How the Billionaires Corporate News Media Have Been Used to Brainwash Us

How much have the corporate news media brainwashed us? The answer is plenty of times and ways.

We have, for example, been told by the corporate news media over the course of many decades that the United States Constitution protects free speech, except in certain cases, such as yelling “fire!” in crowded movie theaters. This is not entirely true, and the results of the brainwashing campaign have opened the door for the United States Supreme Court to give the billionaires vastly more constitutional rights via their corporations than the rest of us, and deliberately so. These newly created legal rights have enabled the billionaires to turn the United States government from a democracy for all into a government of the highest bidders. A small clique controls everything within government nowadays.

These new billionaire constitutional rights came in stages over almost 200 years, but most began when the billionaires began to organize themselves into a single political force back in the 1970s in response to a series of political victories by the 99 percent, such as the fight for clean water and clean air, the war against pesticide spraying on people, the protests to end the profitable Vietnam War, the civil rights protests, etc…. These political battles showed democracy was alive and well. So the billionaires politically organized.

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A critical stage in this organized campaign occurred in November 1977. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, the guy who wrote the manifesto for the corporate takeover of our government and many institutions called the Lewis Powell Memo, led the charge in his guerilla war against democracy and the United States Constitution.

The First National Bank of Boston vs Bellotti case came before the United States Supreme Court. The attorneys for the management of the First National Bank of Boston argued that corporations possessed First Amendment free-speech rights with regard to political speech, that money was the same as speech, and that therefore the laws that the good citizens of Massachusetts had passed to prevent the rich and their corporations from throwing money around in political or advocacy campaigns should be thrown out.

Powell delivered the majority opinion that decided the rich could use their corporations and the money they generated from employee effort as free political speech.[i] It is strange that money spent by the people who managed corporations on political campaigns was free speech, but money spent by non-corporate persons on prostitutes and illegal drugs was not free speech since purchasing such illegal things could clearly be making a political statement that such things should be legal. Nonetheless, in making his decision, Powell was making his own political statement, outlined in his memo, knowingly turning the tide against democracy by giving immense power to the super-wealthy via their corporations, while simultaneously constricting the constitutional rights of all non-rich citizens.

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Rich individuals suddenly could use their supreme court created free speech rights via their corporations in ways the majority of voters disapproved of, and in which the vast majority of American citizens could not participate because they simply lacked the cash to spend as freely as the rich and their corporations. In the Bellotti decision, the Supreme Court gave the rich a massive megaphone with which to drown out the voices of everybody else, and deliberately so. This was a five to four decision, a close vote that helped to turn the United States from a democracy into a plutocracy, which is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Now here is where we have been brainwashed by the corporate news media.

The 1^st Amendment reads;

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When looking at this amendment, the most striking thing is that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech….”

Congress did not make the law that First National Bank filed suit against; the people of Massachusetts voted for the law, a power the Constitution gives them. The 10^th Amendment of the Constitution reads,

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Clearly, congress cannot make laws “abridging the freedom of speech…,” but the states can under the 10^th amendment via a vote of the people or its legislature. State governments and the people can restrict corporations from funding political campaigns. The court ruled against 100 years of campaign finance law when the court ruled in favor of the rich and their corporations. The self-proclaimed original intent conservative corporate members of the court effectively ruled in their decision that the 10th amendment did not really count, and that in this case the founding fathers had made a mistake, but the billionaires news media did not mention this latter part at all.

Another part of the corporate news media brainwashing is the constant reference to corporations as plaintiffs in this and other cases. The headlines usually go something like, “Amazon sues so and so, or so and so sues Amazon. Business corporations cannot speak without spokespeople since they are inanimate. Amazon, for example, cannot operate without employees, either in management, the board of directors, or in warehouses and delivery vehicles. You can rest assured the people in Amazon’s warehouses and delivery vehicles are not calling the shots at Amazon about what they want their political representatives to do. The people at the top of the financial food chain are calling the shots, and it is they who are benefiting from Supreme Court rulings. So we have been brainwashed to think of corporations as single entities rather than conduits, or weapons, used to create greater constitutional rights for the owners of corporations.  

