Corporations Sure Bring Out the Best in People

What is it about the corporate business model that brings out such good in people? Is it that view of the Manhattan skyline that makes one look out over the masses and think, how can I serve humanity today? Is it that corporate charter that demands, Do the right thing? Or maybe it's just those multi-million dollar Christmas bonuses.

I have spent over 20 years trying to figure it out. Of course the corporation is merely a neutral organizational structure. It can't be blamed for what real people do within that structure any more than you can blame the road for bad drivers. Right?

Not exactly. In the San Fernando valley all the main roads were designed to run a pretty perfect north-south, east-west. The result is that twice a day, in the east-west direction, the sun setting or rising silhouettes the traffic lights making them practically invisible. This is an example of road design bringing out the worst in drivers. And incidentally, one that almost cost me my life.

The corporate model, as implemented under US law, has some design flaws of its own. And these design flaws go to the heart of why corporations tend to make people, far more often than not, behave in either unethical, immoral, or even abhorrent ways.

Here I will show that the widespread anti-corporate sentiment so many Americans feel, which may seem reactionary and undefined, is in fact quite rational and based on a real phenomenon. Countless accounts of corporate crime and malfeasance have been documented in film, books, and online. (None more succinct than the film 'The Corporation' where scores of top corporations were analyzed using standard behavioral models and found to be sociopaths. This wasn't just a clever trick. Modern corporate behavior met all the criteria for deviant, anti-social behavior without conscience.)

Personal experience too has shown people first hand that dealing with corporations, from credit card companies, insurance companies and telecommunications companies, to even their local drugstore chain, often leaves them victims.

But rarely is an attempt made to explain the phenomena. And as long as bad corporate behavior is attributed exclusively to people instead of the system itself, we will never be able to address the problem.

So here's what took me years to figure out. Not that it should have. It's extremely simple and part of it is right there in bold print: LLC. Limited liability corporation.

I have identified three fundamental components of the corporate model which contribute to sociopathic behavior. But none is more influential than limited liability. This is nothing short of an invitation to act without consequence. And when people are allowed to act without consequence or accountability, they will do bad things. We are an imperfect species, susceptible to temptation. Even decent people are capable of doing bad things without the threat of accountability. We've known this since the stone age. This is why we have laws.

But the corporate model protects people from the law. It allows people to act behind a shield of limited liability and as a result, corporations willingly break the law knowing that the increased profit gained will be less than the fines imposed for the illegal act. This shield also benefits the shareholders who get to participate and profit from a criminal operation from a nice, tidy distance.

There's another primary contributor to the sociopathic tendencies of corporate operators. And it is written into the law itself. As corporate attorney Robert Hinkley writes in his essay, "How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility:

The provision in the law I am talking about is the one that says the purpose of the corporation is simply to make money for shareholders. Every jurisdiction where corporations operate has its own law of corporate governance. But remarkably, the corporate design contained in hundreds of corporate laws throughout the world is nearly identical. That design creates a governing body to manage the corporation–usually a board of directors–and dictates the duties of those directors. In short, the law creates corporate purpose. That purpose is to operate in the interests of shareholders. In Maine, where I live, this duty of directors is in Section 716 of the business corporation act, which reads:

...the directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interests of the corporation and of the shareholders....

Although the wording of this provision differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, its legal effect does not. This provision is the motive behind all corporate actions everywhere in the world. Distilled to its essence, it says that the people who run corporations have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money. Failing this duty can leave directors and officers open to being sued by shareholders.

Think about this. What these laws, in every state of the Union, say is that corporations are required to place profit above every other consideration. What if you or I placed profit above every consideration? What would we be? Sociopaths.

Yet we have institutionalized this very standard into US law. A legal precept that not only allows, but requires that corporations place the profits of their stakeholders above the interests of society as a whole.

It is fun to watch the disciples of Ayn Rand and Milton Freidman jump through intellectual hoops to try to rationalize how corporations acting exclusively in their own self interests somehow benefit society. And many get paid big bucks to do this circus act.

But a circus act it is. Even wild dogs understand that acting in the interests of the pack is often necessary for survival. Perhaps the Rockefellers should have started with a kennel before attempting the University of Chicago.

Some will argue correctly that corporations are not all evil and many provide great benefits to society through the products and services they provide. This is true, but it is also a strawman argument. There is no requirement that, for a business to be profitable and provide a useful product, it must be limited of liability and possess the singular consideration of maximizing profit at the expense of all social responsibility.

To the contrary, our economy would be far more prosperous without these lawbreaking sociopaths devouring real innovation and competition. And as time has shown, the harm they do to society and the environment in their tunneled quest for profits costs our economy far more than it pays back.

