Corporations

Keith Murphy, President of Conceptz Communications wrote today:

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This the second in a series of action alerts about the fundamental willful and pernicious errors underlying the decision by 5 agenda driven right wing judges on the Supreme Court to gut all restraints on corporate meddling in our elections. Each of these successive alerts will analyze additional derelict aspects of this shameful and truly dangerous decision, to further demonstrate why we the people must speak out and act to reverse it.

In the first alert we made the triable case (which no attorney has written us to dispute) that failing to even bother to distinguish between domestic and foreign owned corporations, and knowingly leaving America vulnerable to the latter BY their ruling, was de facto an act of treason by The Supreme Court 5.

This alert will focus on their abandonment of every prudent rule of judicial review, in favor of haste and the most extreme form of judicial activism, again with specific page number references to the opinion itself.

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and
on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The
economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended
September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an
article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended
unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the
labor movement by giving up the so-called “card-check” feature of the
embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the “reform”
legislation that has been billed as labor’s “number one issue” much
less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by
party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back
EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to
join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement
with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in
union-organizing drives.

By Dave Lindorff

Just imagine for a moment that you are a retired contractor,
struggling to get by on your pathetically shriveled 401(k). when your
ne-er-do-well child suddenly comes to you saying he’s got this idea to
start buying derelict homes and rehabbing them for resale. He asks you
to stake him with a $100,000 loan (about half of what you’ve got left
in your retirement fund), promising to repay you when he sells his
first couple of houses. You know the kid’s flat busted and has been
laid off from his job as a dishwasher, so you want to help, but you’ve
also seen his carpentry skills: The doghouse he build in high school
fell apart on a windy day, and his own house has a leaking roof, needs
repainting, and all the plumbing leaks. You’ve also seen his business
skills: He plays the Lotto excessively, hasn’t saved a penny, and buys
most of his supplies at the local 7-Eleven.

By Dave Lindorff

What’s wrong with this picture: Four groups invest in a company.
One group puts in a 55% investment, a second puts in a 20-35%
investment, a third puts in an 8% investment and a fourth goes in for
2%. The group putting in the 20-35% stake gets three seats on the
company’s nine-member board of directors, which will be appointing the
new company’s management team. The group investing 8% gets four board
members, and the group investing 2% gets 1 seat. Finally, the group
that will hold the majority stake in the company, 55% of the shares,
gets…the one remaining seat on the board.

Why would anyone buy a majority stake in the company and accept
only a 1/9 representation on the board, and thus virtually no say in
the selection of management or in management decisions?

By Dave Lindorff

Whatever the truth is about where this economy is heading, one
thing is clear: employers are taking every opportunity to slash
employment and, if they are unionized, to hammer unions for pay cuts,
even when there is no justification for these actions.

Take Safeway Inc., a large national supermarket chain. The company,
which had $44 billion in sales in 2007, and which, based upon third
quarter figures for 2008 was well on the way to show record sales for
2008, appears to be using the economic downturn as a justification for
laying off employees and making remaining employees work harder.

By Dave Lindorff

Now here’s a word you’re not hearing in America these days: anti-trust.

The country is being dragged down by monstrous businesses, all of
which, we’re told, are just “too big to fail.” As a consequence of
this, the nation’s taxpayers, and their progeny born and yet unborn,
are having trillions of dollars sucked away to prop up these giant
rotting corporate corpses.

Zombie banks, zombie automakers, zombie insurance companies, all bigger than nation states, and all on life-support.

There is a simple answer to this problem. Bust them up.