When Corporations Mutate Into A Super Race
Posted: March 12, 2012 Filed under: corporate money, corporatism, Economy, energy, Environment, Environmental Protection, Environmentalists, fracking, Regulation, toxic waste 12 CommentsWe all remember Mitt Romney’s public and awkward statement that ‘Corporations are people, too.”
But Romney was underplaying the reality of American life in 2012.
Corporations are not mere people. They have morphed into a Super Race, ready to conquer what’s left of our disintegrating democracy. If you think this is liberal hysteria or rank hyperbole, I give you Pennsylvania’s newly passed Act 13. Bad number. But the scope of this foolish and utterly destructive state giveaway is far worse.
Act 13 is a massive gift to the oil and gas companies, which overturn property rights, strips municipal communities of zoning law protection and turn environmental and health compromises into considerations we can no longer afford. It reduces the citizens of Pennsylvania to 3rd world colony status, ripe for exploitation and extraction. Welcome to the New World of Corporate Rule where natural gas extraction is the profitable prize and quality of life is a thing of the past.
And the reaction?
“Now I know what it feels like to live in Nigeria,” said recently retired Pittsburgh City Council President Doug Shields. “You’re basically a resource colony for multi-national corporations to take your natural resources, take them back to wherever they are at, add value to them, and then sell them back to you.”
Yup. This is the neoliberal dream. Steal, add value and then sell back at an exorbitant price tag. The whole world is nothing more than a resource colony so the corporate Super Race can turn a mind-boggling profit. On the backs of the natives. Water safety and/or depletion, health, wildlife? All expendable in this great push for growth and ever-increasing profit. Moral considerations? Please, haven’t you gotten the email? Corporations don’t do morality. They’re too big for that.
Fracking in SW Pennsylvania
Why did this happen in Pennsylvania? Because of the enormous layer of shale deposits known as the Marcellus formation, resting like a slumbering giant beneath the state’s surface. But there’s more! That would be the gargantuan amount of natural gas to be had at a stunning profit—as much as 70-99% some managers of earlier drill wells have boasted.
How could investors resist?
But then, there are the rising concerns of the fracking process itself, the public’s growing awareness of water and air pollution, the niggling problem of toxic wastewater disposal and those bothersome legal suits from citizens with lame health issues.
What to do, what to do?
Act 13 is the perfect response to investor skittishness. It removes all complaint and whining by simply supplanting existing law—the kind that protects the citizen—with corporate friendly law that recognizes the global reality—everyone is for sale and everything can be exploited.
To keep tempers in check, the best PR in the world is dished out, promises of jobs and prosperity, spinning dialogues about energy independence [at any cost] and patriotic flag-waving—how tearing up the earth, polluting our waterways and compromising the public’s health is good for America. After all, in times of crisis, sacrifices need to be made, even when it means overriding the civil rights of people and communities.
That is exactly what Act 13 addresses.
Courts in the Great State of New York upholding community rights to block fracking dreams is simply unacceptable. Act 13 revokes those rights. The Lakota people in South Dakota blocking TransCanada truck transports across Native territory? We can’t have that. Act 13 clearly empowers a corporation to seize property that impacts any stage of the drilling process. And those possible health considerations? Got it covered, boys and girls. Act 13 prohibits physicians from discussing medical impacts from chemical contaminations. The Halliburton Loophole in all its malicious splendor comes back to haunt us.
Marcellus Fracking Pit
This is what happens when corporations are declared ‘people.’ This is what happens when legislators sell their souls for 30 pieces of silver. I do not care if Republican Governor Corbett and his Republican dwarves truly believe this is good for Pennsylvania. This is a betrayal of American law and her people on a massive scale. The good citizens of Pennsylvania might look at the situation in Ohio, where Governor Kasich opened the state’s doors for business, any business, and Ohio became the dumping ground for fracking wastewater disposal and deep ground injection wells. We now know those earthquakes were not coincidental events. No wonder Republicans hate science!
Hattip to Alternet on this rant. I’d recommend reading the article ‘Fracking Democracy: Why Pennsylvania’s Act 13 May Be the Nation’s Worst Corporate Giveaway’ by Steven Rosenfeld in its entirety with the first link I provided. It’s a chilling, mind-blowing report.
