Newsmen Selling Bogus News, Foxes Guarding Henhouses, Non-Profits Rigged For Profit

How the public is brainwashed:

This story is from AutoStraddle.

How the criminals who corrupted the economy and the markets also managed to corrupt the regulatory system put in place to keep them in check:

This story is from Reuters.

How “business think” corrupted one great non-profit, the American Red Cross:

This story is from ProPublica.

Since when are news organizations supposed to disinform the public?

Since when are regulators supposed to cover up crimes?

Since when are aid organizations supposed to keep their money by avoiding their mission?

We live in a far different America than we had 30 or 40 years ago. Both sides say they want to restore America, but it’s clear that the party now led by the guy with orange hair is more intent on driving it further into the ditch.

Killer Business Model

Excellent article in the Washington Post about how furniture rental companies gouge three times the value of the furniture from people who can't afford to buy. This is called the Genius of Capitalism.

Faced with a need or a shortage, do you set about filling that need, that shortage, or is your first question how to exploit the shortage to the fullest advantage?

Is human vulnerability something to take advantage of?

Is poverty a profit opportunity for your company, the deeper the poverty the greater the profit?

Is someone else's helplessness part of your business model? When you see helplessness do you feel sympathy or greed?

Is helpfulness a naïve and foolish custom? Is it unbusinesslike to include generosity or humane consideration in your business plan?

Let’s imagine you manufacture flotation devices, lifesavers they’re called. It costs money to make them, so you sell them for a price. Naturally.

But here’s a business model: you provide flotation devices to lifeguards. Call these lifeguards sales agents and pay them a small commission. Then when someone is drowning don’t have your agent throw them a buoy free of charge, let the market set a price. Dicker with the floundering. Or rent the device to the person fighting for his life, loan the use of the buoy at so much per second. They’re really eager to rent, so set that rate as high as you can. Plus interest, compounding every second.

This is what’s known as a killer business model.

How Corporations Became People (Or Did They?)

A brief clear video summary first.


What’s interesting is that the crucial decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific never stated that the corporation was a person entitled to rights of personhood.

How it became the invalid cornerstone for every corporate personhood claim since is a mystery. Either the judge erred and prejudged the case or the clerk assigned to summarize the decision invented corporate personhood. Was he in the employ of the railroad? This excellent article about the case sorts out the case and finds nothing written in the decision supporting corporate personhood, an issue that wasn’t even properly argued. Was this creation of corporate “persons” done out of bias or error or conflict of interest?

The point is all the subsequent law saying that corporations are persons is based upon a fiction. And corporations have become "super persons" as a result, with rights larger than other citizens. Despite the fact they cannot be jailed, cannot be poisoned by their malfeasance or that of other corporate “persons”, cannot be killed except by their own hand, and are granted extraordinary methods of evading the obligations and hazards that living, breathing persons cannot evade. Today they represent a special class of protected super persons, more powerful than the rest of us and held to fewer obligations. A class virtually above the law. A class, as we see in the case of their proxies in the lobbying group ALEC, that writes the laws the rest of us must live under.

And the point is it was never made law by the Constitution or by Congress or by the courts. Is it possible to undo something that was never done in the first place?

One thing we can do is amend the Constitution. Join the movement. Join MoveToAmend.org and right this wrong.