Posted by CeliaScheer on 12/11/08
Last updated 12/11/08

We have a standing meeting on Saturday mornings at 11:00 am at Beaner's on Central Ave (in Spirit Valley) in Duluth MN.

You are welcome to join us. We'd love to have you!

(because sometimes you just have to be with people who Get It!)

Posted 12/12/08 mstebbins Excelsior, MN

Awesome, Celia! One of these days I'll make it up there. Not this month. Maybe January. You're absolutely right: sometimes you just have to be with people who Get It.

Posted 04/04/09 Matt Anderson Mora, MN

Spread the message! http://www.disastercenter.com/media/mnmedia.html

Posted by CeliaScheer on 10/27/09

Is Limited Government an Oxymoron?

Tom Woods and Doug Casey on McCuistion

28 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpmqy9tC4uI&feature=related

Posted by CeliaScheer on 10/13/09
Last updated 10/13/09

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Jane Anne Morris: Corporate ‘personhood’ must be challenged

Jane Anne Morris | Posted: Friday, October 9, 2009 5:00 am 

When the "Hillary Clinton film" case is decided, headlines should declare, "Supreme Court affirms corporate personhood." Instead, most media will call it a free speech decision. "First Amendment rights" will play the Trojan horse hauling corporate freight.

By first putting human beings and corporations into one basket labeled "things that have constitutional rights," and then arguing about what "free speech" means, the Supreme Court has pitted the likes of the American Civil Liberties Union against advocates of campaign finance reform.

In one corner, arguing against limits on "speech," we find Citizens United Inc. (the right-wing, nonprofit corporation that produced the Hillary film), supported by the ACLU. In the opposite corner, arguing FOR limits on "speech," the Federal Election Commission and an assortment of groups supporting campaign finance laws.

Must we limit speech in order to have free and fair elections? Or must we accept corporation-dominated political debate in order to preserve free speech?

This false dilemma disappears if we reject corporate personhood - the idea that corporations have constitutional rights. Limiting corporate "speech" is not a constitutional infringement if corporations are not "persons" under the Constitution.

Corporate personhood encourages people to forget that every corporation is literally created by legislatures. Corporations of all kinds receive grants of power and privilege from the state; that's why they incorporate. In the Citizens United Inc. case, the Clements amicus brief (on the FEC side) asks, "If the people's elected representatives create legal structures for economic, charitable or other purposes, are they barred from preventing misuse of those structures for non-permitted purposes, such as political activity?"

Admitting the legal fiction of the corporation into the "rights" club has further consequences. With human beings and corporations joined at the hip in the body of constitutional law, the fruit of each people's victory in strengthening or claiming a constitutional right is plucked up by corporate lawyers and used to defend corporations against the governments that created them.

That has been happening since the late 19th century, when the Supreme Court awarded the granddaddy of all corporate constitutional rights (equal protection and due process under the 14th Amendment) to railroad corporations.

In a famous Supreme Court dissent (1938), Justice Hugo Black ridiculed the justices' grant of corporate personhood, and recounted the real function of the 14th Amendment during the first half-century after its adoption. Hint: It had little to do with protecting the rights of African-Americans, women or Native Americans.

Among Supreme Court cases about the 1868 amendment, Black wrote, "Less than one-half of 1 percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations." With corporations on the personhood wagon, rights that we think are protecting human beings are instead protecting corporations against the government.

In the current case, the biggest hope for some and fear for others is that the court will overrule Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 case that preserved a scrap of state power to regulate corporate "political speech." The widely touted "victory" was that the Supreme Court allowed Michigan to prohibit one kind of nonprofit corporation from using its monies for certain kinds of political speech.

Meanwhile, the Austin case accepts that money equals speech (following the Supreme Court's 1976 Valeo decision), that corporations can spend treasury funds on initiatives and referendums, and that political action committees are legal and constitutional. But there's more. Austin affirms that corporations are "persons" with constitutional rights, and that they have First Amendment rights, and equal protection rights.

Despite the hype and flutter around it, Citizens United Inc. v. FEC is not the big showdown about campaign finance reform. Whether the Supreme Court upholds the FEC and the Michigan law, or favors Citizens United Inc. and overrules Austin, corporate personhood will have won again.

