Frankenstein and Sacculina Carcini of Our Daily Lifes

PROLOGUE

Victor FrankensteinVictor Frankenstein’s life story is at the heart of Frankenstein. A young Swiss boy, he grows up in Geneva reading the works of the ancient and outdated alchemists, a background that serves him ill when he attends university at Ingolstadt. There he learns about modern science and, within a few years, masters all that his professors have to teach him. He becomes fascinated with the “secret of life,” discovers it, and brings a hideous monster to life. The monster proceeds to kill Victor’s youngest brother, best friend, and wife; he also indirectly causes the deaths of two other innocents, including Victor’s father. Though torn by remorse, shame, and guilt, Victor refuses to admit to anyone the horror of what he has created, even as he sees the ramifications of his creative act spiraling out of control.

Sacculina carcini: Reasons You Shouldn’t Pick up a Hitchhiker.If you ever have a choice between being possessed by the devil and being possessed by a Sacculina carcini, opt for the devil – no contest. A female sacculina begins life as a tiny free-floating slug in the sea, drifting around until she encounters a crab. When that fateful day arrives, she finds a chink in the crab’s armor (usually an elbow or leg joint) and thrusts a kind of hollow dagger into its body. After that,

she (how to put this?) "injects" herself into the crab, sluicing through the dagger and leaving behind a husk. Once inside, the jellylike sacculina starts to take over. She grows "roots" that extend to every part of the crab’s body – wrapping around its eyestalks and deep into its legs and arms. The female feeds and grows until eventually she pops out of the top of the crab, and from this knobby protrusion, she will steer the Good Ship Unlucky Crab for the rest of their co-mingled life. Packed full of parasite, the crab will forgo its own needs to serve those of its master. It won’t molt, grow reproductive organs, or attempt to reproduce. It won’t even regrow appendages, as healthy crabs can. Rather than waste the nutrients on itself, a host crab will hobble along and continue to look for food with which to feed its parasite master.

The Corporations Will Eat Your SoulBy Davidson Loehr

A sermon by minister Davidson Loehr, November 7, 2004

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756512-452-6168 www.austinuu.org

You may know the story of the frog and the scorpion. A scorpion wanted to cross a swift river, and asked a frog to carry him on his back. The frog asked "How do I know that you won't sting and kill me as soon as you get on my back?" "Well," answered the scorpion, who was good with words when he wanted something, "then I wouldn't be able to get across the river." "Well," said the frog, "then how do I know that you won't sting and kill me as soon as we're across the river?" "Oh," said the scorpion, "because I'll be so grateful for the ride, why would I want to kill you then?"

This convinced the frog - apparently, frogs are easy to convince in stories - so he let the scorpion on his back, and began swimming across the river. They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging river, when, to his great surprise, the frog felt a painful sting and looked around to see the scorpion pulling his stinger out of the frog's back. Very soon, the frog felt himself becoming numb. Just before he was completely paralyzed, the frog had the breath to ask "Why?" "It's just my nature," said the scorpion, as they both sank into the river and drowned. "It's just my nature."

Of course, the story was never really about scorpions. It was meant as a warning against certain rare but dangerous kinds of people whose nature, like that of scorpions, is to destroy others even if it destroys them too.

I think the reason this is such a frightening story is because a person like the scorpion, a person who lacked even basic compassion, isn't quite human.

One of the scariest things we can imagine is a machine-like thing with a will, that seeks to harm us, and feels nothing when we suffer, cry, or die. Think of those android-type men in the "Matrix" movies, for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in "Lord of the Rings," or the governor of California as the "Terminator," that robot programmed only to destroy until it was destroyed.

I suppose the most famous story like this is still Mary Shelly's 1818 tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created from spare parts. For nearly two centuries, the Frankenstein monster has been a symbol of creating something inhuman, giving it life and immense power without a soul, then living to see it turn on us, as the monster even killed Frankenstein in the end.

There have been a lot of movies on this theme in the past decades. The "Terminator," "Total Recall," Darth Vader in "Star Wars," the casual indifference to life in "Pulp Fiction," the powerful forces of greed and destruction in "Lord of the Rings" - you can probably each think of another half dozen.

When I was growing up, the most powerful movie like this was the original 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." For me, it was a movie about the difference between real people and pathological people. You probably know the story. A mindless life force from outer space drifted from a desolate, dead planet and wound up on this one.

It operated under a simple program. When a human fell asleep near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person, taking their body, looks, even their memory, and draining their life, then destroying the original and taking their place. You could hardly tell the difference. They looked the same, had all the same memories. But they had no soul. They had no compassion, no feeling for anyone. The squeals of a dog getting hit and killed by a car in the road twenty feet away didn't even make them care to look.

