Monopolies Over Life Itself

When I picked-up the latest free issue of Pathways while leaving yoga class the other evening, my attention was immediately drawn to an interview of Harriet Washington, a noted medical ethicist and author of several books related to the subject. (Her latest, titled Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate takeover of Life Itself -- And the Consequences for Your Health and Our medical Future, published late last year, is the basis and focus of the interview.)

Later, as I read the interview, it became clear to me how changes in medical patent law, going back to 1980 with the Bayh-Dole Government Patent Policy Act, created a market for patentable living things and allowed researchers to use the information, subsidized and paid with our taxes, to sell the information to private corporations (i.e., Big Pharma) for their own gain and profit. As Ms. Washington notes: "Bayh-Dole was basically a golden key for corporations who could now profit from patents that they previously were unable to hold." It gets worse (which shouldn't be a surprise under our current corporatocracy governmental structure). 

Once Big Pharma patents a gene, for example, it literally stifles innovation, so that product innovation slows to a crawl with resultant soaring prices. I learned about the corporatization of universities, the shelving of unprofitable research, the corporate funding of the FDA and medical journals, and why we're inundated with tons of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements in the United States -- which are banned and illegal in Europe, Canada, and almost everywhere else in the world. Nowhere else in the world (except for New Zealand), are corporations allowed to do this. In a nutshell, I learned how corporations have now been given license to patent, and own, the very basis of life itself. Here is the interview in its entirety, conducted by Dr. Daniel Redwood:

"Two events took place in the United States in 1980 that, in retrospect, have dramatically changed the nature and direction of health sciences research. These were the Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that allowed the patenting of living things and the passage of the Bayh-Dole Government Patent Policy Act. To begin, could you please give us a broad-brush summary of these policy changes?"

"Their import is that Diamond v. Chakrabarty removed the ambiguity about whether one could take out a patent on a product of nature. And specifically for our purposes, whether one is able to take out a patent on a living thing. Living things had occasionally been patented in the past. For example, when adrenalin was patented, there were objections that this was actually a discovery rather than an invention. Even Louis Pasteur faced questions when he patented a strain of yeast. Some said, 'You didn’t invent this yeast; you just discovered it'

So now we have a law that stipulates unambiguously that if something is living, that’s not a bar to its being patented. In addition, we have a second law saying that when a university holds a patent, it is legal for the university to license or sell that patent to a corporate entity. Previously, universities were not allowed to do that, the rationale being that these patents arose from research that was subsidized by the government—that is, by you and me. Our tax dollars paid for the development of these molecules, and the feeling was that a private corporation should not be allowed to profit from it. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, supplemented by other laws, changed all that, making it feasible and, in fact, making it desirable for the first time, for researchers to take out patents on living things, based on research performed in universities, and to sell and license them to corporations. Bayh-Dole was basically a golden key for corporations who could now profit from patents that they previously were unable to hold."

Read the rest here.

 Here's another interview from last December, by Thom Hartmann, on the same subject.

The Biggest Challenge of Our Time

Protester's sign at Occupy the Courts in Washington D.C.

“Why the courts? Because frankly folks, that’s the scene of the crime. Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines. We the people never decided it; our elected representatives didn’t decide it; ordinary people like me and you never decided it. The court created these doctrines and it’s going to take a movement to overturn it.” --- David Cobb, Move to Amend and an organizer of Friday’s Occupy the Courts protests.

 

 

In September a couple of years ago, I explored in a post how the Roberts Court obliterated the Constitution through corporate favoritism. I predicted -- which wasn't really that difficult -- how "big money in politics already subverted our democratic processes before [that election] year, but that [it would] seem like pennies-in-a-bucket when the steamroller of millions of corporate dollars start inundating the media with attack ads and influence peddling -- all designed to adversely influence your opinion to support their views and their candidates." Today's two-year anniversary of that inane and horrible Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was the focus of yesterday's nation-wide network of protests called, collectively, Occupy the Courts. I was a part of the demonstration in Washington D.C., and although it was not as cold as last year's rally that observed the even colder and callous reasoning of that treasonous decision, it was still a brisk and windy day. 

 

Thom Hartmann speaking at Occupy the Courts

The D.C. event included many skits, street theater, and speeches by David Cobb, former presidential aspirant for the Green Party, along with Thom Hartmann, who initiated my journey of realizing the destabilizing and destructive nature of corporate personhood and the resultant corporatocracy we live under today due to this. 