Act 13 is expected to take effect on April 14th. We better pray [regardless of what state we live in] that the groups now amassing in Pennsylvania are able to halt or at least slow down this corporate monstrosity.
Because if not, we can say ‘adios’ to the shredded remnants of our Republic.
As for Pennsylvania? My heart goes out because I lived and worked in the state for over a dozen years and still have family in the area. The economy has been raked over the coals, so the promise of jobs and money injected into struggling municipalities and rural communities is a huge seduction. But we’ve seen this movie before. It does not end well. Here’s hoping that flesh and blood citizens get a chance to write a far better script for themselves and their future. Here’s hoping the rest of the country wakes up to what can only be called a corporate takeover.
Women Of Courage
Posted: March 11, 2012 Filed under: abortion rights, Feminists, Festivities, fetus fetishists, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Human Rights, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights 9 CommentsTo read the biographies of this year’s recipients of the Women of Courage awards is nothing short of inspiring. These are women who have put
their lives and futures on the line to improve the quality of life for others, most specifically women and girls in parts of the world where to be female is extraordinarily difficult, even life-threatening. These are women who would make our Bread and Roses mavens proud, infuse enough energy to conjure those slumbering spirits for another boisterous rally, another yelp for dignity and freedom.
Maryam Durani, a member of the Provencial Council, Kandahar, Afghanistan was one of ten women cited and honored last Thursday in a ceremony, hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Here’s a wee bit of her story:
Afghanistan as we all know is not an oasis of women’s liberation. But Ms. Durani has pitched herself against the traditional Afghani sensibility, standing as a role model and leader in a country of ancient tribal traditions and strict paternalistic mindsets. She is the director of the nonprofit Women’s Center for Culture and owns and operates a radio station, which focuses on informing women of their rights. And the inherent risks of demanding those rights.
She should know. A suicide bomber nearly ended her life, leaving her with serious injuries. The death threats haven’t stopped. Yet, she persists as do the women she serves because in a world where women, by virtue of their gender are considered the enemy, a threat by merely existing as autonomous human beings, there is only one response: fight back.
Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introducting Ms. Durani during the Awards Ceremony last week:
Many of the women honored this year and in the past have put themselves on the frontline, encountering serious security threats to themselves and their families. They are not the first and sadly, they won’t be the last. The complete list of awardees can be found here.
In January 2011, many people were horrified when the body of Susana Chavez was discovered in a shallow grave. Chavez, a young poet activist, gave voice to the disappeared women in Juarez, Mexico, nearly 800 women at the time, only to be ‘disappeared’ herself. She was later found tortured, strangled, her body mutilated.
What was her offense?
She would not stop questioning, haranguing, annoying public officials for their inadequate investigations into the deaths of so many women. She was making trouble because she gave voice to those who had no voice, often no identity because their bodies had been disfigured, disposed of, forgotten.
Chavez refused to forget. She refused to be silent. Giving voice to the abuse of others seems to be a constant thread in all these stories.
In addition to the official US awards, PEN International remembered the murdered women writers of Mexico, eleven murders in 2011, five of whom were women. Since 2006, forty-five writers/journalists/bloggers have been murdered or disappeared because of their investigative/ activist work.
Susana Chavez is on the PEN International list. So is Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, the mother of two and a veteran crime/political reporter. She was abducted by gunmen in front of her home, only to be later found decapitated. The message is clear: remain silent or this could be you.
Threats, torture, rape, imprisonment and murder is too often the fate of women who will not be silent, who refuse to get with programs that would restrain and silence them and their sisters. And yet, like Maryam Durani and others, they persist. They refuse to back down.
We have our own homegrown fight in the United States, those who would roll back a woman’s right to direct her reproductive life, choose her own destiny. Here the punishment is humiliation, censor, scorn, name-calling, legislative measures to equate a woman’s fully realized life with that of a zygote, even the willingness to probe a woman’s decision-making process [because authoritarians find women incapable of ‘right-minded’ action, otherwise known as ‘their way or the highway’].
In all these efforts, the purpose is to demean, limit, control, even eliminate women because the Daughters of Eve are traditionally viewed as a danger, a threat to the status quo. There’s a reason Lilith is rarely mentioned. She was wa-a-ay too uppity.
