Corporations in the United States are treated in the legal system as “people”, legal entities with rights. That’s a problem addressed in Thom Hartmann’s book, “Unequal Protection”, and he touches on it again in Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class”. These legal loopholes make it easy for corporations to get out from under taking responsibility for their actions, because a corporation, unlike a human being, can change it’s identity and move it’s assets to that new identity very, very quickly. As we are finding out with AIG. AIG and other corrupt corporations are frantically moving their assets out of the company (and out of the country) as fast as possible. Some of the places they’re moving the money to are corporate allies, others are just shell corporations that will allow them to keep the stolen loot in the family.

Incidentally, AIG was the primary insurer for the World Trade Center complex, and arranged a very lucrative policy on those towers one month prior to 9/11 with the site’s owner, Larry Silverstein, who was made a billionaire by the attacks. Just thought I’d mention that here. It’s fascinating how many of these corporations currently exhibiting suspicious behavior had their pattifingers in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and not an Islamic extremist to be found anywhere near them in the bunch. But I digress.

This essay will cover my own personal experiences with large corporations, in particular DoD contractors, and what they do to evade taking responsibility for their actions. Like any predator, the predatory corporation is constantly on the move, it’s shifting identities used to camoflague the identities of those who are on the mercenary warpath against their unsuspecting own. Jon Stewart wasn’t far off when he called it a “Sherman’s March” – in many ways it has been exactly that.

In “An open letter to MoveOn”, Dennis put into words something that has been bothering me about the peace activist movement for a long time now. I commented here, voicing my own frustration and rage at these continued requests for my time and money. I’ve been extremely active in this movement since 2004, and I’ve already invested a great deal of time and money (I have rather a lot of one and very little of the other), with nothing to show for those peaceful efforts.

Iraq and Afghanistan wars rage on. Billion dollar bailouts of corrupt corporations continue. After a mealymouthed “Quest for the Holy Grail of Truth(tm)” charade conducted by the Judiciary, Rove and Miers have agreed to a private bellylaugh session. No accountability at all for Rove, Rice, Cheney and Bush – war criminals who have shredded our Constitution, made a mockery of our laws, and murdered millions for a lie.

Today was the coup de grace, the frosting on the cake. I get this from United for Peace and Justice, the first activist group I ever joined:

They need $5000 to make sure the story of their activism gets into the press.

Think about that for a minute.

They need to buy some coverage. As if it was an advertisement. But it’s not an advertisement – it’s SUPPOSED to be the NEWS.

They need to bribe someone in the media to do their job and report the fact that we exist and are angry.

Got all that? We need to pay UFPJ’s fucking media bribe in order to have our concerns heard and taken seriously.

ARE YOU ANGRY YET?

Credo Mobile has a new petition here. Text of my comments sent to AG Holder:

A nation without the rule of law applied to ALL it’s citizens is a travesty of itself.

If nothing is done about this situation, it sends a clear signal to our citizenry and the rest of the world that our laws only apply to some, and that we are a nation of corruption and cowardice.

Bring this desecration of our Constitution and blatant contempt for our nation’s people, laws, and lawmakers to an end. IMMEDIATELY! This is not a request. This is a DEMAND – and it is a demand that should not bounce off you but should pass right through you straight to this first of many lawbreakers, with all the additional righteous anger of your own that you can muster!

We the people are behind you as we DEMAND that you do the right thing, the thing you are there to do, which is uphold the rule of law for ALL of us!

KEEP THE PRESSURE ON THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO BRING THESE CREEPS TO JUSTICE!

This is the Brocken, the highest mountain in the German Harz mountain range. I was brought to this mountain shortly after the Berlin Wall fell by a German friend, Stefan, who was serving in the Bundeswehr at the same base I was stationed, Ramstein. Being the highest mountain in the area, it was naturally being used as a radar post by the Soviets and was unreachable by anyone from the west prior to the fall of the wall. In fact, Stefan issued a stern warning as we crossed what had been the No Man’s Land on the Eastern side of the perimiter to keep to the concrete road, as “it was not certain that all the land mines had been cleared yet”.

For those of you who are capable of gleaning something from it, here’s the last part of my series of essays which discuss how lawless groups and cabals under the wing of the military/industrial complex (which naturally includes more than a few people who pretend they aren’t) continue to implement a formulaic plan to take away your Constitutional rights.