The crowd was slightly larger than last year's event, but unlike a year ago the Capitol Police and Park Police were prominent and very visible. I interpret this to be a positive sign; the Occupy movement has created 

awareness and fear within those corporatists who have overtaken our government over the last thirty years, and especially within this century.  

 

I follow a friend's blog, aptly called "The Rant" by Tom Degan, and even before the realization of the near-collapse of the investment banking sector I expressed my doubts and frustrations about our country's burgeoning corporatocracy. The following reprint of a comment I posted on Mr. Degan's blog on September 9, 2008, which I highlighted in my very first post on No Corporate Rule, is worth repeating: 

 

"Tom, like you, I used to be firmly in the Democratic camp each and every election cycle, just knowing that if only the Democrats could retain power, all our social and political problems would be worked on, and would finally get solved. But, decade-after-decade, the same problems continued to persist. They actually got worse, not better. Aside from a Republican revolution that oversaw a dismantling of much of the New Deal era's strides to put society on a more equal footing, even when Democratic control was firmly in place the slide continued towards further degradation of human rights, and citizen needs, in favor of corporate and moneyed interests.

I, too, sincerely hope I'm wrong in my opinion about Senator Obama. I truly do. But the evidence is irrefutable. Thankfully, in 2002, which is the year Thom Hartmann's remarkable Unequal Protection came out, I picked it off the bookstore shelf and only intended to take a quick glance, but then couldn't put it down. I immediately bought it, and read it - more like absorbed it. Since, I've done extensive reading and research concerning corporate personhood through other areas, such as POCLAD.

That day things really started to crystallize for me. I understood that our problems weren't unsolvable through democratic action; they were only resisted by corporate entities that held far more power and influence than I did as a voter, and an agenda that was antithetical to mine, and most Americans. I learned that although I had the protections and rights granted to me through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so did, underhandedly, multinational corporate and banking interests. Just as important, it became apparent that our elected officials, from both parties, were in the corner of their corporate benefactors; not mine, or yours, or any of the other millions of middle or working class people in this country. When I made that connection, I mean when it finally hit me like a ton of bricks, I understood that a slow-motion coup d’état had taken place right under our noses. It didn't take troops and tanks rolling through the streets; all it took was time and incremental steps. It worked, and sadly, most of America is oblivious to the fact that it happened. They know 'something's wrong' but they haven't figured it out. It was the most covert takeover of a people in history.

I'll probably never return to the Democratic Party, but it could happen. If, through some miracle, they adopted the same stance in their official party platform that the Green Party has regarding the elimination of corporate personhood, then I'll come back. The 'Greens' unabashedly call for 'legislation or constitutional amendment to end the legal fiction of corporate personhood.' This, Tom, would be the real panacea to true reform, and the return of our country to We the People. Without this, we're just pissin' in the wind."      

 

I feel even more passionately about what I wrote that day then ever before. The benefit of hindsight has allowed me to know that the corporatists continue to whittle away at the rights only natural persons were granted through our Bill of Rights; only natural persons, those made of real flesh and blood, deserve the protections our forebearers recognized as natural law. The infusion of corporate money is shattering records this primary season, and we're already experiencing how Citizens United has effectively allowed corporations, domestic and foreign, to leapfrog over our democratic ideals and to the forefront of our constitutional protections. As these transgressions against democratic ideals continue; as each passing year brings us precariously closer to entering the throes of a fascist authoritarian regime, the stakes become higher and the threats loom larger.

 

Until corporate personhood dies and is buried, preferably through a constitutional amendment, we're only fooling ourselves if we think the normal recourse for democratic change will solve the problem. It won't. The last four years have shown us this, and if history is a reliable teacher, the next four years -- no matter who is in office -- will certainly prove this. It's time to think real change. Otherwise, as I said almost four years ago, we're certainly just pissin' in the wind -- and we'll deserve everything that blows our way. 

 

Organized Labor Movements: Spawned by Predatory Greed

Seal of the Knights of Labor (1872)

The history of the American labor movement has always been a response to the predatory and, as any free market advocate will agree, the greedy nature of capitalism. It wasn't spawned on its own. It took the inherent nature of greed, which is the lubricating oil of the engine of capitalism, to make human beings revolt and fight back against the injustices borne of that greed.