In short, with the Bellotti decision, the Supreme Court decided the tenth amendment of the United States was null and void and the founding fathers had made a horrible mistake, and the court legislated that a tiny minority of U.S. citizens should be given greater free speech rights via their corporations than the vast majority of U.S. citizens. This decision paved the way for the rich to dominate political discussion in the United States with their vast resources of money, a not so subtle violation of the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment since it made free speech vastly more abundant for rich people and CEOs via their corporations than for everybody else, and deliberately so.

Meanwhile, the corporate news media focused our attention on whether or not business corporations were persons with free speech rights protected by the constitution. Not many, if any, mentioned the Supreme Court’s decision violated the tenth amendment, and likely the fourteenth amendment. And this is just one way the billionaires have used their corporate news media to brainwash us.

The Bellotti decison helped to create the income and wealth inequality we have experienced over the last forty+ years in the United States and throughout the world, and the decision was also a primary factor in creating a great deal more global warming, but these latter realities are for another time.

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[i] Unequal 26

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Exclusive: U.S. taxpayers’ virus relief went to firms that avoided U.S. taxes

Many corporations pay no taxes, and actually receive tax rebates from the government, and much of this tax avoidance is passed on to rich investors in the form of capital gains, dividends and bond interest. Corporate tax avoidance is only one way the rich get richer at the expense of the rest of us. There are a ton of others ways this occurs. Amazon paid no federal income tax in 2018 and received a $129 million tax refund on taxes it did not pay. That $129 million and the unpaid tax money goes straight into the pockets of billionaire shareholders. Click here for other ways the government is making the rich wealthier at your expense.

Reuters reported last week that the US government is “giving millions of dollars in American taxpayer money via the CARES Act to a number of corporations that have avoided paying U.S. tax.

“In all, Reuters’ analysis of public data found around 110 publicly traded companies have each received $4 million or more in emergency aid from the program.

Of those subject to taxes,” which means profitable, “12 of the companies recently used offshore havens to cut their tax bills, the analysis found. All together, these 12 received more than $104 million in loans from U.S. taxpayers. Seven of them paid no U.S. tax at all for the past year.

The program, which provides low-interest loans that are forgivable if companies use most of the money to pay employees, has been widely criticised for problems ranging from early bottlenecks that prevented small businesses from receiving money, to confusion that led millions of dollars to be handed out to relatively affluent firms.

The Treasury Department declined to comment.

Of the almost 110 recipients of $4 million or more, Reuters found 46 paid no U.S. corporate tax for the last year.”

This is just another example of the massive corruption of both major political parties, the Supreme Court, and the Federal Reserve. The billionaires control them all.

 

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42 Years Ago, a corrupt United States Supreme Court Gave Corporations Free Speech Rights

Lewis Powell was a well-to-do, but relatively obscure, attorney in 1971. He was a corporate lawyer who worked with the Tobacco Institute and various tobacco corporations while they marketed and sold their cancer-causing products to unsuspecting customers. Management knew tobacco use caused cancer and denied it for decades.

In 1971, Powell wrote what has become known as the Lewis Powell memo, which advocated a corporate “guerrilla war” of misinformation and corporate take over of our schools, courts and other institutions. That war has been successfully waged. A few months after Powell wrote the memo and presented it to the United States Chamber of Commerce, then-President Richard Nixon successfully nominated Powell to the United States Supreme Court. You already know where Powell’s sympathies lay. He was the rich man’s class warrior. So fast forward to 1978.

That year “First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti” came before the Supreme Court. The state of Massachusetts had a law banning corporations from spending money in elections. Some corporations sued the state. Although the United States Constitution only provides people with individual rights and does not mention corporations at all, Powell and his other corrupt corporate sympathizers on the court decided to hell with the United States Constitution and nearly two hundred years of legal precedent and argued business corporations had a legal right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution. Powell just made up this corporate free speech right out of thin air, or more appropriately, it was a lie disguised as make-believe, or perhaps you could call it complete fiction.