I mentioned in my last essay that the US has seen several iterations of “raze and rebuild” corporate strongarming across several industries in the last century. Magnates operating on a national and occasionally international level have remade assorted industries under contrived, artificially created crisis conditions. This formula differs only slightly from the one followed by the military/industrial complex in it’s expansionist efforts in Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere which has been responsible for almost every single war throughout the world after 1945. A fundamental part of the formula is that strong emotional causes are attached to the crisis in question – fear, greed, and religion are used as tools.

The crisis du jour is energy, and the box being constructed for us by those who would like to think they are the only ones left standing is one that continues to place a poorly functioning long-handled spoon in our hands. We are expected to take this spoon from people who state they are the only game in town, and like it.

We don’t have to. No one has to.

The latest brilliant plan on the part of the oil corporations who hold the lion’s share of resources and money is to sell the sun, the wind and the flowing river to you in a box, and pretend that they are doing you a favor. They will do so most assuredly in a manner which infers that you need them more than they need you, and that you will continue to pay them for a very long time for the long handle they have placed between you and these ecologically responsible sources of free energy.

But wait, there’s more! They haven’t quite gotten those new boxes ready yet for production all across the nation, so in the meantime they’ll hard sell the more stupid of you ludicrous fairy tales like “clean coal technology” or “clean and safe natural gas”. For the Red State holdouts and BushCo throwbacks, they’ll soothingly insist that “drill baby drill” is the only way to go.

But the echelons of upper management already know that carbon based energy is as obsolete as the horse and carriage. It wouldn’t be the first time these corporations ate their own. Hundreds of thousands of their own workers are going to have to adapt to the new programs or face the killing floor ordinarily reserved for customers, and how much preparation they’re willing to give an individual worker will determine whether that person’s own job is razed or rebuilt. The knife is already raised over the heads of those blissfully ignorant workers, they just don’t know it yet.

As for you end-users, they’ll just keep tell you anything you want to hear so long as it involves them selling you that long-handled spoon, and then they’ll try to sell you the sun in a box when the box is ready. In some places this is already happening.

In my last essay I proposed the short term fix of the poor, middle class and unemployed helping each other via barter of self-produced goods and services and the use of Freecycle. The long-handled spoons allegory I brought in was particularly apt because it strongly resembles the situation we have today. The handles are so long on our spoons because there is a great deal of mileage and a lot of corporate infrastructure between the stuff on the end of the spoon and our hands. It’s like we’re on the wrong end of a pyramid scheme where we’re paying a hundred people to do something as simple as provide a package of raspberries in the grocery store.

In the summer I wrote about the irony of harvesting a good seven quarts of wild raspberries growing near the railroad tracks close to where I live, while the store down the road was selling the same thing for $4.99 for 4 ounces. The store-bought total value for what I harvested ended up being something around $360.00.

I wrote about how people have become so dependent on thinking that there’s only one way to solve problems – the “acceptable” way, the status quo; that people who lived 15 miles away from midtown Manhattan spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk during the northeastern blackout of August 2005 rather than simply… walk home.

It would have taken the average person about five hours to walk those 15 miles. They could have walked along the railroad tracks – the trains certainly weren’t running. They could have slept in their own beds that night. But no… they slept in their clothes on the sidewalk. Because that’s what everybody else was doing. Because they’ve become so dependent on the idea that they couldn’t get home without a car, a bus or a train that they didn’t even THINK to walk. They’ve become fixated on the idea that because it takes them an hour to get into the city during rush hour, they surely live more than fifteen miles away from it. To cite the Dead Kennedys album title, “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death”.

To save our economy and our nation, we need people willing to think outside the box.

The problem is, we have an awful lot of people who do NOT want us to do that. Because the box is of their making, and they’re very proud of it.

I spent some time the other night listening to the clip of FDR’s first broadcast to the nation that Edger posted in Pluto’s essay on the subject, and while I recognized many a good intention and wise goal in FDR’s plan, I also caught a sentence here and there that got my inner cynic smirking; and furthermore I recognized that there were some interesting peripheral things going on both before and after this speech was made.

I recognized a pattern, a formula. It’s a bad scene that’s going to see some daylight here and now, because we’re being set up to be shoved into that box again and we need to stop the madness.

The NY Times had a front page piece recently on a new cop show called “Life On Mars”. The premise is that an NYPD detective is in a car accident (which happens while the David Bowie song of the same name is playing on the radio) and is bamphed (as we say in MMORPG-speak) back to the NYC of 35 years ago. The article was accompanied by a sordid picture of the South Bronx as it looked in 1973.