As corporation buy up a greater and greater share of our economy, and permeate more and more of our lives with their sociopathic ways, they threaten far more than our economy. They are destroying good itself. I'm beginning to see the corporate ethos trickle down to ordinary people and small businesses. A new era of Darwinian animalism is taking hold in our society where the choice of doing right and wrong is made on a calculator.

I see more and more commercial advertisements where desire for a product is represented by greed and selfishness. One even depicted a father stealing his small child's waffle from the breakfast table - because it was just so delicious. This was supposed to be cute. But it was really just sick. A sick commercial for an increasingly corporate society.

There is one last point I want to make. While the corporate system of unaccountability and sociopathic profit seeking allows otherwise decent people to do bad things, it also attracts people who already have sociopathic tendencies. If you're a veritable scumbag who wasn't cuddled enough as a baby, you will thrive at Exxon, or CIGNA, or Citibank, or literally thousands of other top corporations. Someone did a study that showed just that (Link provided kindly by OHdog. Much gratitude.)

The epidemic disease of corporatism has spread so much that I'm not sure how it can be stopped. But however we stop it, I am sure it will involve clearly defining its root causes.

The shield from accountability and the singular goal of profit at the exclusion of all other considerations is a bad system. It's bad for the planet, bad for society, and even bad for the economy.

Social Capitalism

Muhammad Yunus, who won the Noble Prize in Economics last year, proposed an interesting idea at his acceptance speech. Here's a brief excerpt:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

...

Let us suppose an entrepreneur, instead of having a single source of motivation (such as, maximizing profit), now has two sources of motivation, which are mutually exclusive, but equally compelling a) maximization of profit and b) doing good to people and the world.

Each type of motivation will lead to a separate kind of business. Let us call the first type of business a profit-maximizing business, and the second type of business as social business.

Social business will be a new kind of business introduced in the market place with the objective of making a difference in the world. Investors in the social business could get back their investment, but will not take any dividend from the company. Profit would be ploughed back into the company to expand its outreach and improve the quality of its product or service. A social business will be a non-loss, non-dividend company.

Once social business is recognized in law, many existing companies will come forward to create social businesses in addition to their foundation activities. Many activists from the non-profit sector will also find this an attractive option. Unlike the non-profit sector where one needs to collect donations to keep activities going, a social business will be self-sustaining and create surplus for expansion since it is a non-loss enterprise. Social business will go into a new type of capital market of its own, to raise capital.

Young people all around the world, particularly in rich countries, will find the concept of social business very appealing since it will give them a challenge to make a difference by using their creative talent. Many young people today feel frustrated because they cannot see any worthy challenge, which excites them, within the present capitalist world. Socialism gave them a dream to fight for. Young people dream about creating a perfect world of their own.

Almost all social and economic problems of the world will be addressed through social businesses. The challenge is to innovate business models and apply them to produce desired social results cost-effectively and efficiently. Healthcare for the poor, financial services for the poor, information technology for the poor, education and training for the poor, marketing for the poor, renewable energy - these are all exciting areas for social businesses.

I don't fully subscribe to Yunus' idea as presented because I believe it underplays the role of democratic government, which I still very much believe in. But what an incredible thought. Social businesses. Owned by everyone. With two simultaneous goals - success and social benefit.

I included his opening salutations to give you the idea of who he was addressing that night. I would love to know how badly his speech horrified his audience.

TheTruth About Global Warming

I have a confession to make. I've been lying about global warming for years. You see, I have known for over a decade that we were long past the "tipping point" for preventing catastrophic climate change. But I also believed, and still do, that it is a moral imperative to act as though we have a chance, just in case the data is wrong. And so when people asked if there was anything we could do to prevent global warming, I would lie.

Because of my involvement with certain environmental organizations, I was exposed to the science of climate change pretty early. We didn't call it global warming back then. We called it the greenhouse effect. But the truth is, all the way back in the late 70s and early 80s, the facts about global warming were very well established (a very important point I'll get to in my next diary). And way back then, scientists, like modern day prophets, were already predicting what we're witnessing right now - extreme weather events, melting at the poles, droughts, fires and floods. It's almost spooky now, to remember back when these predictions were only abstract notions of a seemingly uncertain future. But facts they were then, just as they are now.

There is one fact that I've never written about or even discussed with close friends until recently. It's the kind of fact that makes people want to give up (We can never give up). But I now believe that circumstances require us to confront the truth of our situation, no matter how painful or scary it may be.

