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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 5/1/11

Made In America; Real Monsters-- Corporate Personhood

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Corporations didn't start in America. The West Indies Trading Company was engaging in shock doctrine tactics-- undercutting local workers and industries-- over 200 years ago. 
But the USA has created the most destructive, horrific, human life and planet threatening monsters ever. These are very similar to the soulless monsters that are portrayed in the TERMINATOR movie series-- inhuman THINGS that see humans as inconveniences to be gotten out of the way. 
flickr image by  thekirbster

Corporations have become monsters for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that the Supreme court, through the actions of a corrupt former railroad CEO (Railroad company heads were the Banksters of the late 19th century US) that led to corporations being given the rights of corporate personhood. 
Thom Hartmann  wrote the definitive book on this,  Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance.
While he was working on the book, Thom sent me a draft, for feedback. That's when it hit me. For over 100 years, science fiction writers have predicted a time when humans and the earth would be attacked by monsters, by aliens, by "Terminators" which attempt to wipe out humans and terraform the earth for their alien needs. Corporations exercising their corporate personhood rights are those monsters. 

Save Humanity Kill Corporate Personhood
The way to save the planet and rescue humanity from what could really be extinction we need to kill corporate personhood-- erase it from the books, cancel the crooked supreme court "decision" that Thom Hartmann has documented was dishonestly written into the books. 

It could be as simple as a Supreme Court majority invalidating the alleged decision, made in the Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case.

When Chief Justice Roberts and his four corporatist cohorts overturned 100 years of election law precedents, they set a precedent that should make it easier for a supreme court with five Democrat appointed judges to make a clear statement that overturns Citizens United AND establishes a clear decision against corporate personhood. 

One person-- that's what's protecting the worst monster on the planet-- one ravaging industries and millions of jobs in the US, cultures and communities.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes in American Prospect about Walmart's use of corporate personhood as a defense against a Supreme Court case, using descriptions similar to the ones I've used for "monster" corporations.:

If Wal-Mart is a person, as the Supreme Court contends, it's a behemoth terrorizing the countryside. But when it comes to workers' rights, it remains curiously immune from lawsuits...
So if Wal-Mart is a life-form, it is an unclassifiable one, at least in ordinary terrestrial terms. It eats, devouring acre after acre and town after town. It grows without limit, sometimes assuming new names -- Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the U.K. -- to trick the unwary. Yet in its defense in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart suit, Wal-Mart claims to have no idea what it's doing. This could be a metaphor for capitalism or perhaps a sign that a successful alien invasion is in progress. The only thing that's for sure is, should the Supreme Court decide in favor of Wal-Mart, we'll have a lot more of these creatures running around: monstrously oversized "persons" who insist that they can't control their own actions.
Chris Hedges says, "The question is, how do we stop the powerful from doing as much damage as possible." Ending corporate personhood is one major way.
We need to end corporate personhood. It is at the root of the problems facing and threatening social justice, even democracy itself in the US and beyond. Invented in the US as a malignant interpretation of the 14th Amendment-- the one meant to give blacks equal rights-- corporate personhood is a blight upon the US and humanity. 
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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