not knowing what more there was to say.

"That bag's my way of saying thanks for straightening me out, I guess."

And with that, he walked off down the street.

Barach looked down at the sack in his hands and gingerly opened it.

He took out his
retirement watch and put it back on his wrist.

Opening his wallet, he
checked for his wedding photo.

He gazed for a moment at the young bride that still smiled back at him from all those years ago.

He died one
cold day after Christmas that winter.

Many people attended his funeral in
spite of the weather.

In particular
the minister noticed a tall young man that he didn't know sitting quietly
in a distant corner of the church.

The minister
spoke of Barach's garden as a lesson in life.

In a voice made
thick with unshed tears, he said,

"Do your best and make your garden as beautiful as you can.

We will never forget Barach and his garden."

The following spring another flyer went up.

It read: "Person needed to care for Barach's garden."

The flyer went
unnoticed by the busy parishioners until one day when a knock was heard at
the minister's office door.

Opening the
door, the minister saw a pair of scarred and tattooed hands holding the
flyer.

"I believe this is my job, if you'll have me," the young man said.

The minister
recognized him as the same young man who had returned the stolen watch and
wallet to Barach.

He knew that
Barach's kindness had turned this man's life around.

As the minister handed
him the keys to the garden shed, he said,

"Yes, go take care of Barach's
garden and honor him."

The man went to
work and, over the next several years, he tended the flowers and
vegetables just as Barach had done.

During that
time, he went to college, got married, and became a prominent member of
the community.

But he never forgot his promise to Barach's memory and kept the garden as beautiful as he thought Barach would have kept it.

One day he
approached the new minister and told him that he couldn't care for the
garden any longer.

He explained with a shy and happy smile,

"My wife just
had a baby boy last night,

and she's bringing him home on Saturday."

"Well, congratulations!"

said the minister, as he was handed the garden shed
keys.

"That's wonderful!

What's the baby's name?"

"Barach," he replied.

That's the
whole gospel message simply stated.

Take 60 seconds and
give this a shot!

All you do
is:

Simply say a small prayer.

Then sit back
and watch the power of God work in your life.

GOOD FRIENDS
ARE LIKE ANGELS, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SEE THEM TO KNOW THEY ARE THERE

-Barach was a
quiet man.