Needless to say, Powell and his fellow non-justices were waging class warfare on behalf of their rich friends when they made this decision. The decision was based solely off the Powell Memo and the needs of the rich to control every facet of the lives of the 99 percent so that corporations could maximize the profits, share prices and dividends of the well-to-do.

Corporations are simply ideas, given a legal structure to operate by state law, with limited purposes. They are not people. But they do provide the rich with considerably more legal rights than the founding fathers could ever have imagined or wanted since they are vehicles for organizing rich people’s money into a single powerful entity and using that money to rig the markets for goods, services, finances, politics, and court justices. This was not lost on Lewis Powell and his fellow corporate Supreme Court non-justices. Their decision was based totally on waging war against the 99 percent and on behalf of the wealthy. You only need to read the Lewis Powell memo to understand the truth of this.

This was one of a series of Supreme Court decisions which have replaced the United States democracy with an oligarchy, and with both major political parties controlled by big money. Lewis Powell completely did what he set out to do, which was to subvert democracy and the U.S. Constitution to the will of the rich. The current representatives of the billionaires on the court (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch) continue their mission of subverting and perverting the US Constitution on behalf of the billionaires and the class war they wage against democracy and the rest of us.

First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti-Reclaim Democracy

The Lewis Powell Memo

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The Editorial the Rich Don’t Want You to Read; Corruption of the United States Supreme Court: What the Rich and Their Corporate So-Called News Media Don’t Want You to Know

The corporate news media does not want you to know a lot of things, and this includes such liberal media outlets as the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as all of the conservative media, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Democratic and Republican Party politicians also do not want you to know certain things.

When Supreme Court Cheif Justice John Roberts went through his Senate confirmation hearings, Democratic senators grilled him on his abortion stance, but never on his insistence that “corporations are people” and “spending corporate money is free speech.” There was never any question asked about the latter two issues, although both are significantly more important to the vast majority of citizens than the abortion issue. The same was true of the confirmation hearings for Justice Neil Gorsuch. The abortion issue was just a distraction, and deliberately so.

The rich, as well as their news media and their politicians of both major political parties, do not want you to know how your legal system and the US Constitution have been undermined in their favor by the so-called justices of the United States Supreme Court. It is all about massive corruption and redistributing income, wealth and political power from the 99 to the 1 percent. They do not want you to know these things.

Below is the editorial the rich, their corporate media, and their politicians don’t want you to see.

A political coup has taken place and much of the US Constitution has been overthrown. Now the corporate wing of the court appears ready to bury more constitutional rights of the 99 percent under a flurry of lies and make-believe.

On February 26, of 2018 the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could profoundly affect the ability of public-sector workers to improve their wages and working conditions. If successful, this case will make the United States a right-to-work-for-less nation, and it is expected that the corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court will unanimously vote yes, despite the fact that the lower courts have consistently rejected arguments in favor of Janus.

The corporate/rich man’s wing of the court has been waging class warfare against the 99 percent for thirty-five years in violation of the US Constitution and legal precedence. So it is considered a foregone conclusion that the majority corporate wing of the court will vote yes in the Janus case.

These corrupt activist members of the United States Supreme Court blithely favor conservative money, wealth and power over all else, and they are about to subvert the United States Constitution once again. Those justices corrupted by powerful vested interests are John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Anthony M. Kennedy. All claim to be “original intent jurists.” In other words, when they rule on legal issues, they claim they follow the original intent of the founding fathers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

All five have shown that their jobs are to rob the 99 percent of as many of their constitutional rights as possible by giving more constitutional rights to the rich, which they have done time and again. This legal corruption makes it easier for the rich to steal from the rest of us, which is why their rulings have coincided and aided the massive redistribution of income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent in the United States over the last four and half decades.

The rich derive most of their political, economic and legal power from their ownership of limited liability corporations. Quite naturally, all five so-called original-intent justices argue that publicly traded corporations are persons with all of the legal rights of human citizens. These justices are not ignorant little boys, but they are corrupt to the bone.

