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Sunday, December 5, 2010

THE SOUND OF OLIGARCHS SCREAMING

My blog has featured link boycotts and blogroll burns. I regularly use link condoms. So with all the hoopla surrounding WikiLeaks, you'll excuse me if I indulge in a brief, strange-but-true story about North Korea and off-limits websites. Lots of readers have been asking me to say something about that situation as well as the leaked cables, so here go two birds with one stone.

Friday, November 26, 2010

IN THE FREE SPEECH ZONE AT THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS

Freedom is in such great danger that we must put a fence around it. Inside, you will find everything that's best about the movement to abolish war. Led by artists, veterans, faith organizations, students, and labor organizers, this is a movement for the ultimate human right from which all other rights flow: the right to be free of conflict.


Watch In The Free Speech Zone At The School Of The Americas Watch

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

TAKING IT TO THE STREETS

The fight against corporate rule is just heating up, now that the consequences of Citizen's United are apparent.

From a PDA message:

"The impact of Citizens United can be judged by simply following the money. The $126 million in undisclosed money represents more than a quarter of the total $450 million spent by outside groups. Add the $60 million spent by groups that were allowed to raise unlimited money, but still had to disclose, to the undisclosed money and the total amount of outside money made possible by the Citizens United ruling reaches $186 million or 40 percent of the total spent by outside groups."

The campaign to Take Back America by abolishing corporate personhood through Constitutional amendment should get a boost from Corporations Aren't People's video contest.






Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Linchpin of Progress

The tea party astroturfing has been an attempt to imitate progressive activism. But when was the last time you saw an act of civil disobedience at a tea party?

No matter how hard they try, corporate shills can't steal this act. Their useful idiots will inevitably wind up stomping a woman's head.



For more on Appalachia Rising, click here.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Dr. Rick Staggenborg Interviewed

Despite my best attempts to get Veoh to cooperate, I cannot seem to download a copy of this video that will open in any software program. So I cannot edit Dr. Staggenborg, unfortunately:

Monday, August 16, 2010

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Birmingham BP Protest

If you needed proof that a seismic shift in the public conception of corporate personhood is underway, just watch this video of a protest against British Petroleum in Birmingham, Alabama yesterday. In comparison, last year in this same city I could only find two health care protesters at a Sarah Palin book-signing.

Southern society frowns on public protest; that's partly an artifact of the Civil Rights Era and partly the social impetus of conformity. My own attempts at visible public protest have been met with wonder, disdain, and fascination, but never a lot of honking. So it was with some surprise that I saw only support from people driving and walking through Five Points:



The center has shifted. A supermajority of Americans opposes bailing out BP, indeed they oppose the continued existence of BP as long as tar balls continue to wash up on Alabama's sugar-white beaches and sea life gets cooked in a deep-fryer combination of sunshine and black oil. Americans are mad as hell and have every right to be.

What would we do with a person who poisoned a sea? What would be the punishment for destroying 100,000 livelihoods? For killing eleven of their workers through criminal neglect, what would our punishment be? The answer, of course, is that we would put such a person in jail, deny them bail, and never let them see the light of day again.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Top Kill, Bottom Kill

I recently had a bipartisan meeting on BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I learned that things are worse than we know -- and British Petroleum has been lying to us from the beginning. Enjoy!

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Is America Ready for "Angry Black" Obama?

So everyone's talking about this as "Obama's Katrina," even Frank Rich:
For all the second-guessing, it’s still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it’s hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama’s considerable talents do not include credible play-acting.

But life isn’t fair, and this president is in a far tougher spot in 2010 than his predecessor was in 2005.
Sure, the US Navy has submersibles; how many Navy submersible crews have experience with underwater oil-drilling? Answer: none. The US Coast Guard doesn't have enough boom to protect the shores for which they're responsible.

What ought Obama to have done? He should've just dropped an atomic bomb on it. Or designed top kill himself on a napkin. He should've farted on the head of BP's CEO. Lots of good ideas -- but what they really come down to is the lack of an angry black man:


Much more after the jump...


Friday, May 14, 2010

Stop The BP Bailout!



British Petroleum failed to take safety seriously, used the wrong diagram to fight the disaster, lied about the scope of their fiasco, keeps minimizing the disaster, and can't say where all the oil has gone. Large balls of tar are washing up on shore as the uncontrolled vent puts 70,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day -- the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every four days.