But here’s the thing: even for those of us not facing mortal danger, we can have an impact by the way we live our lives, support other women, raise our daughters and sons and in the way we give voice to those who have pushed back against female abuse in all its forms, here and around the world, past and present.
Because to quote Hillary Clinton’s famous line: Women’s Rights are indeed Human Rights. Our quest should be to fulfill Susana Chavez’s words: Ni Una Mas. Ni Una Mas.
Not One More.
Women's Empowerment
Broken Windows And The Stealing Of Hearts
Posted: March 8, 2012 Filed under: Bailout Blues, Banksters, Corporate Crime, corruption, Department of Homeland Security, Domestic Policy, double-speak, Economy, Eric Holder, ethics, financial institutions, George W. Bush, Global Financial Crisis, indefinite detention, Injustice system, Patriot Act, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, torture, U.S. Economy 21 Comments
Yesterday I read an interesting essay by William Black over at New Economic Perspectives. In the essay, Black, who headed the forensic audit team during the S&L crisis, pulls forward the Broken Window Theory, a criminological model based on a simple and some have said simplistic idea. The theory was introduced by James Q. Wilson and received a fair amount of popularity during the 1990s, particularly in conservative circles.
Readers might remember Rudy Giuliani’s ‘war against graffiti,’ his zero-tolerance campaign in NYC. That effort, the elimination of the squeegee men and the crack down on street prostitution among other things were based on the broken window philosophy, which uses an abandoned building metaphor.
Imagine a building in any neighborhood [although Wilson focused exclusively on what he termed ‘blue-collar crime.’] The first broken window of our abandoned building if left unrepaired sends a clear message to antisocial types: no one cares about this building. So, it’s open season on all the other windows, on anything of value that’s been left behind. If the owner doesn’t care about the integrity of the building then the street tough is encouraged to vandalize and take whatever’s not nailed down.
The attitude feeds on itself or so the theory goes. Honest citizens are less likely to confront the petty thief, which only encourages others to act out in destructive, antisocial ways. Honest citizens begin to feel overwhelmed and outnumbered and stop safeguarding their own neighborhoods. What’s the point? they say. No one cares. Communities begin to self-destruct.
Now whether you buy into this crime theory or not, I think the metaphor holds when you consider what we’ve been witnessing in the degradation of our financial markets, our legal system, even the refusal to admit that ‘there’s trouble in River City.’
As Professor Black points out, if we were to take Wilson’s theory and apply it to the explosion of ‘white collar crime’ within our financial system, it would be a major step in restoring the integrity of our system and bolstering peer pressure against misconduct. As it stands now, Wall Street movers and shakers and their DC handmaidens have implemented business-as-usual policies that reward the thief and punish the whistleblower. As Black points out in the essay:
We have adopted executive and professional compensation systems that are exceptionally criminogenic. We have excused and ignored the endemic “earnings management” that is the inherent result of these compensation policies and the inherent degradation of professionalism that results from allowing CEOs to create a Gresham’s dynamic among appraisers, auditors, credit rating agencies, and stock analysts. The intellectual father of modern executive compensation, Michael Jensen, now warns about his Frankenstein creation. He argues that one of our problems is dishonesty about the results. Surveys indicate that the great bulk of CFOs claim that it is essential to manipulate earnings. Jensen explains that the manipulation inherently reduces shareholder value and insists that it be called “lying.” I have seen Mary Jo White, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who now defends senior managers, lecture that there is “good” “earnings management.”
My husband had some unsettling experience in this area. Early in his career, he worked as a CPA [the two companies will remain nameless].
But in each case, he was ‘asked’ to clean up the numbers, make them look better than they were. He refused and found himself on the street, looking for employment elsewhere. I remember him saying at the time, ‘Look, I’m a numbers guy. I’ve never been good at fiction writing.’ This was back in the late 70s early 80s, so this attitude has been a long time in the making. Now, we’re seeing accounting fraud that is literally off the charts. Is it any wonder the country’s financial system is on life support?