Residence Time

Let me tell you a secret. Or at least it might as well be a secret because hardly anyone talks about it. It's called residence time. This is the measure of how long a gas stays in the atmosphere before being reabsorbed. And the residence time for CO2 has grave consequences for our planet and our future - which is why I suspect no one wants to talk about it. It wasn't in Al Gore's movie. But if you're one of the overwhelming majority of people who has never even heard of this term, let that be an indication of just how far we are from having even a remotely serious discussion about global warming.

This figure shows the degree to which carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions persist in the atmosphere over time. The lifetime of a gas in the atmosphere is generally known as its "residence time", but unlike other greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide does not undergo a simple decline over a single predictable timescale. Instead, the excess carbon is first diluted by the carbon cycle as it mixes into the oceans and biosphere (e.g. plants) over a period of a few hundred years, and then it is slowly removed over hundreds of thousands of years as it is gradually incorporated into carbonate rocks.

The dilution of carbon is such that only 15-30% is expected to remain in the atmosphere after 200 years, with most of the rest being either incorporated into plants or dissolved into the oceans. This leads to a new equilibrium being established; however, the total amount of carbon in the ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system remains elevated. To restore the system to a normal level, the excess carbon must be incorporated into carbonate rocks through geologic processes that progress exceedingly slowly. As a result, it is estimated that between 3 and 7% of carbon added to the atmosphere today will still be in the atmosphere after 100,000 years (Archer 2005, Lenton & Britton 2006). This is supported by studies of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a large naturally occurring release of carbon 55 million years ago that apparently took ~200,000 years to fully return to pre-event conditions (Zachos et al. 2001). (Source)

Image by Robert A. Rohde and courtesy of Global Warming Art.

What this means is, if humans stopped the engine of the entire world today, shut down every coal fired power plant from here to China, turned off every single automobile, stopped burning any carbon based substances from natural gas to firewood, and miraculously reduced global greenhouse emissions to exactly zero, we could not stop what is happening, and about to happen to our planet.

And because we have entered what I call runaway climate change, with numerous feedback loops kicking in, even if we stopped the engine of the world, not only will global warming continue, but it will continue to get worse.

The global warming we're seeing now is not the result of decades of CO2 emissions. It is the accumulative result of centuries of emissions. All that CO2 that went up George Washington's chimney, and all that CO2 that came out of Henry Ford's Model-T is still up there, suffocating our planet. And all the CO2 that we have been emitting over the last 50 years, billions of tons, will still be suffocating our planet in the year 2200. Some of it will even be around in the year 202,000 A.D.

We have permanently altered our atmosphere, and our climate.

Our New Moral Imperative

It's time to face reality. We can't "fix" global warming. And we can't prevent it. We don't have seven years. We don't have five.

Al Gore and Richard Branson have offered a reward if someone can figure out a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. I pray some one wins that prize. But when you really think about what that will take, it seems unlikely it can happen in time to reverse what has already begun.

But this contest at least confirms to me that Mr. Gore is familiar with the residence time of CO2 – not that I had any doubt. I suspect he has been operating under the same moral imperative I have – pretend we can fix this just in case, by some fluke, we can.

But we now have a new moral imperative - we must prepare the people of the world for catastrophic global climate change, and take measures to minimize the inevitable suffering that will result.

Mr. Gore has called for a Global Marshall Plan, based on the initiative after WWII to rebuild Europe, to move the world toward environmental sustainability. I strongly support that effort. But our Global Marshall Plan must also include mobilizing our resources to deal with global water shortages, mass migrations, the crashing global economy, and the threat of numerous wars.

We cannot continue to walk blindly into this future hoping that some miracle will rescue us from peril. Our moral imperative now is to survive that peril.

Foreshadowing

Yesterday, a new report was released called "The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change".

This report is similar to the Pentagon study released in 2003 called An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United

Both reports address the implications of global warming from a national security perspective. And both reports read like a geopolitical horror story.

It's almost funny. We've gotten to see a little microcosm of the kind of world conflict envisioned in both reports play out right here in the US. Georgia, Alabama and Florida are in a spat over water rights as the long drought diminishes supplies. Lawsuits have been threatened.

Now imagine if Georgia, Alabama, and Florida all had their own armies, even nuclear weapons. This is what we're looking at. Water wars, mass migrations, famine and severe political turmoil.

We can take steps now to help mitigate the social and geopolitical disaster that is every bit the threat posed by the climate disaster. But we have to acknowledge it first.

A Civilization Policy

I want us to work to fix global warming. But we haven't even begun to think seriously about what is involved. Our entire civilization has been designed around fossil fuels. Cheap oil is written into the blueprints of modern civilization in ways we don't even realize, from suburban sprawl, to global trade. Five years? Try two hundred. We're talking about reinventing our entire society, infrastructure, economy.

