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A couple of weeks after the far-right activist Supreme Court falsely ruled 5-4 that corporations have many of the same rights as living breathing citizens of this country, I finally found an article by Thom Hartmann that I remembered reading over seven years ago.  I found the article via an article on the Project Censored website. 

It was back in 1886 that a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) ostensibly led to corporate personhood and free speech rights, thereby guaranteeing protections under the 1st and 14th amendments.  However, according to Thom Hartmann, the relatively mundane court case never actually granted these personhood rights to corporations. (cut to Hartmann article)

[Excerpt from a letter penned by Abraham Lincoln] “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.  I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.”

Lincoln’s suspicions were prescient.  In the 1886 Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state tax assessor, not the county assessor, had the right to determine the taxable value of fenceposts along the railroad’s right-of-way.

However, in writing up the case’s headnote – a commentary that has no precedential status – the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, opened the headnote with the sentence: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Oddly, the court had ruled no such thing.  As a handwritten note from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis that now is held in the National Archives said:  ”we avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.”  And nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.

Nonetheless, corporate attorneys picked up the language of Davis’s headnote and began to quote it like a mantra.  Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate on the issue), was quoting Davis’s headnote in subsequent cases.  While Davis’s Santa Clara headnote didn’t have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions its new doctrine of corporate personhood became the law.

… and from a few paragraphs earlier in the Hartmann article:

Corporations are non-living, non-breathing, legal fictions. They feel no pain. They don’t need clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, or healthy food to consume. They can live forever. They can’t be put in prison. They can change their identity or appearance in a day, change their citizenship in an hour, rip off parts of themselves and create entirely new entities. Some have compared corporations with robots, in that they are human creations that can outlive individual humans, performing their assigned tasks forever.

Isaac Asimov, when considering a world where robots had become as functional, intelligent, and more powerful than their human creators, posited three fundamental laws that would determine the behavior of such potentially dangerous human-made creations. His Three Laws of Robotics stipulated that non-living human creations must obey humans yet never behave in a way that would harm humans.

And from there I offer you two frames from today’s edition of This Modern World:

Click on the frames or here to read the whole comic.  Go on now…

We at harikari.com have been ranting about our country’s illegal policies for detention and torture since the blog was launched in 2005.  Continuing investigations have uncovered evidence supporting claims that many of the several hundreds of prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay and who knows where else have been tortured, beaten, and even killed by agents of the U.S. Government.  Subsequent releases of hundreds of detainees that were held without the right to habeus corpus proved that the overwhelming majority of prisoners were not in fact “the worst of the worst.” 

This week’s edition of This Modern World puts it all in perspective. 

Be sure to click on the image for a link to the whole comic.

America has sold its soul to the devil, and won’t even bother to stop and take a look at what it has become.

Monsters indeed…

They aren’t like Republicans.  They would benefit from being more like them in some ways.  This Modern World explains:

And so did Jon Stewart about four minutes into this segment form Monday’s show:

“Mr. President, I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi ten steps ahead of everything or if this this whole health-care thing is kicking your ass just a little bit.  Why is this so hard?  Why can’t you guys just stay on message?  Remember the Bush team?  Little bit of discipline.  Little bit of repetition.  They sold us a war nobody wanted and nobody needed.”

For a quick summary of all the crazy talk coming from the stars of the Lunatic Fringe and their equally impassioned but uninformed devoted followers, go to Salon.com and read this week’s edition of This Modern World.

These are the guys that Ben Stein hangs out with at the end of the Health Care Status Quo path.

Tom Tomorrow always gets it right, so go read the whole strip.

From this week’s edition of This Modern World.

Read the whole strip for Tom Tomorrow’s analysis of the right-wing response to Palin’s illogical, meandering speech.

You can find a transcript of Palin’s speech here.  My favorite parts were:

If I’ve learned one thing it’s that life is about choices and one chooses how to react to circumstances.  You can choose to engage in things that tear down or that build up and I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity.  I choose not to tear down and waste precious time but to build up this state and our great country and her industrious and generous and patriotic and free people.

Life is too short to compromise time and resources and though it may be tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up.  But that’s a worthless, easy path out.  That’s a quitter’s way out.  And I think a problem in our country today is apathy.  It would be apathetic to just kind of hunker down and go with the flow.  We’re fishermen and we know that only dead fish go with the flow.

…

So that Alaska will progress, I will not seek re-election as governor.  And so as I thought about this announcement, that I wouldn’t run for re-election and what that means for Alaska, I thought about, well, how much fun some governors have as lame ducks.  They maybe travel around their state, travel to other states, maybe take their overseas international trade missions. So many politicians do that. And then I thought, that’s what wrong.  Many just accept that lame duck status and they hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it, and I’m not going to put Alaskans through that.

I promised efficiencies and effectiveness.  That’s not how I’m wired.  I’m not wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.  I promised that four years ago and I meant it.  That’s not what is best for Alaska at this time.  I’m determined to take the right path for Alaska, even though it is unconventional and it’s not so comfortable.