Dyed-in-the wool laissez-faire capitalists like to argue that unions harm economies by driving up wage expenses. As Thom Hartmann explains in What Would Jefferson Do?, that's a myth. In a phrase attributed to John F. Kennedy in a speech he made in 1963, "a rising tide lifts all boats", it was thought that improvements to the overall economy, the macro-economy at large, benefits all participating in that economy -- not just a few. Also attributed to President Kennedy is the phrase, "And a partnership, by definition, serves both partners, without domination or unfair advantage."

This is the equilibrium sought by labor, through collective bargaining, which resulted in widespread well-paid workers resulting in a strong middle class, and not only a healthy national economy but also vibrant local and regional economies as well -- before radical conservatives took control of our executive and legislative processes, more frequently, starting in the 1980s. In its simplest terms, the unwritten partnership has always been, as an exchange for a livable wage, and not hurting people or harming the environment, corporations would receive an educated workforce, a stable currency, a court system based upon the rule of law, reliable transportation systems along with other infrastructure, and international agreements protecting businesses and workers alike.

But that partnership has withered and died in the last thirty-plus years. By chipping away slowly and methodically, through manipulation of our legislatures and executive leaders with untold infusions of cash (i.e. influence) and the lies of mutual and beneficial rewards of globalization and tariff-less trade; through deteriorating tax bases that made good education improbable, if not impossible, and a physical infrastructure crumbling and deteriorating; a stable currency stable, only if our foreign treasury-bond holders decide it to be; and the corruption of our court systems through powerful outside influences intent on circumventing justice for all in favor of justice for the few, these powerful interests are now aimed at taking it all away -- livable wages and benefits (what few remain), and the protection, or "do no harm", of humans and the environment.

Please read the following short article about the struggle of the working class in this country, and the reasons we intimately remain in that struggle to this very day. Understand why the labor movement was instrumental in creating a strong middle class, and how that movement shaped our workplaces for the benefit of all. Then, take the short test at the end. See whether your knowledge of how this nation was built on the backs of the working class coincides with what you were taught in school. You may be surprised.           

    

The Working Class History Test 

by Peter Kellman 

from Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy (2001), pp. 46-48 (Reprinted with permission from POCLAD.) 

The dominant history taught in the United States today reinforces the notion that from 1776 to the present “We the People” have formed our own government, and this government operates to protect and promote the interests of most of the people most of the time. Slavery and the denial of the right to vote for women are pointed to as exceptions that have been rectified through constitutional amendments.

Most working people today believe that the country is not run by We the People but by a small group of the very rich and powerful who manage large corporations. Many of us have in the back of our minds an image of this country, based on the history we have been taught, where the government was run to protect and promote the interests of most of the people. Therefore our vision of a better future is based on getting back to a time when things were better. The problem is that from its inception the United States government and economy has been run by and for the very wealthy.

If we are to build a society where the government is run to protect and promote the interests of We the People, we need to know the history of the elite who have always run this country and the history of the working class that built it. The following test was put together to bring out some of the history that has been denied. It is this denied history that should form the image of the past we carry around with us because we need to have a truthful understanding of the past to create a vision of the future.

We need to be clear about what it is we want to go back to. Do we want to go back to the vision of President James Madison -- a slave owner and “Master Builder of the Constitution” -- or to the vision of the people who built the early Abolition, Suffrage, and Labor Movements? Do we want to go back to the vision of President Hayes -- who used Federal troops to break strikes, promote corporate interests and end Reconstruction --  or to the Knights of Labor who demanded equal pay for equal work, and voting rights for all citizens regardless of race or gender? [1]

NOTES: [1] Still, most "traditional" histories show events punctuated not with the actions of the ordinary but with the acts of the powerful: landed, privileged, and in control. One noted exception is Howard Zinn's book A Peoples History of the united States: 1492 to Present. --Editor

The Test  Try the test. Answers at the end.

1. It is easy for citizens of the United States to form a corporation but very    hard to form a union. Name three countries where it is as easy for workers to form a union as it is in the United States for investors to form a corporation. 

 

2. In 1770, what percentage of the colonial population lived in slavery?

3. At the time of the War of Independence, what percentage of the people who made up the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia were or had been indentured servants?

4. Who was the richest man in America at the time of the Revolution?

5. What percentage of We the People could vote in 1776?

6. Who said, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.”

7. What great American document was written behind closed doors at a meeting held in 1787, the minutes of which were made public only 53 years later?

8. What great American “told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and spend only $12 or $13 on his keep.”

9. What were the demands of the Labor Movement in 1830?

10. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed after the Civil War in 1868 to extend due process and equal protection of the law to African Americans. In the first 50 years after its adoption what percentage of the cases brought under it were on  behalf of African Americans and what percentage of the cases were brought on behalf of corporations?