For over a century we've been designing our civilization around cheap fossil energy. Where once communities sprung up in walking distance, now you most likely have to drive miles just to get a loaf of bread.

And let's not even mention business and trade. It takes a lot of oil to get all that wheat gluten from China. And yet the oligarchs are dead set on fulfilling David Rockefeller's dream of a one world economy.

Then we have Ted Steven's bridge to nowhere. I really wish we would let him build it. What a fine monument to a failed idea. A failed civilization.

We can change civilization. But let's not delude ourselves that this is merely an energy problem. We have to restructure our entire way of life, from the way we trade and distribute goods, to where we work and live. I believe what we lack in a replacement for cheap energy, we can make up for in efficiency and restructuring. Did you know we waste as much as 80% of the energy we use? And yet almost every estimate on how much solar energy we would need to replace fossil fuels uses current consumption levels. If we even approach 50% efficiency, solar energy becomes much more feasible.

But we have to get serious. Our energy policy needs to become a home and office insulation policy. A civil engineering policy. A trade policy. An electric car policy. It needs to be a restructuring of Western civilization policy.

There is hope

Having the residence time of CO2 out in the open is not just to plan for the worst. It also informs our strategies for planning a solution.

The Gore/Branson initiative for example. I think we should put everything we have into carbon sequestration technology - which is what their contest is going for. It may not bear fruit for decades. But it does offer the promise of correcting our mistake.

Massive reforestation is a potent form of carbon sequestration. But we also must develop technology to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

Granted, it's a long shot. But it is by no means impossible. And until the carbon cycle becomes a serious part of the debate, not only will we not prepare for the worst, we will greatly diminish our chances for a possible solution. We must change the nature of the discussion.

But our political leaders, the media, and even our fellow citizens are living in a fantasy world. I won't even honor the proposals by the Democratic candidates for president by mentioning them. And the Republicans. Well, they'll be one of the first extinct species. They're almost there now.

Runaway Global Warming Has Begun

Meanwhile, back in reality land, something is occurring that I've been fearing for a long time. That something is runaway climate change.

'Carbon Sinks' Lose Ability To Soak Up Emissions

A dramatic decline in the ability of the Earth to soak up man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, and a corresponding acceleration in the rate of increase of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, have been detected for the first time by scientists.

This little news item effectively says that that chart above is wrong. Turns out the residence time for CO2 just got an extended stay.

We've known all along that when global warming really kicked in, it would snowball. This is because the atmosphere is a nonlinear thermodynamic system. The slightest, even linear change in input will most probably result in a dramatic, exponential change in output. And when you factor in that the input, CO2 emission rates, is also nonlinear, and the many feedback loops at play - deforestation, co2 sink rates, arctic reflectivity, and melting permafrost, just to name a few - you see what I believe we are clearly seeing now - not just a change in global weather patterns, but an exponential change.

The thing to understand about science is it often lags behind knowledge. For example, it was over a decade after Einstein first conceived of his General Principle of Relativity before he was able to publish on it. While he had firmly formulated the concept, incontrovertibly so in my opinion, he didn't know of a mathematical formalism to represent it. He had to consult a mathematician friend who suggested Reiman's work in non-euclidean geometry.

Climate science is similar in that you can see patterns clearly, know they're occurring, and yet spend years putting together the necessary data to actually prove what you already know. Of course, this is the way it should be. And the measured, conservative projections of climate models are the only way to ensure accuracy.

But because of the exponential, extraordinary rate of change we're seeing in global climate patterns, and the extreme complexity of the data, the science just can't keep up. This is why of late, we are also seeing an exponential increase in the number of studies claiming 'We were wrong, it's much worse than we thought.'

Again, our problem is not just energy or greenhouse gas emissions. It is our entire global way of life. Feedback loops are a consequence of warming, feeding back to create even more warming. But other severe contributors, like wiping out half of the South American rainforest, are not. And this double whammy has yet to be fully included in climate models. So over the next decade, we are going to see a switch from scientists trying to predict what is going to happen to scientists trying to explain what is already happening.

OK, I'm Depressed

You may be reading this and thinking, OK, even if I buy all this residence time crap, and accept that the world is going to tank, what can I do about it. This is just to big for little old me.

Well, you would be right. It's too big for any individual. But the amazing thing about this internet thing is it allows individuals to become groups. And as a group, we can do what we do best, raise awareness.

I have a one year old daughter. I know she's not going to grow up in the world that I did. But I believe that she can grow up in a world that is sustainable, peaceful, and happy.