All that was bad enough. Then last night, Sen. Lisa ("Lease-A") Murkowski (R-BP) blocked an effort to raise the liability cap on oil companies from $75 million to $10 billion. BP has already spent $350 million; costs will probably reach the billions before the cleanup is done. There is nothing to stop BP from declaring its liabilities finished and walking away while oil still clogs the beaches of Mobile Bay.

Murkowski's motivations have everything to do with the prominence of BP in her state's oil and gas industry (.PDF). Her campaign coffer contains $426,000 of oil and gas industry cash. This action amounts to a billion-dollar taxpayer BAILOUT of a foreign corporation, and a very wealthy one at that, in exchange for a relative pittance.

But all is not lost. In fact, this is a crisis we cannot afford to waste. (More after the jump!)

Sunday, April 18, 2010

CHAPTER EIGHTY THREE. DEFANGING TEHRANYSAURUS REX

Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Apr 18, 2010 3:06 PM PDT


This essay is dedicated to Azar Nifisi whose brilliant Reading Lolita in Tehran revealed to the average American the painful experience of losing hard-won freedoms. In this poignant book, she helps the empathetic person understand the pain of being subject to the whims of men who wanted to control the thoughts and actions of others. Her undaunted courage shines through in her account of the resistance of a small group of women to those who invoke moral authority that they themselves cannot comprehend.



When I was attending Portland State University in the late 70s, the school was populated by a large segment of Iranian students sent there by the then-secular government or by their oil-rich parents. The latter could be recognized by the beefy Trans-Ams they invariably drove to impress American girls who were looking for excitement and a generous date who would provide a taste of the good life that many could not otherwise experience and with which the ads in the Western corporate media tantalized them.

The other group of Iranian students was comprised of those who were trying to understand and take home the more important lessons that living in a democracy could teach them. They hoped to better their lives and those of their families and friends upon their return home. Among them was a brilliant and studious young woman who I met when we were both tutoring other students. In my loneliness I worshipped this beautiful, idealistic patriot and lover of freedom. In the more tolerant United States at that time, I and any young man or woman who wanted to attend college could do so because education was commonly understood to have a value to society. The corporations that had begun to seize power in America had not yet succeeded in crippling our system of higher education in their effort to squeeze the last public dollar for their profit instead of the needs of the People.

In the days before Reagan rose to power with the help of the corporatocracy, the American people maintained the fiction lost during the Vietnam era that we are all one people who had each risen through hard work in a society that understood the concept of a level playing field. This was our reward for freeing the world from the grip of Fascist tyranny at the cost of hundreds of thousands of young American lives. The so-called Greatest Generation had reaped the benefits that they and their children then enjoyed. We were the products of the resulting baby boom and innocently expected that we would continue America’s proud tradition of taking care of its workers and their families forever.

Events moved swiftly in those days. The Iranian students began demonstrating regularly at PSU. I watched with curiosity as these determined men and woman agitated for the American people to understand that the government of Reza Shah Pahlevi was a puppet of the CIA that had put the cowardly Shah into power. Pahlavi maintained his grip on the forcibly secularized Iran through a repressive regime backed by the Gestapo-like Savak. The universities flourished in the new society, which was secularized and allowed woman such as Nifiski to not only learn but to teach other young men and women.

The CIA had installed the Shah to assure the control of the Iranian oil supply for the benefit of their masters, the economic elite in the US and the oil rich countries of the Mideast. These were the nations that formed OPEC, the great little tool that American, British and French-based transnational oil corporations found so useful. Iran had made the mistake of nationalizing the rich oil fields that this criminal cabal considered its own. Among these allies were Goldman-Sachs and its friends in the IMF and the WTO. Also profiting from this arrangement were the various corporations internationally that comprised the military-industrial complex.

This arrangement was convenient for everybody concerned, except the citizens of the nations involved. Among them, only Americans as a whole failed to worry about the growing power of these international corporations and the increasing irrelevance of nations. They failed to recognize that 1984 was just around the corner. The Hydra that is the cabal of international criminals thus busied itself unencumbered in the task of enslaving the world.

