No Colonsocopy Required

Wisdom is a lady, I heard
With never cigars or a beard
She notes among us the righteous
And would not try to fright us
She is fair and smart and serene
And won’t ever dirty the clean
But why was she missing
When the Supremes were just pissing
In the eyes of us human beings
To support the corporate extremes
And making justice blinding
Instead of just blind
So that dollars are finding
The twist of the corporate mind


According to Linda L. Berger of the Mercer University School of Law, there are cases on file that have challenged our basic beliefs about the purposes of Democracy. She cites the Buckley and Bellotti cases creating a concept that essentially say that 1) Money is speech; 2) that corporations are people; and 3) that elections are marketplaces. The latest legislation by the Supreme Court of the United States has entered some new realm that brings up those three serious concerns needing our attention. Many of us prefer the definition of Democracy as government “of the people; by the people and for the people.” Abraham Lincoln made that a statement part of his Gettysburg Address, but it has become the soul, the essential part, of our self-concept as Americans. Commercial speech was not part of the concept so well molded by Lincoln, a great Republican and our greatest republican. He spoke of real people.

Linda Berger has written a great piece (What Is the Sound of a Corporation
Speaking? How the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor Can Help Lawyers Shape the Law) that enables us to see some fallacies in using metaphor for personhood. It is worth your time to read it. Corporations do not actually speak. Controlling individuals within a corporation may speak, but there is very little direct connection between speech by a controlling individual in a corporation and the shareholders of that corporation. Shareholders of Nike, for example, had no influence on the day-to-day “communications” of the company. To treat Nike as an individual “speaker” would be ludicrous given the reality that Nike is made up of thousands of people and controlled by only a few executives who do not consult with the thousands, except that the metaphor of personhood is employed to permit the illusion. Further, it was shown by opposition that Nike had used false information and claims to present an image that was in contrast to exploitation of labor in foreign countries, so the “exchange” of information could easily be confused with advertising instead of speech. Nike does not speak in the original sense of the First Amendment by using communication as a means of self-expression, self-realization, and self-fulfillment as the original and basic characteristic of a person.

As we face the real impacts of the recent Supreme Court decision, we should be startled to learn that we not only gave personhood to corporations, but we also transferred rights to money that were heretofore granted to people by saying that spending money is equivalent to free speech. In a humorous way, we “hear” used car companies advertise “Money talks and nobody walks.” The reality is that money does not talk. It is a questionable metaphor at best. The third leg of the strange corporate metaphor is that elections are commercial marketplaces. If that is not enough to turn your stomach, then perhaps you have become so cynical about politics that you have given up on the notion that only real people should determine the nature of the government that they give power to.

Unfortunately, there is still a fourth dimension to the granting of rights to all corporations that we extended to American corporations which people do not have and was not considered by Linda Berger because her piece was written before the Supremes recent “legislation.” Given that money now “talks” and that elections are “marketplaces,” what is to prevent LUKOIL of Russia, or CITGO of Venezuela from entering that election marketplace as interested corporations exercising free speech?

The Constitution and its First Amendment cover and describe the rights of American citizens. By stretching the metaphor to cover corporations, the Supreme Court has also given foreign corporations the same right as ours to enter the “marketplace” and speak with money to send a message through buying an election. The report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," shows that, from 1998-2008, Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.725 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, a financial juggernaut aimed at undercutting federal regulation. Nearly 3,000 officially registered federal lobbyists worked for the industry in 2007 alone. The report documents a dozen distinct deregulatory moves that, together, led to the financial meltdown. These include prohibitions on regulating financial derivatives; the repeal of regulatory barriers between commercial banks and investment banks; a voluntary regulation scheme for big investment banks; and federal refusal to act to stop predatory sub-prime lending. The Supremes so “re-legislated” the existing law with its decision as to include foreign corporations, that Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin or some Saudi prince or Chinese politician could invest millions into candidates that favor those countries instead of our own as long as they do it through corporations. If you liked Wall St. in New York, you will love Nevsky Prospekt in Moscow.

There is a solution, of course. Require colonoscopies of any “person” engaging in “free speech.” I hope that our Congress will see the new law for what it is as a giveaway to international corporate interests and restore the balance to Lincoln’s concept of government of the people, for the people and by the people. If not, it may indeed perish from the earth.


Peace,
George Giacoppe
28 January 2010

War in Georgia

When I heard about the conflict in the Caucasus between the Republic
of Georgia and Russia, and especially Michael Klare’s (author of
"Blood and Oil") comments about its relationship to United States
designs on the huge oil deposits nearby, something rang a bell.