11. The Supreme Court ruled in 1872 that women do not have the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. What year did the Supreme Court rule: “Corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States”?

12. How can five people amend the Constitution?

13. Whose election to the Presidency of the United States was determined by a special commission, controlled by the CEO of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and made up of Supreme Court justices and members of Congress? In what year did that president pull the last of the federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction, and use those troops to put down the first national labor strike in the United States in which over 100 strikers were killed?

14. In 1886 the largest labor organization in the United States was the Knights of Labor. What issues did they advocate and fight for?

15. When was the labor movement politically powerful enough to prevent the Governor of Michigan and the President of the United States from sending troops to break up a strike in which workers were occupying corporate property?

16. Which president (John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt or Herbert Hoover) signed into law an act which included the following: it is necessary that he have full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of his own choosing; to negotiate the terms and conditions of his employment; and that he shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or mutual aid or protection.  

17. In many countries workers have benefits like paid maternity leave, maximum hours of work, health care, paid holidays, and vacations defined by law. In these countries workers have what, that they don’t have in the United States?

Answers:

1.  Sweden, Germany, Italy, Japan, Belgian, Ireland, and more.

2.  20%.

3.  75%.

4.  According to historian Charles Beard in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, George "Washington of Virginia, was probably the richest man in the United States in his time, and his financial ability was not surpassed among his countrymen anywhere." 

5.  75%.

6.  John Jay, first president of the Continental Congress and first chief justice of the Supreme Court.

7.  The Constitution.

8.  “Master Builder of the Constitution", and fourth president of the United States, James Madison. 

9.  The 10 hour day and public education.

10.  African Americans 0.5% (one-half of one percent); corporations 50%. Also, of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, 19 dealt with the rights of African Americans and 288 dealt with corporations.

11.  1886.

12.  They become U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

13.  Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877.

14.  They advocated the creation of producer, consumer, and distributive cooperatives, the prohibition of child labor, equal pay for equal work between the sexes and races, universal suffrage; the eight-hour day. And they opposed the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, reasoning that as long as a few people controlled most of the wealth they would use their economic power politically to prevent the creation of a real democracy.

15.  1936–37 [The sit-in strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan.]

16.  Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 was passed by Congress and signed into law by Herbert Hoover.

17.  Strong working class political parties.

The Dismantling of Democracy

Just as today, Monday, January 17th, we commemorate and memorialize Martin Luther King for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, this Friday we'll denounce the landmark Supreme Court decision of last January 21st -- Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission -- for taking, as Thom Hartmann condemningly expresses, the "radical step of overturning more than a hundred years of laws passed by elected legislatures and signed by elected presidents and declared that not only are corporations 'persons' but that they have constitutional rights such as the First Amendment right to free speech."  

The following article appeared in today's Truthout. Mr. Hartmann, a historical researcher and writer concerning the legal fiction of corporate personhood and its devastating affects on our democratic processes, presents another penetrating analysis of this subject, and how Citizens United has effectively allowed corporations, domestic and foreign, to leapfrog over our democratic ideals and to the forefront of our constitutional protections.

Mr. Hartmann is totally correct in his historical analysis of the history of corporate personhood. Even prior to his work, scholars and other writers investigated and engaged in understanding this legal fiction; others, since, have corroborated his research. This is the single biggest issue confronting our democracy and our future. With last January's errant Supreme Court decision, the stakes got even higher. To dismiss Mr. Hartmann's work, as one commenter mentioned, "hypocritical", or to throw in the towel and see the cause as being too futile, does nothing to help stem the tide of this horrific neo-feudalism.

If you're in Washington D.C this coming Friday, January 21st, join us for a rally condemning last year's dreadful decision. We'll be in front of the Supreme Court building at 11:00 a.m. See www.movementforthepeople.org for more information.

 

Wal-Mart Is Not a Person by Thom Hartmann

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

—John Stuart Mill

In 2003, after my book Unequal Protection was first published, I gave a talk at one of the larger law schools in Vermont. Around 300 people showed up, mostly students, with a few dozen faculty and some local lawyers. I started by asking, “Please raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons and therefore entitled to rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Almost everyone in the room raised their hand, and the few who didn’t probably were new enough to the law that they hadn’t gotten to study that case yet. Nobody questioned the basic premise of the statement.