They know publicly traded corporations did not come out of the wombs of women. They know corporations are simply an idea of a form of business structure given legal rules to exist by state legislation. They know the United States Constitution does not even mention the word “corporation.” They know that not a single one of the founding fathers ever mentioned “persons” and “corporations” together in any sentence, paragraph, or chapter of any of their voluminous writings. The idea that corporations are people subverts the original intent of the US Constitution, which gives only human individual’s legal rights. Ideas of business models were never given any constitutional rights by anybody until conservative Supreme Court justices decided it was so.

Since the rich control the mechanisms of publicly traded corporations, the court’s decision in this regard is to hand greater constitutional rights to these legislatively created tools of the rich, giving the 1 percent greater power than the founding fathers wanted or were ever able to imagine. Then the corrupt wing of the court issued another class war decision.

The activists of the Supreme Court declared in its 2010 Citizen’s United ruling that corporations were exercising their constitutionally protected free speech rights when they spent money on political advertisements, but nowhere in the United States Constitution was such power granted or even recognized. Nowhere in any founding father’s writings was such power to be found. Now corporate advertisements are drowning out the free speech of all others, especially during election seasons.

Two corrupt US Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, “participated in political strategy sessions…to advance this case, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” according to Common Cause. These two so-called justices were clearly biased in this case, and they voted accordingly, rather than recuse themselves.

In addition, Citizen’s United eliminated one hundred years of campaign finance laws. United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in favor of Citizen’s United, gave sworn testimony in his confirmation hearings before the US Senate that he would respect legal precedents. He, obviously, lied under oath. Think about it; the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court is a well-known perjurer. His job appears to be to overthrow the US Constitution on behalf of the rich, just like the other corrupt corporate members of the US Supreme Court.

These activist justices have been creating make-believe stuff up in order to give the rich and their business tools called corporations greater constitutional rights while diminishing the constitutional rights of the 99 percent in the process.

The lies, the made-up make-believe that ideas are people and that money is free speech, the numerous perjuries, and working with the rich on cases the justices are about to rule on demonstrate without a doubt that the sole purpose of the corrupted members of the court has been to wage class warfare against the 99 percent on behalf of the rich by subverting the US Constitution. Doing so has allowed for greater political power and additional constitutional rights for the wealthy and the court’s activist class warriors have succeeded against the original intent of our founding fathers.

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The Activist Liars, Perjurers and Subverters of the US Constitution Sitting on the United States Supreme Court Are About to Launch Another of their Attacks Against the Middle Class on Behalf of Their Rich Backers

A political coup has taken place and the US Constitution has been overthrown.

On February 26th, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could profoundly affect the ability of public-sector workers to improve their wages and working conditions. This case will make the United States a right-to-work-for-less nation, and it is expected that the corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court will vote yes, despite the fact that the lower courts have consistently rejected arguments in favor of Janus.

The corporate/rich man’s wing of the court has been waging class warfare against the 99 percent for thirty-five years in violation of the US Constitution and legal precedence. So it is considered a foregone conclusion the corporate wing of the court will vote yes in the Janus case.

The corrupt activist members of the United States Supreme Court who blithely favor conservative money, wealth and power over all else are about to subvert the United States Constitution once again. Those justices corrupted by powerful vested interests are John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Anthony M. Kennedy. All claim to be “original intent jurists.” In other words, when they rule on a legal issue, they claim they follow the original intent of the founding fathers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

All five have shown that their job is to rob the 99 percent of their Constitutional rights and to give more legal rights to the rich, which they have done time and again. This legal corruption makes it easier for the rich to steal from the rest of us.

The rich derive most of their political, economic and legal power from their ownership of limited liability corporations. Quite naturally, all five so-called original intent justices argue that publicly traded corporations are persons with all of the legal rights of human citizens. These justices are not ignorant little boys.

They know publicly traded corporations did not come out of a woman’s womb. They know corporations are simply an idea of a form of business structure given life by state legislation. They know the United States Constitution does not even mention the word corporation. They know that not a single one of the founding fathers ever mention “persons” and “corporations” together in any sentence, paragraph, or chapter of any of their voluminous writings. The idea that corporations are people subverts the original intent of the US Constitution, which gives only individual’s legal rights. Ideas of business models were never given any constitutional rights by anybody until corrupt supreme court justices decided it was so.