Just as we have a model for how to proceed with Mr. Gore's Marshall Plan, we also have a model for how not to proceed. We can call it the Katrina plan. Katrina was a disaster. But it didn't compare to the man made disaster that followed.

So it is with global warming. If we don't plan for the worst, the greatest disaster will not be climate change itself, it will be our response.

You Can Laugh, But the Gore Mania Should Tell You Something

I have a little device I call the Dean-O-Meter. I keep it in my shirt pocket close to my heart. Every time I watch a Democratic debate, or see a candidate speak, I can pull it out and measure how they rank compared to any given Dean speech. Sometimes I think my Dean-O-Meter is broken. The little needle just sits there. Then someone will say something, like when Edwards talked about taking on corporate power, and it will flicker a bit.

I know I'm not the only one. In fact, the way I see it, this little meter thing is the perfect instrument to explain why Al Gore, a man who has not given even a hint that he's going to run, is still the candidate of choice for so many Democrats.

Yes, you can laugh at all the Al Gore diaries which, admittedly, are beginning to resemble Elvis sightings. But there's a message in there somewhere. And that message, to my ears, is straight from an old Peggy Lee song, 'Is that All There Is?'.

Quite simply, and this should be obvious to anyone who's honest about it, the current slew of candidates fail to inspire. And, most importantly, they have failed to tell the truth.

You want to know what Ron Paul's appeal is? Every now and then, he speaks the truth. I am no more fond of Libertarianism than I am of Conservatism. Both philosophies fail to recognize that societies are more than an aggregation of individuals, but are indeed a cohesive system - An interconnecting, interdependent whole. And the collectivism they so vehemently oppose looks a lot like democracy to me.

But that doesn't mean someone like Ron Paul is wrong all the time. And every now and then, regardless of his misguided - I'd say absurd - philosophy, he speaks the truth. The kind of truth that rattles the conventional wisdom and scares the Washington establishment - like saying the reason we were attacked on 9/11 is not because they hate our freedom, but because of our imperial misadventures in the Middle East.

Not to draw too close a comparison, but Howard Dean did that too. He rattled the conventional wisdom with his opposition to the Iraq war way back when Hillary and Edwards were still holding their political fingers in the wind.

But more than anything, Howard Dean's campaign was about empowering people. Not just empowering Howard Dean. "You have the power" he would yell, and we believed him. And that scared the Washington establishment most of all.

And so they took him down. But when they took down Howard Dean, they really took us down. And the old saying, 'Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer'? That is why Howard Dean is still DNC chair - that once powerful position now a retirement home for old threats to the established order.

The Democratic establishment hates John Edwards too. At least if you believe MSNBC's Chuck Todd who, in a rare moment of candor for those up late enough to see it, said as much after the Democratic debates last week. "The democratic elites" he called them, "hate John Edwards." I'm surprised no one else caught it, or at least wrote about it.

But I'm not surprised they do. They hated Al Gore too. They have a cushy gig there in the Beltway. And the last thing they need are principled populists and visionaries to fuck things up.

I wonder how many people realize that for every election, there are actually two campaigns: one for the people's vote, and another, behind the scenes, for the support of the money people and their conventional "wisdom." This is why Democratic candidates are so strained to say anything meaningful on the stump - it would conflict with what they've been saying behind closed doors. Incidentally, Hillary won the money race back in 2006.

The Republicans don't have to work so hard, speaking in forked tongues. Their message of lower taxes, deregulation, and reducing the size of government to a defense contract is the same out front as it is in the back room.

Will we ever get a candidate who can speak to the American people, honestly and without hesitation, without the internal conflict of knowing he or she doesn't believe a word they're saying.

I think that's what people see in Al Gore. Someone who has the integrity to tell the truth, and the clout to make it mean something. Someone who's both a member of the establishment, and a patron of the people.

Al Gore's become almost a Messiah like figure, someone said. But I think it's more like Moses. Born a prince, exiled a peasant, coming down from the mount, reborn and white haired, to lead his people to the promised land.

Me, I'll settle for anyone who can make this Dean-O-Meter thing work. Cause I can almost swear it's broken.

The True Power of the Netroots

The most powerful force in our modern world is not government, politicians, the military industrial complex or even Wall Street directly. It is the big, agenda setting media - and mostly the television networks. Their ability to control information, shape the parameters of acceptable discourse, and spread lies and misinformation trumps all other forms of political power - including protests, political campaigns, and any other action you can think of.