Life didn't matter to them. Only reproducing their kind, to no other end than reproducing their kind. Eventually, like the frog and the scorpion, they kill everything. Then if the cosmic winds are right, they may blow across the galaxy and suck the life out of yet another planet. I've met a half dozen people who grew up when I did, saw that movie, and were similarly moved to think of real versus unreal people, the way kids 150 years ago probably thought in terms of real people versus Frankenstein monsters. In both cases, they were persons lacking humanity, lacking the concern for others that makes them frightening and dangerous persons.

When humans act like this, we think there's something fundamentally wrong with them. Theologians call them evil, novelists call them monsters or body snatchers, and psychologists call them psychopaths. Since psyche means soul, the word really means people with sick souls. Here's a list of psychopathic traits I recently read. Psychopaths are:

Irresponsible

Grandiose, self-absorbed

They lack empathy

They won't accept responsibility for their destructive actions

They are unable to feel remorse

They're finally quite superficial: all power, no depth; all manipulation, no connection (Joel Bakan, The Corporation, p. 57)

I can see you making a mental list of some of your ex-friends….

Now what is this about? Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths and scorpions whose nature is to destroy, even if it also destroys them? What on earth does this have to do with a respectable church sermon?

It's a way of introducing the business of trying to understand the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world. That sounds so dramatic it almost needs a science fiction movie with special effects to make it scary enough.

But I am talking about a person that we have created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense power, more money than God, and which, like the invasion of the body snatchers, is seeking to, and succeeding in, destroying the compassionate qualities of both societies and real people.

You'll think I've badly overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real person is the corporation. So let me try and persuade you.

Only a very few of these insights are mine. I got the rest from a remarkable new book of only 167 pages by a Canadian law professor named Joel Bakan. The title of the book is "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power." He also made a movie of the interviews he conducted in writing the book, and that movie, called "The Corporation," is playing to sold-out and standing-ovation crowds in theaters all across Canada right now, where it has become a national phenomenon. I spoke with the film's promoters last week, who said they are now arranging a tour of more than 200 cities in the U.S. for the movie, beginning on June 4th in San Francisco, Calif., with Austin, Tex., tentatively scheduled for July 29th, at a location still to be determined.

The author explains the nature, the character and the danger of large corporations in a few pages, and I'll try to reduce it to a few minutes. But make no mistake: this is like a horror movie. Even though there is some hope at the end, I want to scare you.

Corporations formed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, to pool the money of a large number of people in order to give the corporation more power than any single business could have. Very early, laws were passed saying investors had no real liability for whatever dastardly deeds the corporation did. This gave the corporation limited liability, but unlimited ability to make money. It's something you

can't imagine ever wanting to do with a person, isn't it?

And from the start, as a matter of structure and law, the only purpose of a corporation was to make as much money as possible for its stockholders.

By the late 19th century, the courts had transformed the corporation into a person, a legal person, and even spoke of it in that way. And in 1866, lawyers representing this newly-created "person" won a ruling from the Supreme Court saying that, as a legal person, corporations were entitled to be protected by the 14th amendment for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws." These provisions of the 14th amendment, as you may remember, were written for the protection of freed slaves after the War Between the States. But since 1866, it has been used almost never by freed slaves, and almost exclusively to protect corporations - even when they make slaves of workers all over the third world and, some would argue, within our own country. I am betting that not many of you knew that. Until a few years ago, I didn't know it either. Isn't that odd, that we didn't know that?

Since being christened as persons, corporations have done what any person would do: they have fought for both survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor their aims, and buying influence,lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents when they can. It isn't seen as evil, just doing business, just their nature.

And what are their aims? You might say that it depends on the corporation, that they are free to do whatever they want. That's not true. If the corporation sells stocks, its sole legal purpose, under U.S. laws, is to make as much money as possible for its stockholders. The corporation can pretend to care about society or the environment, as long as the money they spend makes more people want to buy their products and so increases profits for stockholders. But they may not, legally, spend money for social good unless they really aren't interested in social good, but only in profits.

Milton Friedman, who had been regarded as a second- or third-rate economist until he was adopted as the official economist of the greediest kind of capitalism, calls making money the corporation's only moral aim. He compares little acts of apparent social conscience to car manufacturers using pretty girls to sell cars. "That's never really about the girls," he points out, "it's just a trick to sell cars." Likewise, a corporation can donate to the special Olympics or civic projects, but only if it will sell more of their product. They can't do social good for the sake of doing social good.

Peter Drucker, perhaps the oldest living guru of corporate character, says if you have a CEO who wants to do social good, fire him fast!

