Well, this seems about right. Most impressively, the video below explains how corporations are legally required to put the interest of shareholders and the maximizing of profits above all other concerns.
This is just one of the reasons we were so critical of Obama’s recent address to the damnable U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest corporate lobbying group in the nation, wherein he seemed to be grovelling for them to work together in the interest of creating jobs for Americans. Silly, that. The corporations he was meeting with have a legal fiduciary duty to maximize profits. Period. They have no requirement to do anything else. In fact, they have a legal responsibility to do nothing but!
In short, corporations will not behave in the interest of the public unless and until they are legally required to do so. Anything short of that is simply whistling past the graveyard and/or a more political kabuki theater.
This video, featured by the DemocracyIsForPeople.org campaign to help the push for a Constitutional Amendment that would undo the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 5 to 4 Citizens United decision last year by requiring that First Amendment rights apply to human beings only (or, at least, not to for-profit corporations) does a very fine job of explaining in simple terms the entire fine mess this country now finds itself in. It’s well worth the 8 minutes it takes to watch…
Statistical correlation between wealth and power.
An interesting statistic that correlates with the one given in the video that “85% think that corporations have too much influence in our democracy” is that 80% of the nation’s population possess just 15% of its wealth.
US Uncut is about taking action against unnecessary and unfair cuts to public services across the US. Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans.
http://www.usuncut.org
Along the lines of the fallout of Citizens United, here’s a kid has it figured out:
Kid Corp Vid
Great Vid, Spread it through Digg, Facebook, Twitter
A while back I read something
http://www.truthout.org/090409A
which proposed restricting donations (specifically corporate donations) to candidates running in districts (House) or a given state (Senate) where a corporation is headquartered. (How you handle the presidential campaign he didn’t go into.) Quote: “The 1976 US Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money with “free speech,” affirmed your right to buy your own congressman. But it did not explicitly affirm your right to buy mine.”
Not sure if I can anticipate all the ramifications of whether this could be made to work or not (reasonably corruption-resistant) but it seems to me it might pay to have some contingency backup as getting a constitutional amendment through could take a while if it succeeds.
In any case, the pattern I see in the great wave of change, from Tunisia to Madison and wherever it leads, though I’m not aware anyone else has put it this way yet, is the impulse for economic justice, here and worldwide; this to me is where the venn diagram overlaps, what underlies all the uprisings. And as long as the kleptocrats via corporations run the world we’ll never get there.
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Following the reasoning that corporations are persons then we have to recognize that they are also potentially immortal or they can be absorbed by some larger corporate person to become part of an even larger “personâ€
Which changes its name so that isn’t recognized for the malignant blob that it is – and the blob grows.
Obama is a corporate front man.
http://bcove.me/xh82za7f
Jeff said @ 7:
He may or may not be. But just to be clear, the video you linked to in your comment above had absolutely nothing to do with Obama.
It concerns a case brought by the Bush Sr. Dept of Justice originally and then prosecuted (unsuccessfully) under the Clinton Administration.
The case was over and done with before Bush Jr even took office, much less Obama.
Here’s the full story of the case that you failed to link to when only linking to the video above.
The Citizens United decision is a significant setback to the constitutional rights of ordinary citizens.
However, a constitutional amendment will not come quickly. After all, the 27th Amendment is the most recent amendment to the US Constitution. It was ratified in 1992, 203 years after its initial submission in 1789.
The quicker solution rests with Congress.
Citizens United is a narrow decision. It allows Congress to pass laws that regulate corporate expenditures where there exists a relationship between campaign expenditures and corruption. This is a key opportunity to restore the First Amendment balance.
Shareholders are often kept in the dark when it comes to corporate political expenditures. As a result, they may unwittingly fund political spending when corporations freely spend on political campaigns.
New regulations should require authorization from shareholders before corporations are allowed to make political expenditures with corporate funds. In turn, political speech can be return to the people.