Back in March Eddie Vedder put a post on the Pearl Jam website about the plight of weekly comic artists during the current downturn of print media.  The post was more specifically about Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World. 

Last night Pearl jam appeared on The Tonight Show during Conan O’Brien’s first night as the new host.  When he introduced the band, he held up some artwork for the new album, and  guess who the album artist is – Tom Tomorrow.

Read all about it.

Oh and this week’s edition of This Modern World is very good.  Read it here.

As long as we’re on the subject of comics, it’s worth getting around to noting that both Seattle weekly newspapers, The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger, have dropped their featured weekly comics.  The Seattle Weekly ran This Modern World, and The Stranger ran Troubletown.

So now when you go to your local coffee shop or cafe and pick up the alt-weeklies expecting to at least get a chuckle from two of your favorite comics, you will be disappointed.  Well, if you don’t have your laptop with you anyway.  You can still read them on the internet.  (That’s the place where in the not-too-distant-future you will be reading all of your print media, so charge up that laptop before going to the cafe.)

Tom Tomorrow and Lloyd Dangle have written many posts about how they’ve been shafted by papers all over the country that used to run their comics.  The papers claim they stopped running the comics as part of their cost-cutting efforts designed to help keep them in business.  One link I followed led to me to this story that pointed out it typically costs most papers about ” $20 to $35 a week” to run the comics or about $3,500 a year.   Wow… what a savings. 

I don’t think cutting content is going to improve their circulation and, in turn, increase their ad revenue, so I think the weeklies are making a big mistake.  We’ll have to wait and see.

For more about the missing comics I recommend this post by Tom Tomorrow and this one by Lloyd Dangle.

Funny how the sick work of Sean Delonas will continue to be available in Rupert Murdoch’s rag, and two really good comics that are actually funny won’t be available in my local papers.

Yesterday I read an excellent opinion piece by Ron Chernow in The New York Times about the 1933 Senate Banking and Currency Committee hearings.  The column got me thinking not only about the lack of accountability on Wall Street, but also about the lack of accountability in the Executive Branch of our government. 

The Chief Counsel to the 1933 Senate Banking and Currency Committee hearings was a man named Ferdinand Pecora.  Throughout the extensive hearing process, he exposed the 1920’s Titans of Wall Street as crooks and liars and set the stage for many banking and securities reforms that were put in place by the Roosevelt Administration to protect our investments. 
 
As I read through the litany of offenses outlined in the article, it seemed to me that everything accomplished by Pecora and the Roosevelt Administration has been unraveled over the past twenty to thirty years, and the very same crooked practices of the twenties were repeated in our current decade. 

Hearings like the ones Pecora held over seventy years ago would most likely expose Wall Street’s current Titans as reincarnations of their greedy, lying forbearers. 
 
Everybody, and I mean Republicans and Democrats and everyone in-between, gets riled up about the subprime lending debacle that led to the 2008 stock market crash.  When we see the results of the rampant corruption and fraud on our personal investment statements, we get angry – and most of us get monthly or quarterly statements that continue to fuel our rage.
 
That said, I think our economy is basically sound and that with proper foresight and guidance from the Obama administration, we will see a strong recovery, but it may take a few years, so it’s going to be a while before we start feeling good about our investments.
 
In his NYT column, Chernow asks “where is our Pecora for today?”  Is anyone going to hold the swindlers accountable?  Most people would welcome a man like Pecora to investigate the players in today’s financial system.  Sure, they’d like to identify the culprits and hold them accountable for their theft, but there are plenty more Bush-Era corruptions that are worthy of investigation.

What about all the illegal and despicable practices that have been carried out by our intelligence agencies and covered up by our Justice Department?  We not only need a “Pecora Commission” to investigate Wall Street, we need a “Pecora Commission” to investigate the operations and policies of our Intelligence, Security, and Justice departments. 
 
Has anyone in the Bush Administration ever had to answer to anyone under oath?  I think not.  If they did and they had to answer to someone with Pecora’s intellect and tenacity, they would be exposed as devious crooks with no regard for the laws they swore to uphold, and everyone would be as outraged as I am. 

I guess I’ll have to learn to chill out though, because during the coming era of post-partisanship, such hearings are just not going to happen.  One frame from the latest This Modern World sums it up pretty well:

Click on the picture to read Sparky’s reply to this newly non-partisan Republican…

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson:

“If we design it so it’s punitive and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the way we need it to work,” Paulson, whose net worth is said to be north of $600 million, told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House banking committee

“Here is this absolutely essential program that’s needed to keep the economy going, but there are CEOs who won’t participate in it if a few of their many millions are going to get nicked? That’s really what he’s saying, that some CEOs put their ability to get unrestricted excessive compensation, including rewards for failure, over and above trying to cooperate and help the economy. If that’s true, we’re in worse shape than we think.”

Everything else you need to know you can find in six panels of this week’s This Modern World:

That’s just one panel.  Click on the picture to read the rest…