Since the rich control the mechanisms of corporations, the court’s decision in this regard is to hand greater constitutional rights to a legislatively created tool of the rich, giving the 1 percent greater power than the founding fathers wanted or been able to imagine. Then the corrupt wing of the court issued another class war decision.

The activist Supreme Court declared in its 2010 Citizen’s United ruling that corporations spending money on political advertisements is free speech, but nowhere in the United States Constitution is such power granted or even recognized. And nowhere in any founding fathers writings is such a power to be found. Now corporate advertisements are drowning out the free speech of all others, especially during election season.

In addition, this ruling eliminated one hundred years of campaign financing laws. Two corrupt US Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, “participated in political strategy sessions” to advance this case, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” according to Common Cause.

U.S. Supreme Court Cheif Justice John Roberts gave sworn testimony in his confirmation hearings before the US Senate that he would respect legal precedents. He, obviously, lied under oath. Think about it. A known perjurer in now the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. His job is to overthrow the US Constitution on behalf of his class solidarity, just like the other corrupt corporate members of the US Supreme Court. He has been doing a marvelous job.

These corrupt activist justices have simply been making up shit in order to give the rich and their business tools called corporations greater Constitutional rights while diminishing the Constitutional rights of the 99 percent in the process.

The lies, the made-up make-believe that ideas are people and that money is free speech, the perjuries, and working with the rich on cases the justices are about to rule on demonstrate without a doubt that the sole purpose of the corrupted members of the court has been to wage class warfare on behalf of the rich by subverting the US Constitution. Doing so has allowed for a greater political rule and constitutional rights for the rich, and these activist class warriors have succeeded against the original intent of our founding fathers.

See the following link for more information https://www.politico.com/story/2011/01/scalia-thomas-and-citizens-united-047855

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The Politics of Abortion and Conservative Supreme Court Justices Are the Perfect Example of How the US Constitution is a Living Legal Organism

The activist corporate conservative justices have reinterpreted the US Constitution over the decades giving corporations all the legal rights and none of the responsibilities of real people, and then giving corporations free speech rights, which has then been used to roll back 100 years of campaign finance spending laws.

These conservative justices are not and never have been original intent jurists, as they claim. If anybody tells you the US Constitution is not a legal contract that is open to reinterpretation in a manner inconsistent with the desires of the founding fathers, they are wrong, and all you need to do is point to the modern conservative justices who represent only one economic class in the United States, and it isn’t the 99 percent (currently Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy).

Since Neil Gorsuch made his way to a supreme court seat earlier this year, I’ve been waiting for all to see that the Republicans who control the US House of Representatives, the US Senate, and the United States presidency will not under any circumstances come up with legislation banning abortions. That would give their base a lot of hope such legislation could withstand a challenge in front of the conservatively loaded US Supreme Court.

In addition, the US Republican-dominated US Senate will never vote to end the filibuster on legislation so that the conservatives in the Senate can disappoint their grassroots base again. That won’t happen because doing so would raise the hopes of the Republican faithful that their dreams of saving tens of thousands of the unborn every year would be fulfilled, and this great wedge issue would be legally resolved. Perhaps then many of the faithful would begin to clamor for a more equitable distribution of income, wealth, and political power, and the leadership cannot have that.

Ergo, conservatism, as it is largely practiced in the Republican Party, is only about letting corporations and the rich legally run wild over everybody else while redistributing income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent. But the Republican Party is not the only representative body in the US government who performs this function on behalf of the wealthy.

So too are corporate Democrats, such as Hillary and Bill Clinton, Wall Street Senators Ron Wyden and Joe Biden and many others.

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Gorsuch is not an Original Intent Candidate: Another Reason Why Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee is Not Fit to Be a US Supreme Court Justice

Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next US Supreme Court justice, is completely unfit for the office. There are a myriad of reasons why this is so. The most damning thing is that he thinks corporations are people.