And all of them were wrong.

We the People are the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution; and from its adoption until the Robber Baron Era in the late nineteenth century, people meant human beings. In the 1886 Santa Clara case, however, the court reporter of the Supreme Court proclaimed in a “headnote”—a summary or statement added at the top of the court decision, which is separate from the decision and has no legal force whatsoever—that the word person in law and, particularly, in the Constitution, meant both humans and corporations.

Thus began in a big way (it actually started a half century earlier in a much smaller way with a case involving Dartmouth University) the corruption of American democracy and the shift, over the 125 years since then, to our modern corporate oligarchy.

Most recently, in a January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John G. Roberts, took the radical step of overturning more than a hundred years of laws passed by elected legislatures and signed by elected presidents and declared that not only are corporations “persons” but that they have constitutional rights such as the First Amendment right to free speech.

This decision is clear evidence of how far we have drifted away as a nation from our foundational principles and values. Particularly since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, over the past three decades our country and its democratic ideals have been hijacked by what Joseph Pulitzer a hundred years ago famously called “predatory plutocracy.”

The Citizens United decision, which empowers and elevates corporations above citizens, is not just a symbolic but a real threat to our democracy, and only the will of We the People, exercised through a constitutional amendment to deny personhood to corporations, can slay the dragon the Court has unleashed.

Read the rest at Truthout.

Capitalism Hits the Fan (or as your mama used to say, "don't step in that stuff")

If you don't think our economy is in dire straits, our way of life has been irreparably harmed and is in a downward spiral, then you either haven't been paying attention, are in denial, or you're part of the elitist two-percent living the good life at the top of the heap.

Please don't get the idea that our recent woes are purely an aberration of our previous and current president, although both certainly have accelerated the pace of decline with their corporatist policies and obvious disregard for the middle and working classes. This decline, as mentioned in my previous post, really has its roots in the successive court rulings giving corporations the rights previously only accorded real flesh-and-blood people, or more appropriately, natural persons -- like you and me. But the real tailspin, the one we're smack-dab in the middle of right now, started taking hold in the late 1970s when real wages started to flatten and stagnate, and productivity started its astronomical climb into the upper hemisphere. Corporations, the multinational ones with all the dough and all the lobbyists -- not Joe Schmoe's Engineering Company, or Jose Frijoles's Landscaping Services -- started really raking in the profits right about then, while John and Jane Doe starting to find it difficult to just make ends meet. To compensate, two-income families eventually became the norm while personal and private debt took off and has now reached record levels.

We're now looking precipitously like the early 1930s, when, as you recall, things started going from bad to worse. Back then, FDR had the guts and determination to initiate the necessary changes to put people on payrolls and back to work. He started works programs that built the infrastructure of this nation; roads, hospitals, schools and more, and didn't just extend unemployment benefits for those long-term unemployed. Fortunately, labor unions were a strong enough influence, being nearly 35% of the domestic workforce, unlike now where there isn't much of a push to reverse the current slide into the wastelands of economic purgatory. As Professor Wolff remarks, "As long as we let large corporations have the wealth that they have, be driven by profits as they are, we really can't be surprised if the things they do serve their interests and not the rest of us."

There's a crisis in America right now, and no matter whether you choose to ignore it, refuse to accept it, or try to escape it, you can't. It's going to take all of us to beat this, for surely it took most of us to allow it to happen. Please listen to what Dr. Richard Wolff (The University of Massachusetts at Amherst) says in this recent interview by Thom Hartmann, or read the transcript from Capitalism Hits the Fan.

Legal Precedence Built Upon a Lie

Okay, so you've read my preceding post, and for whatever reason you've decided you can't read Thom Hartmann's book; there's no time, you can't find it at the bookstore, your library doesn't carry it (no surprise!), or you just don't care. Well, let me make it easy for you (unless, of course, you really don't care!). The following interview of Mr. Hartmann, conducted this past March, gets right to the gist of the matter; the reasons why subsequent court decisions have framed the judicial precedent as to why corporations are currently viewed as "persons" under the law. As fraudulent as it is, because as you'll discover it's based upon a lie, you'd think there would be rioting in the streets. But, I suppose, most Americans really don't care.

Please watch. Consider what this grievous lie means.

Corporate personhood is the root cause of most, if not all, of our social problems. We continue to throw money and resources at the symptoms, but to no avail, however the disease is corporate personhood. It's time to treat the disease. Once cured, the symptoms will disappear.