They happily made war, subjugated the poor people of the Mideast and fed money to keep well-oiled the Israeli war machine that they thought could alone ensure the security of their joint enterprise. They pumped just enough oil to soak Europe of its wealth and subsidize the fat and happy middle class in the US. The Puppet Masters of the Senate used cheap oil in America to keep the middle class complacent and willfully ignorant through the skillful manipulation of the corporate media. The media had become drunk with their success in revealing the threat to democracy of Watergate and CIA spying in America. In its stupor the Hydra grew stronger, feeding off the suffering of millions throughout the world. The media have not yet awaken, nor have the American people who depended on its integrity to understand the workings of its government, the former leaders of which had slunk off into the shadows.

It is amazing how fast the Puppetmasters of the fascist shadow government walked back from the dark side where the shadows dwelt and into the light of day. The vanguard of the re-emerging international Army of the Night was led by such traitors as Ollie North and G. Gordon Liddy. Both had either belonged to or worked hand in hand with the CIA and other minions of the Hydra to undermine democracy in America. These later-day Benedict Arnolds were rewarded for their roles in the October surprise and Watergate with national radio shows.

The more deluded among the Greatest Generation listened to their confused rantings with rapt attention. They lionized the traitor North and nod their heads when Liddy told them to “shoot for the head” when gummint agents come to take their guns that they use them to rape their daughters under the guise of “religious freedom.” Individual freedom uber alles, they silently thought. The powerful just naturally have the right to treat the powerless as possessions, don’t they? They have earned it by servicing the nation and its Puppetmasters, after all.

The silent majority stayed silent while the counter-Revolutionaries proceeded to undermine the intent of the Founding Fathers and those who died to establish our inalienable right to self-determination. The traitorous psychopaths who were the principle owners of these international corporations set about acquiring and consolidating the mass media and brainwashing the eager youth of the far right into accepting the false doctrine of original intent. The more farsighted among them knew that in the end, the plan was to hand all power to the corporate traitors who established the Heritage Foundation, the Heritage Institution, “Liberty” University and the think tanks and law schools from whose dark halls sprang the likes of John Yoo, Bybee, Scalia, Alito, Roberts and the simple-minded sharecropper’s son, Uncle Thomas.

Others merely joined in the effort for profit, not realizing that they were not buying America but selling it out. This is the inevitable fate of a society that forgets that a democratic government is established only by the just consent of the governed and its purpose is to serve the people, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare in order to secure the blessings of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights were once recognized to be the God-given and therefore inalienable right of men and women. In the cult of greed that arose around the false prophet Reagan, all this was forgotten and then lost.



Meanwhile, back in Iran the power of the people prevailed. The CIA puppet Shah Rezi Pahlavi fell to forces led by the Muslim Fundamentalists who the CIA had deliberately brainwashed into thinking that democracy was evil. Here in Portland, rich and poor Iranians alike cheered. Thank Allah almighty, they were free at last. Little did they know that they had let loose a force that would lead the nation to the brink of self-destruction. In an act of sheer madness, the Ayatollah’s men kidnapped 50 Americans under diplomatic protection. This was how these deluded pseudo-Muslim Fundamentalists slapped the face of the Great Satan whose face they clearly saw, while most Americans did not.

The result was that to save face after this colossal blunder, the Ayatollah made a deal with the devil that sealed their fate. They helped North, Poindexter and other traitors subvert the American government. Unsubtly manipulating the price of oil, OPEC colluded to bring about the recession that put Reagan into power in the stead of James Earl Carter, the peace monger. He was and is a devout Christian who understands the need to eliminate America’s dependence on foreign oil through conservation. Arms were traded for hostages, money was exchanged and the wheels of injustice being properly oiled, the deed was done. The corporate media aided and abetted this coup by ridiculing Carter’s conservation efforts and promoting Reagan’s false promises of making the United States the “shining city on the hill.”

Congress failed to fulfill its responsibility to oversee an out of control CIA after North admitted his treason. Poindexter’s implausible denial of a central CIA role in the coup was accepted by the politicians in charge who feared that the people would be more upset by undergoing the ordeal of another impeachment trial so soon after Watergate than by the subversion of their government by the CIA on behalf of international corporations. Unfortunately they were right, or so proclaimed the corporate media. Even more incredibly, the American people failed to take to the streets to Take Back America after the hunting of President Clinton produced a monkey trial that even they refused to buy into. It is astounding that even after demonstrating his willingness to compromise with the coup regime the persecution did not stop.