I realized immediately when I started reading the story that this show, and by proxy the article about it, had a not-so-hidden agenda. It’s spin is designed to make America feel more comfortable with it’s new status as a police surveillance state. The idea is to point to how bad things were crime-wise on the streets of NYC in 1973 and say, “See? Aren’t you glad those problems don’t exist now?”

Except that the foundational issues still DO exist. NYC was near bankruptcy not because there were hookers, pimps and johns on 42nd Street or fires and drug wars raging in the South Bronx but because there was corruption and graft at the highest levels of it’s government – in particular, it’s police department.

A major red flag in the NY Times piece (which was since taken down and seems mysteriously hard to find in their database) was the treatment of Serpico, a well-known movie that came out of that era, as the last in a long list of cop movies and TV shows popular at the time.

Frank Serpico was and is a real man, a real NYPD detective who fought very real corruption and graft within the NYPD. He blew the lid off the “omerta” – yes, there’s that word again – that surrounded the NYPD and the sheer proliferation and matter-of-fact attitude toward graft in the department. Ironically, at first Frank Serpico was ostracized for simply refusing to play the game. He remained silent about what was going on around him – his only initial offense was to refuse to take the money. But that was enough to send the majority of the guilty police into paroxysms of paranoia. (Words with a “P” this time, she wrote, smiling gently…)

Serpico nearly died at the hands of his fellow cops when he was set up by them. Sent to arrest a drug dealer and given absolutely no backup, he was shot in the face. His so-called “brother officers” were the ones who stood with their arms folded, nearly as guilty of murder as the dealer they’d gone to arrest, who was quite happy to do their dirty work for them.

But the genie was out of the bottle by then. The press, a more responsible and less timid press than the examples we have before us 35 years later – had the story and was breaking it to the public. The media – a slightly more responsible and less desperate and greedy media than the examples we have today – produced that book and that documentary which today is being passed off in the NY Times as just another cop action movie from the 70s.

My father handed me a copy of the Peter Maas book in 1973. He wanted me to read that book very, very badly. My dad wasn’t usually the kind of person who tried to do more than mildly influence my reading habits, so when he took pains to do so I tended to pay attention, even if I was a 12 year old kid with ADD. I asked him why he felt it was so important to read this book, and he explained.

One of Barack Obama’s constant and primary memes has been a call for public service from the American citizenry. It is significant that he spent the day before his inauguration setting an example to follow – volunteering his time at a house for homeless teenagers in DC.

A noble and worthy goal in and of itself, it’s also an incredibly clever way to winnow the wheat from the chaff when it comes to discovering who TRULY loves this nation – to reveal who would be willing to work with him and his administration to fix what the shadowy cabal behind the Bush administration have spent not merely years but DECADES and ENTIRE GENERATIONS trying to destroy.

Never before in America have a “parcel of rogues” come so close to reworking our democratic ideals into a twisted blend of corporate feudalism and outright fascism. With so much to undo, Obama’s call to service acts as a sharp and well-aimed sword cutting through the Gordian knot left to him. Actions speak louder than words, and Obama’s call is a call to action. Those who are interested in deception will eventually be revealed. Their actions of public service – should such even occur – will be halfhearted, slipshod, done grudgingly and with a marked disrespect for those who have called for help.

This methodology is just and fair. It assigns no partisan value to service. In a single master stroke, it guts from nave to chops the runaway capitalist/imperialist monster created by the cabal over the last century – the greedy and irresponsible “FUCK YOU, I’VE GOT MINE” Ayn Randish mentality that America has become all too guilty of across the board.

The blogosphere is well aware of Democrats who pretend to public service but who in reality are all about “FUCK YOU, I’VE GOT MINE”. We are less aware of the Republicans who have chafed alongside us under the abuses of the Bush regime, writhing with embarrassment and shame as they perform their own forms of service, but not to acknowledge that they exist would be less than fair.

What also has me giggling no end about this call for public service from our new African-American President is what it will do to the head of the average white supremacist, but that – like the racists themselves – is a marginal issue. The real goal here is to find those willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. You love this country? PROVE IT! With your shoulder to the wheel! Get off the couch, turn off the goddamned TV or the video game or yes, t3h 1nt4rdn3tz and stir stumps! Put up or shut up, keyboard warriors!

Obama is laying the groundwork now to make it VERY, VERY EASY for anyone who wants to prove they love this country to do so. There’s a lot of messes to be cleaned up. There’s a lot of stuff that this administration broke.

There’s a lot of work to do. And there’s a lot of people who need work.

This isn’t rocket science. All the same… it’s brilliant. As simple, clear, and brilliant as truth, as the light of day.