This is what we're up against. This is what Democratic leaders who want to do the right thing are up against. A zeitgeist of pundits on the payroll, PR firms, news publishers and tv producers, radio talk show hosts, and others who all serve to shape the American consciousness into accepting the status quo and believing that real change is both impossible and dangerous.

How many times have you turned on your TV and thought, 'what world are they in? Don't they know what's really going on?'

Of course they do. It is their job to keep the rest of us from knowing it though. The self appointed role of the agenda setting media is to maintain a stable and docile society. To keep us happy consumers and protect the corporate economy. Providing the public with disturbing news of the state of the world is not on their agenda. The people might revolt.

And this is the good side of the big media. The truly nasty side is the spread of lies and misinformation to serve the perpetual war machine, feed on people's fears to make them compliant and powerless, prop up evil regimes like very popular guy you want to have a beer with Mr. Bush, and serve the goal of corporate empire.

From "news" to entertainment programming, the big media is nothing but one big infomercial. And their selling the corporate takeover of our country - indeed the world. And the feckless public, unaware of how they're being manipulated by the cleverest of means, is buying it. Sort of.

Out of all the actions we can take, none is more important and more effective than what OPOL and the rest of us are doing right here - challenging the zeitgeist, informing the people, and raising awareness. OPOL is particularly effective at this task because he takes it to the next level and goes beyond informing. He inspires.

The internet as a means of spreading political knowledge is the best weapon we have against the very real corporate takeover of our country - and other countries as OPOL pointed out. Those who mock and condemn OPOL and others as all talk and no action are forgetting an incredibly important point - all action must first begin with an idea.

The Vietnam protests were the response to information. Information that was spread by the big media who, at that time, had turned on the war.

The big media has somewhat turned on the war now, it seems - or at least Bush's bungling of it. But the Bush admin and the Pentagon are highly effective at keeping them in line. They went into this war with hindsight of how a few brave journalist ended the war in Vietnam. And so they took steps, like embedding journalists for example, to prevent a repeat.

But the broader issues of the general fascist like elements affecting our world are largely unknown to the masses. We here are on the front lines of the information war. We mine data from disparate sources and connect the dots and dig up the truth. Most however, are still getting their information from the fascist-like media. We have a lot of work to do.

People have always been able to organize and protests etc. The whole "let's take over the party from the grass roots" is not new either.

What is new, and gives us hope, is this ability to spread information and knowledge. This is our real power. And that's why the big media people have been trying to discredit us from the start.

I'm all for taking action. But, quite frankly, we ain't there yet. The public, and the necessary consensus we need for real change, is lagging behind, still drinking MSM cool aid.

Before people can begin taking meaningful action, they must first be informed about why action needs to be taken. And let's face it, they aren't. They watch Desperate Housewives and Britney TV and are mesmerized by flashing colors on their screen and have no fucking idea that they are conquered.

If even half of the American public were as informed as we are here, we would be living in a different country. And that, my friends, is the real power of Daily Kos.

So next time OPOL or others post an awareness raising diary, and the predictable critics pop in to ask, "what are you going to do about it?", ask them how many people they informed today? How many people got a little closer to understanding the truth about their world as a result of you?

Most historians believe the printing press was one of the greatest developments in human history for a reason. It facilitated the spread of knowledge and gave people the power to understand and change their world.

This is our new printing press. And using it is very much taking action.

And to all you super organizers, leaders of meetups, and even you OPOL with you protest drives, please keeps something in mind. People don't need to be pushed to organize and take action nearly as much when they are informed enough to be outraged.

That's what we're doing here. Write it and they will come.

A few misconceptions

Misconception #1 Our health Care System Is Broken

Our health care system is not broken. It is working flawlessly. Just not for the vast majority of Americans. If you're a major stockholder of an HMO or an insurance company though, then we have the best health care system in the whole world.

Misconception #2 The Mainstream Traditional Corporate Media is Broken

The big media isn't broken either. They aren't incompetent or unqualified. Those people on TV are doing a great job. It's just not the job we think they're doing.

The big media's role is to keep us docile and complacent consumers. Stupid even. What Herbert Hoover liked to call happiness machines. I often hear people say, "Where's the outrage?" - after some revelation surfaces about yet another atrocity by someone in power. The outrage got lost somewhere between 60 Minutes and Desperate Housewives. Probably during a commercial for a shiny new combustion engine device.

The most accurate way to look at television is as one big infomercial. But they're not just selling little products. What they're really selling is one big product - American life. Complete with soccer moms, and breakfast cereal dads, and happy kids with headphones. What they're selling is a belief system. That cheap products from Indonesia and China will fill our emptiness. And what that doesn't provide, pharmaceuticals will. And no matter how shitty your job, your life gets, you can come home, turn on the fantasy box, and escape for an average of 5 hours a night.