We can see the destructive results of this careless, corrupt posturing all around us. Professor Black continued:
Fiduciary duties are critical means of preventing broken windows from occurring and making it likely that any broken windows in corporate governance will soon be remedied, yet we have steadily weakened fiduciary duties. For example, Delaware now allows the elimination of the fiduciary duty of care as long as the shareholders approve. Court decisions have increasingly weakened the fiduciary duties of loyalty and care. The Chamber of Commerce’s most recent priorities have been to weaken Sarbanes-Oxley and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We have made it exceptionally difficult for shareholders who are victims of securities fraud to bring civil suits against the officers and entities that led or aided and abetted the securities fraud. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) has achieved its true intended purpose – making it exceptionally difficult for shareholders who are the victims of securities fraud to bring even the most meritorious securities fraud action.
Reading this, I immediately sensed we could apply the metaphor just as easily to our legal predicament. Dak wrote to this yesterday—about the disheartening disrepair of our justice system, which was badly wounded during the Bush/Cheney years with the help of eager lawyers like John Yoo, stretching, reinterpreting, rewriting the parameters on the subjects of torture, indefinite detention, rendition, etc.
Not to be outdone, Eric Holder stood before Northwestern University’s Law School the other day and with the same twisted logic, explained away due process, otherwise known as ‘how to justify assassination.’ In this case, American citizens, those the President deems are a threat to the Nation, can be killed on native ground or foreign soil. Jonathon Turley, law professor at George Washington University and frequent legal commentator in the media, headed a recent blog post as follows: Holder Promises to Kill Citizens with Care.
Sorry, this does not make me feel better. What it does make me think is lawlessness simply breeds more lawlessness. The Broken Window theory writ large. As Turley explained:
The choice of a law school was a curious place for discussion of authoritarian powers. Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a “trust me” pledge that Holder repeated yesterday at Northwestern. The good news is that Holder promised not to hunt citizens for sport.
Holder proclaimed that “The president may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war — even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen.” The use of the word “abroad” is interesting since senior Administration officials have asserted that the President may kill an American anywhere and anytime, including the United States. Holder’s speech does not materially limit that claimed authority. He merely assures citizens that Obama will only kill those of us he finds abroad and a significant threat. Notably, Holder added “Our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan.”
Turley went on to comment that Holder was vague, to say the least, when it came to the use of these ‘new’ governmental/executive powers, claiming that the powers-that-be will only kill citizens when:
“the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.”
And as far as ‘due process?” Holder declared that:
“a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process.’”
Chilling! As Turley grimly noted in an earlier post, this is no longer the land of the free.
Seemingly unrelated was this report from the New York Times: the heart of Dublin’s 12th-century patron saint was stolen earlier this week from Christ’s Church Cathedral. The heart of Laurence O’Toole had been housed in a heart-shaped box, safely secured [or so church authorities believed] within an iron cage. The relic’s disappearance was preceded by a rash of reliquary robberies from churches, monasteries and convents around Ireland. According to the article:
The small cage hosting the heart-shaped box containing the relic was tucked away in an innocuous alcove at the side of a small altar. Visitors to the cathedral on Monday stared at the twisted bars and the empty space behind. The bars themselves were sundered evenly.
According to Dermot Dunne, dean of Christ Church, the box had lain undisturbed for centuries. He had no idea why someone would take it.
Whether it’s the heart of a saint or the heart of a Nation, the theft is a grievous insult. The crime betrays the public trust and our basic sense of decency. But the thieves of O’Tooles’s heart performed a curious act before exiting.
The Irish culprits lit candles at two of the Cathedral’s altars. Which means the perpetrators possessed, at the very least, an ironic sense of tradition.
The same cannot be said of our homegrown hooligans. Crass greed and the lust for unlimited power have their own dark tradition. As Americans, we do not expect vice to be confused with virtue. In the past, we could not imagine a blatant disrespect for the Rule of Law–crimes ignored, excused, then openly declared necessary for whatever raison du moment.
Not here, we told ourselves repeatedly. Not in the United States.
Perhaps, we should light candles of our own. A small devotion for the lost and dying.
Let’s Hear It For The Girls, All Month Long
Posted: March 7, 2012 Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, birth control, Civil Rights, collective bargaining, Economy, Feminists, income inequality, War on Women, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: international women's day 10 Comments
Though GOP madness is in full swing, March is the month to celebrate women—their lives, strengths and accomplishments. True to its nature, the month has roared in but with a twist, acting as a party crasher, snapping at all female guests of honor.