Clinton’s gift to the shadow government after the coup was signing on to the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Apparently, the man from Hope had lost hope that Americans would rise up and take re-establish democracy. Having thrown in his lot with the counter-Revolutionaries, he discovered that the corporate elite did not take kindly to having the Office of the President occupied by someone who had struggled up on his own and who wanted to represent the People. He was not fully appreciative of their important role in ruling the nation by virtue of birthright. It was out of a sense of duty as much as self-interest that the moneyed elite thought it necessary to destroy the Presidency of this aspiring leader of the ostensibly free world.

Perhaps Clinton’s mistake was that in his naiveté, he challenged the privilege of the medical-industrial complex without fully appreciating the extent to which the traitors now in control of the government also controlled the corporate media. Having allowed him to win the election, they set about tightening their control of the media in preparation for their final assault on democracy.

Now the stage is set for what Christians call Armageddon. According to the Mayans and Nostradamus, this outcome was so obvious that it was foreseeable thousands of years ago. It would appear that the End of the World as we Know it was destined to come about from the beginning of time, in a manner of speaking. However, others believe that the prophecy of Armageddon was not a promise but a warning, one that Mohammed clearly described in the fourth to the last Sura. Humankind was created with free will and we may collectively choose to determine that the End of the World as we Know it will be a wonderful thing. If we can shift the collective human consciousness from survival of the fittest to survival and spiritual growth of all, it will be as if Heaven and Earth will have become one.

Those who live for wealth and power are headed for a fiery death. Whether it is the one that they expect to happen here on Earth or whether it will be in another dimension of existence, their end is near. The Soldiers For Peace throughout the world outnumber them one million to one and we are not going to allow them to impose their design of worldwide slavery while we are alive to stop them. We operate in cyberspace, where the Matrix is seen for the illusion that it is. We cannot be detected by those who lack the vision to see the world as we do. The world as it is teetering on the balance between stability and self-destruction. We do not choose for those who we love to die for the cause of allowing the apparently powerful to destroy humanity.

The easy way to avoid the war between Iraq and Israel that both governments seem to be itching for is to establish an international consortium consisting of the United States, Israel, Russia, Germany and France. This group would under inspection build and launch a geosynchronous communications satellite above Tehran. The hardliners in the Iranian government can scream bloody murder, but if they shoot it down they will have to evacuate Tehran first or murder even more innocents than they are already doing. This would merely hasten the fall of the government of Iran and the Ayatollah, hereafter referred to as Tehranysaurus Rex, the King of Tyrants in our beleoved Persia. The will of today's Iranian students will not be defied if the US and Israel truly want peace.

ATT may cry foul at the thought of providing anyone with free Internet services, especially since the FCC recently approved the illegal merger of this behemouth with Comcast. The oil inndustry may whimper that if a free Iran opts out of OPEC, their splendid little arrangement will fall apart when Chavez joins in the effort to undermine their control of world oil prices. How, they will ask, can we justify never-ending war if neither oil nor terrorism can be used as an excuse? Oh, well. No one ever promised them that they could rule the earth for a thousand years after Armageddon. Jesus is not coming down on a white horse with a flaming sword to slay the bad guys and save the faithful who only wait and do not save themselves. The last Jihad will be the first, a peaceful one in which the death of the ego is complete and the Eternal One becomes a stable entity of peace and harmony throughout the Universe.




In the words of REM (which also is a dream state):


That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane.
Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn.
World serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs.

Feed it up a knock, speed, grunt no, strength no.
Ladder structure clatter with fear of height, down height.
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for hire and a combat site.

Left her, wasn't coming in a hurry with the furiesbreathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tetheredcrop.
Look at that low plane! Fine then.

Uh oh, overflow, population,common group, but it'll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed.
Tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right - right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, brightlight, feeling pretty psyched.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign tower.
Slash and burn,return, listen to yourself churn.
Lock him in uniform and book burning, blood letting.

Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a candle, light a motive. Step down, step down.

Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh,this means no fear - cavalier.
Renegade and steer clear! A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies.
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.