Is it a conspiracy? It was in the beginning. The power class saw television as a way to manipulate the masses and shape society around the capitalist, consumer economy. They were also scared to death. They saw the mass rioting and upheaval during the Great Depression. A lot of it was filmed, but you probably won't see it on television.

But now it's just a norm. Everyone who works at a network, or in a newsroom for that matter, knows the boundaries. And they know what the masters in the boardrooms like. When it was decided to sell the Iraq war, for example, it didn't take a memo. It's a lot like when you go to a dinner party, no one has to tell you not to urinate on the houseplants.

Misconception #3 The Democrats Are Spineless

Another misconception is the idea that the Democrats are spineless, weak, pussies, or however you would put it.

In fact, to the extent one can generalize, the Democrats in power are strikingly agile creatures. You see, they have a much, much harder job than Republicans.

Republicans only have to serve one master. They are expected to be the party of big business, the wealthy and powerful. Their only selling point to the less well-offs is that if, one day, the less well-offs should become well-offs too, the republicans will save them a place at the trough. This seems to be effective on a good number of people.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are traditionally known as the Party of the People. And apparently, this has traditionally meant that in the age old conflict between the well-offs and the not so well-offs, the Democrats would be siding with the not so well-offs.

But in the late 60s, some powerful business leaders got together and decided that it would be better for them if the Democrats started acting more like Republicans. And so they schemed to start using their money and power to bring that about.They formed little groups like the Business Roundtable to exert their influence and they funneled vast fortunes to elect these new Republican-like Democrats and, though they couldn't buy them all, they eventually got so many that they reshaped the party. Why, they even got a Republican-like Democratic president.

But this created a bit of a problem for these new Democrats. Like wolves in sheep's clothing, they had to do costume changes every time they went from the cloak room to the courtyard.

What we interpret as weakness is really the intrinsic strain of internal conflict. What we hear as the voice of timidity is really the thrashing of a forked tongue.

The simple truth is our leaders know who brung em to the dance. And they're not about to leave with the bussboy. Or Howard Dean for that matter.

To the extent one can generalize. And that's a problem in itself. Congress is a club. And so complex are the machinations, the cover they can provide each other makes it hard to tell where anyone really stands on anything.

Until they vote on something really important. But even then, you never know. If my memory serves, 62 House Democrats voted down the Markey amendment preserving Net Neutrality. Coincidentally, that was just the number of votes needed to defeat it. One never knows.

But it doesn't take FISA warrant to know that what they say behind closed doors and what they say up front don't exactly mesh.

So, let's cut them a break. It's really, really hard to keep the military industrial banking media Wall Street complex happy and us progressives too.

Sociopath Nation - How Free Market Ideology is Destroying Society

A Daily Kos diary was posted attacking the baby boomers and their dietary shortcomings. The argument was made that they should not be allowed unlimited health care because they don't deserve it - they should have eaten better.

This is typical Right wing nuttery. But what surprised me was the response.

Many arguments accepted the premise that health care is earned and responded by proposing that the baby boomers have indeed earned their health care because they are paying for it - with social security etc.

What I didn't see was one argument that addressed the real issue - that access to health care is not something you earn, it is a right.

As decent people of good conscience we must reject the Right wing frame of health care as a privilege or something you must earn. What kind of society turns away the sick because they don't "deserve" health care? A sick society.

This is the disease of the free market ideology - the idea that everyone, working in their own selfish interests, creates an equilibrium which benefits society as a whole.

What this ideology creates is a society of sociopaths. We must restore the health care debate to the realm of common decency.

And we must reject the fallacy that Adam Smith's invisible hand can replace our basic obligation to our fellow man.

Humans, on the most instinctual level, have always understood that we depend on each other to survive. Society itself is a product of this understanding - why we have always ran in tribes instead of going solo.

The ideology of the free market, the view of society as the aggregation of individual self interests, and its insidious byproduct, "Market Democracy", are just inventions designed to allow the corporate model to operate without conscience or regard to social responsibility.

It has been embraced and propagated by capitalist forces who see democratic institutions and government regulation as enemies to profit. The health care system is only one egregious manifestation of this sociopathic ideology. There are many others from environmental abuse to economic injustice.

What the Left has allowed in the US is nothing less than the defeat of the idea of society as a social compact. We have allowed Right wing forces to slowly redefine our most basic values and subvert the instrument of Social Democracy.

Even entertaining the sociopathic notion that people should be denied access to health care because, by some criteria, they don't deserve it, is evidence of how far we have fallen.