That’s been the slogan repeated by conservatives for over a hundred years, and yet, corporations are purely and only an idea of a business structure that sprang forth from somebody’s mind and not from a woman’s womb. Conservatives, and Gorsuch in particular, haven’t figured out the difference between babies that spring forth from a woman’s womb, and an idea that originated from a human brain.

Anybody who has not figured out the difference is not mentally fit to sit on the bench of the United States Supreme Court. That really means that none of the conservative justices, and perhaps a few of the liberal justices as well, are not mentally fit to serve on the highest court. Yet, there they are, and that’s because the US Supreme Court is a battle ground between persons with legal rights protected under the US Constitution, and the corporations used by the rich and powerful to take those rights away, as much as possible. The rich have used this argument to provide themselves with greater legal rights through their corporations, since those corporations are managed and largely owned by the 1 percent.

Ergo, the idea that publicly traded limited liability corporations are persons protected by the US Constitution is simply a legalistic slight-of-hand maneuver that has succeeded to undermine the original intent of the founding fathers to establish and protect individual rights, and twist the law in favor of the rich and against the 99 percent. That is the sole purpose of using this lie in legal matters.

Gorsuch takes this anti-original intent further than most conservatives. He ruled that a truck driver should have frozen to death in his tractor rather than abandon his load and get to safety. Whenever possible, he has ruled for corporations and against people, as if working persons are disposable raw material whose sole purpose is to generate profits for corporations. Those profits primarily redound to the benefit of the rich.

Gorsuch does not care about original intent when it comes to the US Constitution. He is a judicial champion of the billionaires and their corporations in their war against the 99 percent.

Who among the founding fathers said that corporations were people? Who among them said that an idea of a business structure from somebody’s mind had the same constitutional protections as a person conceived in a woman’s womb? Not a single one of them said or wrote or implied such a thing, so far as I can discover.

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Trump’s Nominee Neil Gorsuch is Not Fit to Sit on the United States Supreme Court

US Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is either too stupid, too politically corrupt, or too ideologically corrupt to be the next member of the United States Supreme Court. This guy actually believes that an idea has the same rights, responsibilities and legal protections as any person in the United States. Gorsuch is no dummy, so he must be financially or ideologically corrupt.

Gorsuch believes business corporations are people. That’s been the slogan repeated by conservatives for over a hundred years, and yet, corporations are purely and only an idea of a business structure that sprang forth from somebody’s mind and not from a woman’s womb. Conservatives faked not figuring out the difference between a mind and a womb a long time ago, and in particular they faked they didn’t understand the legal difference between an “idea” from a human mind and a person from a “woman’s womb.” This concept does not befuddle them. Far from it, but the concept that corporations are persons has been used to twist the law in the favor of the rich and against the 99 percent. That is the sole purpose of using this lie in legal matters.

Government enacted legislation that provided a legal framework for business corporations to exist, and within the legal framework were the words “artificial person.” As any honest judge who looks to the US Constitution for original intent can determine, the word “artificial” does not appear in the great document, and therefore anybody with half a brain can determine that ideas called business corporations have no legal rights via the US Constitution. But this is a game to rig the law in favor of the rich and powerful. Besides, if somebody calls a dog a human being, does that make the dog a human being? Of course not. Gorsuch is no dummy. He knows all this, but his agenda has always been to increase the wealth and prosperity and political power of the rich at the expense of the 99 percent, and so he will maintain this lie of an idea being legally equal and having the same legal protections as real people.

Corporations are the principal conduit through which income and wealth are redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent. For example, Wall Street would not exist in its present parasitic form if corporations did not exist. Conservatives, and I should point out certainly not all of them, pushed the legal idea that corporations are persons simply to twist the laws in their favor. They’ve done a great job.

United States Senator Elizabeth Warren said it best about Wall Street Supreme Court candidate Neil Gorsuch;

“On the bench (Gorsuch), his judicial decisions show a remarkable ability to shape and re-shape legal arguments in ways that benefit large corporations and disadvantage ordinary people seeking justice. In the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case, when he had to choose between the “rights” of corporations and the rights of women, Gorsuch sided with corporations. In consumer protection cases, when he had to choose between the “rights” of corporations and the rights of swindled consumers, Gorsuch sided with corporations. In discrimination cases, when he had to choose between the “rights” of corporations and the rights of employees to be free from harassment and abuse, Gorsuch sided with corporations.