Then I remembered. Jeremy Scahill, in his book "Blackwater: The Rise
of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army," has a short chapter on
Blackwater and Caspian Sea oil. Take a look at a map of the region
and you see that Georgia is located smack in the corridor between the
Caspian and the Black Seas. Its closest neighbor, bordering its south
and east, is Azerbaijan. Scahill tells us that in order to protect
western oil and gas interests in that region, the Pentagon “deployed
‘civilian contractors’ from Blackwater and other firms to set up an
operation that would serve a dual purpose: protecting the West’s new
profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically
dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly lay the groundwork for an
important forward operating base for an attack against Iran” (p. 173).

Now, with the battle over Georgia, we see more of what’s going on.
According to Klare, the United States, beginning with the Clinton
administration, has been pouring arms into a province, Georgia, that
had never had a real army of its own (it is, after all, the Russian
province which gave the world Josef Stalin). Now it’s armed to the
teeth, and those arms (plus special forces training similar to the
kind the U.S. has long exported to its neighborhood friendly
dictators via the School of the Americas) apparently gave it the
notion that it could simply invade Ossetia without consequences. In
Azerbaijan, the tactic is a bit subtler, but possibly more dangerous:
send in private “contractors,” i.e. mercenaries, instead of our own
forces. And why? Because we love democracy, as the President would
have it; because we love freedom?

Not exactly. As Scahill and Klare make clear, it’s about oil, folks.
Russia and its Caspian Sea region has all this oil. And we have
almost none (Klare, in a recent essay, “Portrait of an Oil-Addicted
Former Superpower,” contends that, because of its insatiable need for
foreign oil, the U.S. has already faded as a superpower). Russia also
has these former provinces which seem open to western money,
influence, and clandestine activities—not to mention that western-
owned pipeline which bypasses Russia and therefore avoids Russian
control. More than that, both countries, Georgia and Azerbaijan, are
“sandwiched between Russia and Iran,” so sending uniformed American
troops could be provocative, but sending private contractors keeps
things a bit quieter (at least, that was the hope).

Now, however, the Georgian attack on Ossetia and the overwhelming
Russian response has blown things into stark relief. The United
States has been caught playing a risky game, inciting the Georgians
into a tweak of the Russian bear’s whiskers, and no doubt doing the
same in Azerbaijan. In the latter country, according to Scahill,
Blackwater mercenaries are being used to “bolster Azerbaijan’s
military capabilities, including creating units modeled after the
United States’ most elite Special Forces, the Navy SEALs—this in a
country, according to Human Rights Watch, already prone to employing
“torture, police abuse, and excessive use of force by security
forces.” In Georgia, though, the Russian bear has struck back, with
consequences no one can really predict. What we can predict is that,
once again, the United States is stirring up a witch’s brew of
conflicting loyalties, as in Iraq, which may prove impossible to
control. And it is doing so in a region that has exploded before, and
could well explode again. For all we know, that may be the intention
here: start a little backfire, set the tanks and planes rolling, and
perhaps find the excuse the Bushies have been looking for to invade
yet another muslim country, Iran. Then the United States of America,
the great “peacemaker,” will have torched not just Afghanistan, not
just Iraq, not just Georgia, but the whole damn region.

Meantime, our leaders are singing their song of outrage: big bully
Russia has attacked a defenseless “democracy,” is trying to
reincorporate Georgia into its “empire,” and must withdraw,
immediately. How noble they sound, demanding a ceasefire, pretending
to work hard for peace—all the while knowing that they themselves are
the incendiaries, the naughty boys who simply can’t stop pouring oil
on fire, or fire on oil, take your pick. Only this time, the game is
not working very well. Russia holds all the cards here. It has all
the oil, and the United States has nothing but oil debt. So weakened
has the Bush Administration made us (Klare points out that with the
average GI in Iraq using 27 gallons of petroleum-based fuels per day,
America’s gasoline bill for 160,000 troops comes to more than $14
million per day, or $5.1 billion per year) that it took France’s
President Sarkozy to put together an initial cease-fire.

At this writing, Georgia is licking its wounds and a once-invincible
superpower is left with nothing but protests about the brutality of
Russia’s “invasion.” That, and the vain hope that somehow its oil
exploitation in the Caspian region can survive the blow. If it does
not, and if the U.S. keeps adding fuel to the regional fire (such as
today's Bush administration action of using military planes to send
"humanitarian aid" to its dear ally, Georgia), the least of the
consequences may be the $200-a-barrel oil prices that many have
predicted.

Lawrence DiStasi