Just as the single-payer option has been suppressed in the national health care debate, corporate personhood is all but ignored in discussions of campaign finance reform. Perhaps if "corporate personhood" made it into more headlines, we could shoo it out of the Trojan horse where it has obfuscated free speech and equal rights issues for too long.

Corporate anthropologist and Madison resident Jane Anne Morris' recent book, "Gaveling Down the Rabble: How 'Free Trade' Is Stealing Our Democracy" (Apex Press, 2008) is cited in an amicus brief filed in support of the Federal Election Commission in this case.

Posted by CeliaScheer on 10/09/09
Last updated 10/09/09

So, Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I know what Nobel intended the prize to be, but what the "peace" prize currently amounts to nothing more than a progressive beauty contest, where what you believe is more important than what you do.

Maybe, given time, he would do something worthy of getting the Peace Prize. Maybe.

They handed it out too soon. They clearly gave this award for what they want Obama to achieve - most of which would be bad for America. They seem to have a soft-spot for statists, human caused global warming advocates and anything opposed to the ideas of freedom and liberty, so Obama fits the bill to a tee -- a three-fer, if you will.

It has nothing to do with peace, just as the Gore award had nothing to do with peace and everything to do with influencing American domestic policy.

Of course, Nationalist in me loves the idea of an American winning; the Libertarian in me loathes the idea of a Statist winning and the Narcissist in me is kinda miffed that I didn't get more consideration for the award. After all, I like peace, too, plus I did as much to advance the cause the peace last year as Obama... well, at least Liberty (as the regional coordinator for Campaign for Liberty), and true liberty would give us the kind of peace that our blow-back filled foreign policies have definitely not achieved.

Posted by CeliaScheer on 09/21/09

To all of those in the traditional media establishment -

Thanks for all of your dedication over the years, but we're going to have to let you go. The simple reality is that we get more objective facts from our Facebook feeds than we do from you. Moreover, we just don't get you anymore. It's like listening in on someone else's conversation. You focus on stories and story lines that have no relevance to us.

Worse, you report from subjective, ideologically-driven premises that we know are simply wrong. See that's the thing, we used to take you at your word and base our understanding on the premises that you developed for us, but now we have the internet and we are starting to discover that your premises are simply false. We have begun to question those premises...left/right, for/against, Republican/Democrat. We just aren't buying anymore. Before the internet, we assumed we were alone in feeling this way, that we were the outliers, the kooks, but now we know that actually, you are.

You recently told us that 60-75 thousand attended the Tea Party event in DC. In the past we would have shrugged and said, "Oh, o.k." But today we have so many tools that don't depend on you which can be used to confirm or deny your claims. I have read two separate analysis of the crowd size by normal people who just took the various claims, cross-referenced them with videos,still photos, mathematical calculations, interviews, and archived material from past events. Guess what, your numbers are laughable, and easily rebuked. This is the part you're missing. In the world of virtual communities and internet activism, anyone can project a message, but it must stand up to critical review or be discredited. When the message is repeatedly discredited, so is the messenger.

Time and time again, your reporting has been challenged and rebuked; your blind partisan hackery and naked self-aggrandizing pose exposed for what it is. When GE uses its media arm to promote "going green", you don't think we see it for what it is? When there are four leftists pounding on one token conservative on your talk shows, you don't think we understand what is happening? When you take affronts to freedom and liberty and frame them as left versus right, do you honestly believe that we aren't laughing and mocking your simple-minded naivety and your assumption that we are too stupid to see through the false choice you are presenting?

Look, this is a courtesy letter. You guys do what you will, but when the bankruptcies cascade through your industry, at least you'll know why.

In liberty,
America

Posted 10/02/09 nordog Bovey, MN

What you have stated while true as far as it goes fails to identify the real problem. The problem is the likes of Socialists like Ruepert Murdock owning the news we read and hear. We need legislation banning the ownership of US media by anyone but US citizens coupled with a law limiting the size any of these media outlets can obtain,(putting competition back in the media).