"Water is Not a Human Right" Sez Corporation

A Nebraska farmer confronts an oil and gas committee, demanding they drink his well water if they think fracking is harmless. Do they? Let's Watch.

You’ve no doubt seen this one. Monsanto lobbyist says their pesticide is safe to drink but refuses to drink it and runs away. (Reported by RawStory)

OK OK… apparently he’s not a paid lobbyist. He’s only a paid shill. Can someone explain the difference? (I wonder why Newsweek decided to parse this one? Did they get a call from a Monsanto lawyer?)

The point is this: Water is not a human right. Nestlé has told us this, so it must be true. People do not have a right to get a drink of water. Water is a corporate right, not a human right. Want to live? Pay the corporation that owns the water.

(Here's the backstory.)

(Here's the film.)

Corporate ownership of water is the future. (From the Guardian.) Wherever possible corporations are finding things people need to live and cornering the market on them.

This has been happening for the past 50 years, bit by bit, ever since Reagan and Thatcher and before that (it's their legacy, their gift to humanity), working its way through corporate-controlled legislatures and being ruled on by corporate-owned judges and supreme courts.

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.

Google Chairman Favors Federal Stimulus Spending

Good interview via Mother Jones. A corporate leader who seems to understand how a consumer economy actually needs consumers.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, GOOGLE: "The economy is today stuck behind the power curve. It needs a lot of encouragement. It needs not just something like the jobs bill, but also significant government stimulation in terms of buying power and investment. Otherwise we're set up for years of extraordinarily low growth in the economy and no real solution to the jobless problem."

Christiane Amanpour: But you say significant stimulus. Obviously this is a political environment where the only real conversation is about cutting. Do you see any expectation or possibility of a climate for more stimulus?]

Schmidt: "Well that's a political question. But the current strategy is ludicrous. You have a situtation where the private sector sees essentially no growth in demand. The classic solution is to have the government step in, and with short-term initiatives help stimulate that demand. If they do it right, they'll invest in income and growth producing things, like highways and bridges and schools."

In other words, the radical budget cutting being forced by the Republicans is exactly the wrong thing. The Obama jobs bill is the right thing, if he can get it passed.

This corporate leader understands what most Americans don't: our economy won't recover without another strong jolt of stimulus. Corporations won't spend their money (in some cases OUR money, which they got in rescue packages) unless consumers show the confidence to spend, and consumers won't have that confidence if they don't have money in their pockets and if they're worried their employer is about to lay them off or cut their pay, which is what employers do when they're uncertain.

The consumer/employer/manufacturer cycle is a whirlpool right now, leading us down. Only federal stimulus will do the trick, like it did in 2009 when the entire world economy was on the brink. Then it did work. It will work again if Congress will let it work.

The problem we have is REPUBLICANS DON'T WANT A GOOD ECONOMY. They want Obama to fail, and in order for him to fail we as a nation must fail. Then Republicans can take over again. Do we remember what got us here? The dangerous finances of Bush and his Republican enablers.

Today's Must Read

The Bill of Rights as rewritten to suit America's new, officially protected, Supreme Court endorsed and validated SuperCitizens (as ghostwritten by Thomas F. Schaller of the Baltimore Sun.)

Why is it millions of Americans, and I mean average wage-earning Americans with mortgages to pay and families to feed, carry water for the corporate elite who've been suppressing their standard of living for the past 30 years? Is it because FoxNews tells them to? Is it because they bought the Republican team sweatshirt and will cheer for that team no matter what? Or are that many Americans just happy to do as they're told? Is it obedience or ignorance or cowardice?

The Tax Evasion Industry

Everybody hates the tax man, so people tend to laugh when tax evaders get away with it. Never mind that Jesus advised people to pay their taxes, and President George Washington personally led an army to go after tax evaders in western Pennsylvania.

Taxation is both Christian and patriotic. So how do flag wavers and bible thumpers get away with their evasions? Plain and simple? They cheat. They leave honest citizens to carry their burden. They sit at the table and order food, they eat and drink, and they leave before the check arrives. They may be good at business, but mostly they're good at avoiding their responsibilities as citizens and neighbors. They are lowlifes. We shouldn't admire them. We shouldn't allow what they do. Mostly we shouldn't be paying their debts for them.

Here's a very good article by Chuck Collins in Sojourners.

Tax evasion is a big business model, and the biggest tax evaders are corporations. Companies like Amazon.com outcompete the small independent bookstores by evading sales taxes. There's an excellent article about this in Mother Jones.

The "Double Irish" maneuver corporations use to avoid paying taxes. Clever them, poor us. Here's a useful diagram.

The U.S. may have a high rate of corporate tax, but corporations don't pay it. The Daily Beast has a list. It's worth sharing with your conservative friends.

The top corporate tax dodgers include GE, Eli Lilly, Google, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal), Boeing, Pfizer, Oracle, Altria (Philip Morris), IBM, Goodrich, TimeWarner, Morgan Stanley, the Hartford, Devon Engergy, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.

Cost rising/life expectancy dropping in US relative to "socialist" Europe

The Washington Post reported that life expectancy is dropping in the U.S. relative to Europe. And we spend considerably more per capita in America to do considerably worse.

Of course the small percentage holding most of America's wealth are worried that their wealth may be taxed to pay for public obligations like Medicare and Social Security, as they once were in the bad old Communist days of Eisenhower and Reagan. Their private hope is that people who need help will quietly die off first, that working people will die earlier and cheaply and not become "a burden." If the middle class becomes poorer, they too will die earlier and cost less, their retirement will be shorter meaning less will be drained from corporate pension and insurance funds, leaving more money for the people who now have most of it.

This is a cynical strategy, but, let's face it, wealth is cynical. If wealthy people don't like to think this way they hire people to think this way for them. Wealth takes a cold view of things. Wealth owes its loyalty to narrow calculations of money and its preservation. We shouldn't kid ourselves that these calculations aren't being made. Recall the cynical sale of securities that were designed to fail, securities which the bankers were simultaneously shorting on the market, earning millions from their customers' losses. These calculations do take place.

Is it "Socialist" to recognize this? Is it "Socialist" to honor pledges to American citizens? Is it "Socialist" to make sure the healthcare system delivers its care, including the miraculous advances funded by tax dollars, to all of its citizens?

Make no mistake, there are still extremely wealthy people in Europe and Scandinavia, and they show no indication of wanting to move here. In most modern industrialized countries there is a social contract and a strong sense of the public good, things we seem to have abandoned in this country.

If there is a protected class that everyone seems eager to protect it isn't the middle class or the working class or even the poor; it is the very rich. (Here in Minnesota the Republican Party is hoping to eliminate 36,000 public sector jobs to preserve the special low tax rates of 48,000 very wealthy Minnesotans. And they have the support of millions of average people to do this. Republicans are also dumping thousands of poor people from their state funded health plans.)

When you see what is happening, it's no wonder life expectancy is dropping in America. The losses have only begun. And who is it benefiting? The irony is that the money saved isn't being invested here in America. The "patriotic" tax cutters and entitlement slashers are quietly taking those savings and investing them in China and other emerging markets. They certainly aren't creating jobs in America. How patriotic is that?