Thinking Outside the Box

The Corporate Achilles Heel by Rick Casey Protest rally on the first anniversay of Citizen's United, Boulder, CO January 21, 2011 Introductory Remarks I'd like to thank the Boulder County Democrats, the Coffee Party, and especially Move To Amend, its founders and its many volunteers, and all the other people who are here today working on these fundamental and vitally important issues: corporate personhood and the disastrous Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United. Both must be reversed; but today I want to emphasize what I consider the Achilles Heel of the power of corporations: namely, the legal fiction that we call corporate personhood. The Setting Corporations are some of most powerful organizations in the history of the world. It's said that of the 100 largest economies on the planet, 51 of them are corporations -- and that statistic is several years old. Maybe it's even more now. They have grown so powerful that it is difficult indeed for even the US government to ...

With the nation grieving over the recent shooting in Tuscon, there has barely been any acknowledgement in the mainstream media of the fact that Jared Loughner is afflicted with a mental illness (i.e. a brain disorder), but did not get help. On Democracy Now's show this morning (Jan 11, 2011) however, there was a balanced and compassionate interview of one Loughner's past classmates in a poetry class. It demonstrated that this young man clearly stood out from his classmates due to poor socialization skills, but was highly functioning, enough to be attending classes at a community college. Even though symptoms of his mental illness had been apparent since high school, he nor his parents apparently ever sought, or been offered, treatment for it. Instead, the community college he was attending last fall withdrew him from class, and forbade him from coming on campus until he had obtained treatment, and been given a clear bill of health from a mental health professional that he was ...