It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide.
Mount St. Edelite.Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Breshnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs.
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You symbiotic, patriotic,slam, but neck, right? Right.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine...fine...



Rick Staggenborg, MD

Portland, Oregon

Thursday, February 11, 2010

An Actual Tea Party

I propose a National Surrender to Corporate Overlords Act. In outline, the NSCOA would add fifty seats to the US Senate by sealed physical bid. These corporate persons may then use their free speechThe money would be used for clean elections with the rest of Congress and the remainder shared among the several states for the same purpose.

It would codify the current situation and put lobbyists where they already are, doing what they already do: write laws. It would put a permanent majority of living, breathing human beings in charge of those laws and might actually bring technocrats to the Senate instead of self-dealers. Half the lobbyists in Washington would become Senate staffers and the very word "lobbyist" would lose its negative connotation overnight.

This, and the War Tax, could be the primary causes of a new for-profit corporation. I say this because I crashed the Tea Party Convention and got an unauthorized look at how you can get away with monetizing revolution:


You can read about what happened when the media liaison for Gaylord Entertainment found out about us here.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

I Want A War Tax

It used to mean something when the United States declared war. Take taxes, for instance: Teh Global War On Terrorizzms™ is the first time in recorded history that a nation went to war while cutting taxes.

...Actually, come to think of it there wasn't technically a "war." There wasn't a Declaration of War, after all, but a "resolution" allowing "operations." We started calling wars "operations" a long time ago because "police action" was unacceptable, and so was war. See, we had this big, long Cold War that conditioned us to pretend conflict wasn't warfare, and forgot to fix that after Operations Desert Storm/Shield.

We really ought to end that.

I'd like to see a day when statutory limits keep the number of deployed Americans low. Granted that we will always need brave men and women to guard us -- and sometimes rescue us. There are a thousand thousand thousand reasons why it is good to have soldiers, sailors, pilots, and specialists. No blog could hold all the reasons.

And yet it would be nice to have a limit, and the way to do that is create a disincentive for warfare.

We need a war tax.

How do you strike the balance? I think this is fair: set a mandatory limit on how many Americans can be deployed or employed abroad in support of military operations without a progressive surtax on the top 2% of income earners. I use "progressive" in the non-political sense here, as what I'm talking about would hit billionaires harder than millionaires.

Why? Because money talks, is why, and the sooner Lloyd Blankfein has a reason to use his company's new citizenship powers to encourage bipartisan support for an end to foreign adventures, the better.

And it's a point of pride. The president says he wants to get the hell out of Afghanistan starting in 2011, which means we have a limited time to do better than we've done. And as I said, it used to mean something when the United States went to war.


Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Cal Thomas Recognizes Overreach

Conservative Cal Thomas says of the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v Federal Election Commission: "What makes the ruling and the march ironic is that the 1973 court...downgraded a human fetus to the level of nonperson, while the modern court has invested "personhood" in corporations. Does anyone else see a contradiction or at least a moral inconsistency in these two rulings?"

Thomas is a rare conservative to admit a problem; most say it's the greatest blow for freedom since Plessy v Ferguson. Thomas is also correct to suggest the decision is judicial overreach every bit as awful as he holds Roe v Wade to be.

The very name Citizens United is Orwellian doublespeak. The ruling culminates a decades-long campaign by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, corporate trade associations, and assorted right-wing think tanks. It is "grounded" in the 14th Amendment, which was specifically intended to establish the rights of former slaves.

And what of these corporate "persons?" For instance, when a person sells $40 billion of toxic waste that blows up the global economy, bets on who dies first, declares an emergency to accept government help, and amasses the world's largest fortune in the process, we generally hound them to the ends of the Earth and relieve them of their accounts. Yet this comic book supervillain has a name: Goldman-Sachs. The Supreme Court has announced this psychopathic "person" has the same rights accorded to me by the Constitution. Actually, it has more rights than we do: corporations quite literally get away with murder. Blackwater, too is now a "person."

This happy state of affairs comes courtesy of a movement Thomas has abetted his entire adult life. They said, 'be afraid of Big Brother!' while endowing little brothers with unelected and unaccountable power. To this end Thomas has said much of a "right to life;" but his movement has designed a world in which that right ends at birth, leaving us all on our own against the little brothers.