The instrument of Social Democracy, the way we as a society make collective decisions on how to benefit society whole, is democratic government.

But the Left, and Democrats specifically, have largely accepted the Right's fallacy that government is inherently flawed. We have allowed the subversion of the most powerful agency of social justice in the history of man - the US federal government.

This could not have happened at a worse time. The problems facing our country, indeed our world, from the health care crisis to global warming, require not some fictitious Invisible Hand, but the wise governance of the democratic process.

The first Americans fought and died for the same government that Ronald Reagan, the presidential candidate, called "the problem." We must fight for our government again. We must fight for the idea that a free, thinking people can come together and work for not only the interests of the individual, but the interests of society.

US Attorney-Gate Was About Carol Lam

Once the press get's its narrative, it's almost impossible to change it. The narrative on the firing of eight US attorneys? Politics, of course. "And that's just wrong. Not a crime mind you. But wrong." Even many on the left are a bit speechless when asked what the crime is here. Bill Maher's eyes glazed over when promted.

Here's the freakin crime:

18 U.S.C. § 1512 c. which states:

(c) Whoever corruptly—
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

It is simply incredible to me that months have passed over this scandal and the talking heads, the Democratic leadership, and many in the blogosphere have failed to clearly stake out this relatively simple case.

Kyle Sampson's email proves intent:

McClatchy:

In an e-mail dated May 11, 2006, Sampson urged the White House counsel's office to call him regarding "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam," who then the U.S. attorney for southern California. Earlier that morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam's corruption investigation of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., had expanded to include another California Republican, Rep Jerry Lewis.

Perhaps what is lost in all this confusion over who said what when and which prosecutors were bushies and which were not is just how significant Lam's investigation was. This paragraph from an August 2006 article in Vanity Fair will instruct:

Tens of thousands of pages of congressional documents going as far back as 1997 have been demanded by the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego. The C.I.A., Pentagon, I.R.S., and F.B.I. are conducting investigations, and at least three congressional committees are cooperating in hopelessly tardy fashion. "We are scrubbing" is how a staffer on the intelligence committee puts it. Washington is unraveling.

Remember, this was published in August of last year. It was almost certainly written many weeks earlier. Washington was unravelling. But the very next paragraph brings it home:

"What these revelations provide is a window into Babylon or the last stages of Rome," explains a source with knowledge of the multiple ongoing investigations. "Many felonies went undetected because in the Defense Department a lot goes on in secret, and these crimes grew in the shadow of both 9/11 and one-party rule—with little scrutiny. So what you're looking at is a world where money, secrecy, sex, and indulgence were all in play. Where everyone is guilty of something."

Carol Lam simply had to be stopped. The name of that article by the way is 'Washington Babylon'. I highly recommend everyone read it.

As Josh Marshall said, "By almost any measure this is a public corruption indictment of historic proportions." Indeed.

Remember, as a direct result of her investigation, the head of the CIA, Porter Goss resigned. His number three was indicted. It had been leaked that the investigation was now to include the Republican chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. There was even a Wall Street banker to complete the picture.

But if Washington's cesspool of corruption has a heart, it is the Committee on Appropriations and it's little stepchild the Subcommittee on Defense. That's where all that dirty defense money comes from. You know, phony contractors, war profiteers and Bush Pioneers.

Carol Lam's investigation threatened to shine a big bright light on the darkest, most most secretive corner of the federal government. The place where the so-called Military Industrial Complex and their armies of lobbyist go to drink from the cup that overfloweth - otherwise known as the US Treasury.

"the highest levels of government"

Then, last week, it was revealed that when Lam had "requested additional time to ensure and orderly transition in the office, especially regarding pending investigations and several significant cases that were set to begin trial in the next few months", it was rejected by the "highest levels of government."

From Lams statement:

"He [Michael Elston] insisted that I had to depart in a matter of weeks, not months, and that these instructions were "coming from the very highest levels of the government."

This is obstruction and it points right to the White House.

On a scale of 1 to 100, the Lam firing was 100 to the seven other's 3. In fact, it is highly reasonable to suspect that the other seven were merely fired to cover for ousting Lam.

Only in TV Land is Carol Lam just another fired prosecutor. And only in the cesspool of corruption that is the Washington establishment is this all just "politics".

Now, I think the politization of the justice department is a huge story. And so is, of course, voter fraud, false claims of voter fraud, and especially the use of the justice department as a political weapon as exposed by Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan's studywhich was reported by Paul Krugman.

All of this is grounds for an independent prosecutor.

But make no mistake, Carol Lam was "the real problem" and her firing was a real crime.