Gorsuch has taken positions that are even more extreme than his extremely conservative colleagues. When it comes to the rules that protect public health and safety, Gorsuch is more radical than Scalia was. Gorsuch believes that courts should not be required to defer to expert agency interpretations of their governing laws. If he had his way, he’d make it even easier for corporations to challenge health and safety rules that prevent them from polluting our air and water, poisoning our food, undermining public safety, or cheating people out of their hard-earned savings.

Big companies and rich right-wing billionaires are spending top dollar to help a judge like Gorsuch get over the finish line. But that’s not how our court system is supposed to work. Our courts are supposed to be neutral arbiters, dispensing justice based on the facts and the law — not the party with the most money or political power.” (Click here for Warren’s complete op-ed on Gorsuch)

If the Democrats gave a rat’s ass at all about the 99 percent, and most don’t because they primarily represent their billionaire benefactors, they would fight tooth and nail and nuclear bomb against Gorsuch, who is nothing more than a corrupt legal assassin of the bottom 99 percent.

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The Secret Document Reveals Exxon Mobile Has Been Preparing for Climate Change for Over Thirty Years

Scientists employed by Exxon Mobile had the data showing climate change was occurring back in the 1970s. They also came to the conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions were the cause of it. Recently, the internal documents were leaked to the public.

This blog is about income redistribution, political power and corruption. Climate change isn’t a thing of interest for this blog, but corporate corruption is. This conspiracy is complete corruption.

According to the internal Exxon memo, Exxon executives decided to follow the path of Big Tobacco, which denied the link between tobacco and a variety of ailments, such as lung cancer, despite their own studies demonstrating these links. The GMO corporations are also following this format of lies when it comes to their products.

So Exxon executives began elevating offshore drilling platforms more than thirty years ago to prepare for rising sea levels while following a sustained public relations campaign to deny the relationship between their products and climate change.

“Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.

The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered…. Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.”

So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.”

Last fall, a Yale study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from the Koch Brothers and Exxon played a key roll in polarizing the climate debate within this nation, even though Exxon’s own science showed the climate change was on the rise due to CO2 emissions.

The company’s sins—of omission and commission—may even turn out to be criminal. New York Attorney General Eric Scneiderman has launched a criminal investigation into this matter. This may account for why Exxon’s current CEO, Ray Tillerson, no longer claims the world is cooling, and that CO2 emissions “are having an impact” on global warming.

The Washington Post reported two months ago that ExxonMobil has a far saner view of global warming than the national Republican party.

Fred Hiatt, the paper’s centrist editorial page editor, drops this bombshell:

With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible.

Exxon Mobile website states the issue clearly;

“The risk of climate change is clear and the risk warrants action. Increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere are having a warming effect. There is a broad scientific and policy consensus that action must be taken to further quantify and assess the risks.”

For more on this, check out the following link.

Ecowatch Reporting

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren: Her New Report Provides the Details of 20 Shocking Corporate Crimes That Go Unpunished

Elizabeth Warren is a rarity nowadays. She is a US senator, unlike most senators, such as Ron Wyden, who is clearly a tool and senator of Wall Street and of perhaps even Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. In a new report prepared for Warren, called Rigged Justice, several not so shocking things are clearly illuminated which prove how corrupt the US government has become, and let’s face it, this government is one of the most corrupt in the world, at least among the so-called Democratic nations.

“The Obama Administration,” the reports says, “has made repeated promises to strengthen enforcement and hold corporate criminals accountable, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced in September that it would place greater emphasis on charging individuals responsible for corporate crimes. Nonetheless, both before and after this DOJ announcement, accountability for corporate crimes is shockingly weak.”