We’ve seen reproductive rights assaulted, the 100-year contraception battle reignited and shock-jock Rush Limbaugh bully and slander a female student from Georgetown University. Rick Santorum has turned the Republican effort into a Comstock-era discussion of acceptable moral/sexual behavior and a county in the Great State of South Carolina is suggesting a purity pledge for Republican membership. Even the workplace is under assault with candidates suggesting the elimination of minimum wage and repealing Child Labor laws.
What’s next? The village pillory? 
Who invited the Crazies?
My suggestion? Show them the door, kick their arses to the street. We didn’t invite reactionary fools to the party. This woman would not have tolerated their company for a single nanosecond:
Margaret Sanger
Nor these women
Women's Suffrage Parade
Nor these:
Bread and Roses Protest
The last photo, the Bread and Roses protest, was a workers’ strike protesting deplorable work conditions, non-living wages and inconceivably long days in New England’s textile mills. One of these strikes occurred in Lawrence, Massachusetts, fueled by earlier actions in NYC’s garment district. Thursday, March 8th is the official recognition date of a 100-year old struggle, under the aegis of the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] but primarily led by immigrant women, young and old, who successfully striked for humane working conditions, decent wages and openly opposed child labor and workplace exploitation.
It did not come easy. But come it did.
One of the descriptions I read of these early battles was nothing short of shake-your-head inspiring:
According to [Consiglia] Teutonica, this time a 22-year-old Syrian immigrant named Annie Kiami stepped in front of the crowd. Calling the soldiers “Cossacks,” Kiami wrapped an American flag around her body and dared them to shoot holes in Old Glory.
Once thought of as docile and subservient, the Bread and Roses women quickly gained the notorious title among mill owners of radicals of the worst sort.
“One policeman can handle 10 men,” Lawrence’s district attorney lamented, “while it takes 10 policemen to handle one woman.”
In the words of one horrified boss, the women activists were full of “lots of cunning and also lots of bad temper. They’re everywhere, and it’s getting worse all the time.”
Lots of cunning and bad temper! I like that.
Flip forward some 50+ years and the Bread and Roses contingent in Boston fought for reproductive rights and abortion, child care, equal employment laws against discrimination in the workplace and recognition of and legal remedies to fight and reduce violence against women. In 1971, the Bread and Roses group occupied a building owned by Harvard University for 10 days, during which they offered free classes and childcare. After they were removed from their encampment, several sympathetic donors offered $5000 with which the group opened The Women’s Center in Cambridge.
The Women’s Center is in operation today, offering a multitude of services to battered women, victims of rape and child abuse and providing counsel, support and health information to moderate to low-income women. Their mission statement reads as follows:
To provide women with the resources and support they need to emerge from
conditions of domestic violence, sexual abuse, poverty, discrimination, social isolation and degradation.
To challenge and change the attitudes, actions, and institutions that subjugate women.
They’re still going strong.
A myriad of Bread and Roses communities have grown and spread across the country, many charitable outreaches to low income families, providing meals and support to the unemployed, the sick and disadvantaged. In each case, the Bread and Roses emblematic power rests in the idea of social justice, community outreach and support. With each and every group, each program, the legacy returns to those women and children of 1912, the day they said–Enough is enough—and then put their bodies, their very lives on the line, demanding to be treated with dignity, to be seen and counted as human beings.
As for the name, Bread and Roses? The phrase reportedly came from a banner—Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses–carried during the early days of the textile strikes. James Oppenheim, a poet, novelist and editor, attended one of those protests and was so moved by the imagery that he wrote the following poem to honor the women.
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
Oppenheim was inspired by the women and their courage. The women were inspired by the words.
It’s a fine legacy, one among many in which women had a leading role in changing the course of American history. The citizens of Lawrence will be commemorating the women and their efforts with a Centennial festival. The major programs are slated to kickoff tomorrow Thursday, March 8 and run through May 1.
There’s no better time to give these women their due because income inequality, rising poverty and homelessness has returned to the Nation, a vicious cycle tearing at families and communities alike. The Lawrence strike has an uncanny parallel to the Occupy protests. At the turn of the 20th century, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few was unrivaled. Until today. What Bread and Roses reminds us is the power of solidarity, fighting the good fight. With cunning and bad temper if necessary. Or as James Oppenheim wrote a century ago:
The rising of women means the rising of the race.
Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
Happy 100th!
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