I find Cal Thomas to be a contradiction, or at least a moral inconsistency.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Somebody Chain This beast


It will be an interesting morning. Pardon me while I engage in a Santelli rant, but the Supreme Court has just gone too far.

"Citizens United v Federal Election Commission" is naked doublespeak of the first order, and a judicial overreach of epic proportions. Last time I checked, a "citizen" of the United States was defined as a single biological human being. Not a corporation or a union or a church or a community organization, but a person that has exactly one life and identity.

The decision is the end result of a long campaign by radical reconstructionists of the right. It rests on the ridiculous 19th Century legal fiction that corporations are persons. This abomination of legalese is "grounded" in the 14th Amendment, which clearly states:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Emphasis mine)

Get that? Corporations aren't born; they are legal inventions with state-sanctioned paperwork for DNA. How do these non-biological entities, existing through an obeisant contrivance of government, merit equal protection of the constitution?

More importantly, why don't actual people enjoy the kind of legal protections America provides to corporations?

For the better part of five generations, the Beltway consensus was that corporate persons should be free to invest in government, to enlarge themselves at taxpayer expense, and to influence the very language of legislation. The results are a health care system going broke and a banking system that lost trillions of dollars in value and produced this recession we're all enjoying.

The left needs to answer all this teabagging nonsense: I suggest we start a Fourteenther movement right away. This egregious, Orwellian decision comes at exactly the right time. Progressives, take note: a keystone issue is suddenly hot, so it's time to raise a ruckus.

And raise it we must. Freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press, and practically all of mass media is corporate-owned. The supremes having long upheld the supremacy of editorial prerogatives, you can count on Glenn Beck to gloss over this "person" business; Rupert Murdoch is just about the last person on Earth to invite questions about corporate personhood, and Republicans are falling all over themselves to tell a compliant mass media why Citizens is the most important blow for freedom since Plessy v Ferguson.

Which is true as long as you, y'know, think Goldman-Sachs is a person.

Which demands another question: what happens to actual breathing/bleeding human beings who sell $40 billion of something they know to be toxic? What penalties would we extract from any person who then made bets about how long it would take for that toxic waste to kill other "citizens" of its kind?

Never mind the millions of actual, living, breathing human beings unemployed, their children born in debt to pay for the latest round of CEO bonuses. It sure has been a good year for Goldman-Sachs! But I digress.

The answer, of course, is that nowhere would be safe. That "person" would be pursued to the ends of the Earth. They would lose their freedom, their fortune, and quite possibly their life. They would be universally reviled and their trial would be discussed daily across the length and breadth of cable media. No one would want to own such a person or give them refuge. It would show up in late-night television sketches:



Now the Supreme Court, in the greatest case of judicial overreach since Roe vee Wade™, has determined that Goldman-Sachs is a citizen of good standing who may broadcast its apologias between psychic pets and laundry detergent advertisements. It may influence the political discourse freely and without reserve wearing an infinite number of guises on any number of channels.

There are currently millions of Americans, mostly men, unable to vote because of felony restrictions. Goldman-Sachs is a psychopath with a media megaphone at its disposal, courtesy of the very corporate media that will dominate the discussion of the president's tirade today. I say that Obama has a golden opportunity here to grab the political center with a key progressive issue by bringing it to the center.

Corporate personhood exists for the purpose of divorcing men like Lloyd Blankfein from the consequences of their actions. Well, I say enough: the man's metaphorical head must roll and the crime for which he bears executive responsibility must be punished. I don't even care if Goldman-Sachs experiences a corporate makeover in the process, but America cannot afford to reward this kind of behavior with taxpayer dollars.

If politicos want to obstruct reform in the name of fictitious persons set free by an amendment clearly intended solely for recently freed members of homo sapiens, there isn't much we can do. But who will have the guts to talk about corporate personhood this morning in the wake of Obama's speech? And how quickly will the issue meet an apologia for the role of corporations in American life today?

Corporate personhood has to end. They aren't people, and if they were people we would lock them up more often than any ethnic or national group. Goldperson-Sachsium is a species only known to legal science. It is definitely not a human, but a kind of useful animal.

Some animals are no use to the American people and should be treated like any vicious predator would be: captured, chained, and disposed: be rehabilitated and released, or die.