This is because both the Democratic and Republican establishments are completely reliant on money from the CEOs and corporations that commit these crimes. Most of the penalties faced by these CEOs and their corporations were so paltry that the report stated, “The examples (from this report) raise the disturbing possibility that some giant corporations—and their executives—have decided that following the law is merely optional. For these companies, punishment for breaking the law is little more than a cost of doing business.

There is a simple set of rules governing how US laws are applied. If you are rich, and you have used your money to corrupt the political system, the DOJ doesn’t look at you after it has caught you. The report goes on.

“When government regulators and prosecutors fail to pursue big corporations or their executives who violate the law, or when the government lets them off with a slap on the wrist, corporate criminals have free rein to operate outside the law. They can game the system, cheat families, rip off taxpayers, and even take actions that result in the death of innocent victims—all with no serious consequences.”

According to Warren, in an editorial in the New York Times, in 2015, “in case after case, federal agencies caught big companies breaking the law, defrauding tax payers, covering up deadly safety hazards, even precipitating the financial collapse of 2008, and let them off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist.” And to think that financially ordinary people go to prison for far less crimes than ripping off billions of dollars from taxpayers and investors, or knowingly selling products that kill.

“The failure to punish big corporations, the report went on, “or their executives when they break the law undermines the foundations of this great country: If justice means a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but it means nothing more than a sideways glance at a CEO who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars, (not to mention the theft of the government and their regulatory agencies) then the promise of equal justice under the law has turned into a lie.” That promise died decades ago. “The failure to prosecute big, visible crimes has a corrosive effect on the fabric of democracy and our shared belief that we are all equal in the eyes of the law.

Some of the crimes committed included:

1 “The Cartel”: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Barclays, UBS AG, and Royal Bank of Scotland. In May 2015, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Barclays, UBS AG, and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) agreed to pay a combined $5.6 billion settlement to the DOJ. Bank traders from Citicorp, JP Morgan, Barclays, and RBS created a secret group known as “The Cartel,” which for more than five years manipulated exchange rates in a way that made the banks billions of dollars at the expense of clients and investors. And, the fifth bank, UBS, separately agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud charges in connection with interest rate manipulation. Although DOJ required admissions of guilt as part of the settlement – a reflection of the severity of the charges – not one single individual faced any criminal prosecution. Moreover, the SEC granted waivers to each bank so that the banks could avoid the collateral consequences that were supposed to accompany a guilty plea. Those waivers meant that the banks’ much-hyped guilty pleas were ultimately “likely to carry more symbolic shame than practical problems.”

2. Novartis. In November 2015, DOJ announced a $390 million settlement of a civil fraud lawsuit with Novartis Pharmaceuticals over allegations that the company engaged in a kickback scheme with pharmacists to increase sales of their drugs to Medicare and Medicaid patients. These kickbacks allegedly were paid even as Novaris was already under a corporate integrity agreement for previous violations of the law. This $390 million represented just over 10% of the damages sought by the government. It placed no further restrictions on Novartis’ participation in federal government healthcare programs, included no admission of wrongdoing, and did not include an indictment of any individual responsible for the kickbacks. The settlement was so paltry that after it was announced, Novartis’s CEO candidly noted that “whether we change our behavior …[in response to the settlement] remains to be seen.”

3. Education Management Corporation (EDMC). In November 2015, DOJ settled a civil case with EDMC, the second-largest for-profit education company in the country. EDMC illegally paid high-pressure recruiters to enroll students and violated the False Claims Act by falsely certifying that it complied with Title IV of the Higher Education Act. EDMC received $11 billion in payments (90% of it via federal student grants and loans) from 2003-2011 as a result of these efforts. But the settlement recovered only $95 million –less than one percent of this total. The DOJ settlement did nothing to resolve federal student loan debts owed by those who were victims of the illegal recruitment, held no individual executives at EDMC accountable, required no admission of wrongdoing, and did nothing to prevent EDMC from receiving federal funds in the future.

What the report doesn’t mention is that US banks have been caught openly laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. They’ve been fined, and then were caught again, and not a soul has been charged with a crime.

For the complete report click the link below.

Click to access Rigged_Justice_2016.pdf

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