David Brooks, the Explainer of the Working Class

Today’s Fun Facts. How deeply unfair has the American system become? Read on.

Libertarianism is an invention of a mischievous corporate cabal. It’s about their liberty not yours. Read and Learn Here.

David Brooks: “Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the working class…” Priceless omniscience from Brooks can be enjoyed here.

And David Brooks understands the working class completely. Like God. Underneath that smooth expensively suited Brooksian facade is a true working man, complete with sweat, weariness, worry about paying the mortgage, fears about some venture capitalist looting his pension, concern about his kids’ lives being poorer than his own. Yeah, Brooks is the working man personified. He knows that the triumph of the working man will only come when he realizes his interests are best served by following instructions. People who work for a living are meant to serve the people who own for a living.

Here ends the Gospel.

Why democracy isn’t working has something to do with the antidemocratic unAmerican concentration of wealth and power. Learn more here.

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.

Corporatocracy

There isn't a Doctor Evil plotting world domination in some remote bunker. No, it's done at Davos and Jackson Hole and the Bohemian Grove, whenever the rich and powerful get together over cocktails. They know each other, they do deals, they share interests and goals. They own us. Now there's science to prove it.

Do you think these very well organized corporations don't know how to rig wages worldwide?

Do you wonder if, maybe, they collude to profit from shortages and panics? If they profit from them, do you think they might be tempted to cause them?

Ever suspected that drug companies might actually conspire to cause shortages to keep drug prices high? How clever. (They're so carefully protected by the Republicans that Obama has had to use executive orders to fix the problem.)

Did you realize these very rich corporations also know how to avoid taxes? They're actually pretty good at it.

The word for this kind of dominance is "oligopoly". It's the opposite of a free market and very anti-democratic.

This is what the 99% are angry about. Too big to fail is too big altogether. It makes the world economy unstable and unworkable.

Income Inequality is Killing Us

This short TED lecture by Richard Wilkinson is worth watching and sharing. You might want to pause the video, as I did, to look more closely at the graphs. The TED lecture series is wonderful, a great place to learn from the best minds out there.

I like Professor Wilkinson's statement at one point, looking at a graph on upward mobility: "If you really want to live the American Dream I suggest you move to Denmark." I don't remember who he was quoting. Income inequality is killing us, but it's also making us miserable while we're alive. This is what is putting people into the streets.

Richard Wilkinson is an epidemiologist and professor at Nottingham University, and founder of the Equality Trust.

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?

Corporations and Rich Interests Created this Economic Mayhem

Today's must-read. A very good piece in the Washington Post by Steven Pearlstein, an intelligent writer about markets and money, and one who lives far enough from Wall Street not to be in thrall to it.

As I watch the stock market drop like a stone, again, fueled downward by panic selling by small investors, whose retirement will materialize or not depending on what happens in five minutes, and then zoom just as quickly upward, lightened by the absence of thousands of little people who got off at the bottom, I think of the "bounce effect".

The "bounce effect" is a term I invented to describe something I overheard on television: the "useful elimination of investors who have no business owning investments." Here I'm quoting a "market expert" explaining creative destruction on one of the television stock market programs. This was years ago now but it's happening again and worse than ever. The economy drops hard and bounces back up, without thousands, millions, of poor losers.

When bad things happen to little people, big people will explain why it's a good thing. Ever since Reagan restacked the deck against all little people in America we've had no explanation of the bad events except ones that let the big investors, the big market manipulators, the "market makers" off the hook.

This cannoning stock market and these three years of a bad economy are the lovechild of Wall Street and K Street. Americans need to begin asking their Republican representatives and their corporate bosses who pay for the Republican campaigns, "Is this the economy you wanted?" I believe it is. I believe they are privately very happy for most Americans to be fearful and impoverished because a worried workforce works harder for less, and a worried electorate is more obedient.

They are happy to impoverish the government because they hate it. Without a democratic government there is no one to boss them. Without government spending there is no spending right now, and no help for this economy. Meanwhile they are giddily tearing down useful institutions and replacing them with nothing. This is what revolutions are made of, only they are the revolutionaries and we are the innocent bystanders.

Privatizing Our Democracy

There are some chilling articles being published these days. A few making it into the mainstream media describe what's going on in state capitals all across America, where "Tea Party" Republicans, funded, organized, trained and instructed by Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, are taking orders from bosses like the Koch Brothers and working to kill not only the middle class but representative government as we know it–––while neatly wrapped in the flag and singing God Bless America.

From TruthOut.Org

From In These Times

It's like a scene out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; government by the bosses.

What's the alternative to government operated for the convenience and profit of multinational corporations and rich individuals like the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch? It's us. It's government by us.

It's ordinary, practical, people-centered elective government. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt that's meant "progressive" government, not big government necessarily, or not any bigger than we are––let's face it, the US is now home to over 300 million people––but progressive, focused on more of us doing better and living better, having better jobs and secure lives.

This is both progressive and conservative. Flexible and practical. Led for and by the people rather than for and by corporate bosses. It's as American as apple pie.

It's both liberal and conservative––conservative in that it preserves and improves what works. Which means preserving what worked well for the best fifty years in America history–– the time-tested institutions and commonsense rules, put in place by TR and FDR and Truman and Ike. This is what the modern Republican Party is trying to tear down. The Republican Party isn't conservative at all, it's dangerously radical.