And there are laws supporting this perspective. Ninety years ago, when Henry Ford was becoming astoundingly rich from selling his Model T Fords, he decided that he was making too much money. So in 1916, Ford "cancelled the stock dividends to give customers price reductions because he felt it was wrong to make obscene profits." (Bakan, p. 36)

Two of his major investors, the Dodge brothers, took him to court, arguing that profits belonged to the stockholders, not the company, and the court agreed with them, establishing a precedent that still rules. Corporations exist as persons only to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their stockholders. Even if it harms people. (Yes, the Dodge brothers then started their own car company.)

In a 1933 Supreme Court judgment, Justice Louis Brandeis finally made the obvious connection, when he stated that corporations were "Frankenstein monsters" capable of doing evil.

The author cites another famous case from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas Day 1993 a mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while stopped at a stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to explode, burning and badly disfiguring all five of them. During the trial, a report was introduced showing that GM knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could explode on impact, killing the car's occupants. In fact, about five hundred people were being killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new Malibu style cars were being planned. He figured that each fatality could cost the company $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the figure by 41 million, the number of cars GM had on the road. The engineer concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40 per automobile. The cost of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was estimated to be $8.59 per car. That meant the company could save $6.19 per car if it let people die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires. (Bakan, pp. 61-63)

While the jury made a huge award, it was later reduced by 3/4, and GM appealed the case. In support of GM, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a brief defending the practice of using this kind of "cost-benefit analysis in corporate decision making." The jury's decision, they said, was deeply troubling, because manufacturers should use cost-benefit analysis to make the most profitable decisions. (63) The corporation's legal makeup, its nature, requires executives to make only those decisions that create greater benefits than costs for their stockholders. Executives have no authority to consider what harmful effects a decision might have on other people or upon the environment, unless those effects might have negative consequences for the corporation. (p. 64)

Do you see what has happened here? This person we created through our own laws, by following its legal nature, can and does endanger and kill human beings in the pursuit of profit.

Now let's jump to a very different area of society, one you might not think is even related to corporations. It's the subject of our armed forces, what they are really serving, and what our soldiers are really dying for.

Joel Bakan's book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI's most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long.

"I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few

hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

Given that speech, and Butler's disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business [see so-called Business Plot also known as the White House Putsch]. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America's long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control." (p. 95)

And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation's profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)

NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, "out-sourcing" them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you. I don't think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein

monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction." (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn't anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.

And now we're at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they're cheap to replace. There's cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can't write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it's just its nature.

http://www.yuricareport.com/Corporations/CorporationsWillEatYourSoul.html

Corporate Frankenstein: A Special Essay by Tracy R. TwymanJuly 4, 2010By Tracy R Twyman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLQGhAd120&feature=related

Long before the advent of modern democratic republics, the world was ruled by priests, kings, and in some cases, priest-kings. To our ancestors in the ancient world, government had a religious ritual significance. It was the Pharaoh of Egypt who literally made the Sun rise and set each day, or so they believed. The Aztecs thought that the human sacrifices performed by the priesthood were staving off the world’s inevitable destruction. In Europe, the divine right of kings dictated that the monarch was literally the connection between the body politic and God in Heaven, and that through his or her actions, God’s will was represented.

Even as the Age of Enlightenment caused philosophical reason to trump superstition, bringing constitutional monarchy, and eventually, representative government, these beliefs and traditions simply became sublimated and took on new forms. The philosophers of the day may no longer have professed a belief in magic, but it was never lost by those who pilot the ship of state. Belief in the spiritual power of political structures instead became the purview of those who study the occult.

“Occult” is merely a word that means “that which is hidden,” that which goes unnoticed by the average man. It is no secret that many of the most powerful men and women throughout the last several hundred years of history have been members of secret societies that continue these occult traditions, and had blood lineages that can be traced back to the royal families of Europe. Not all of them are consciously aware of the traditions that they are actively continuing, but that is nonetheless what they are doing.

What we mean specifically by ritual magic is to “cause change to occur in conformity with the will” through means that are beyond the merely physical. Ritual magic is all about creating artificial mental constructs and then forcing them to have an impact on reality by infusing belief and spiritual energy into them. The constructs then take on a life of their own and reality begins to mirror them. This is called “sympathetic magic”, in which the desired outcome of the ritual is mimicked in some way, as is the case with a voodoo doll. In this process, written documents and diagrams become part of the “software” that governs how the program of the magic ritual is supposed to work. A good example of how this works can be found in Ezekiel Chapter 4, where God instructs the prophet to draw a map of Jerusalem on a tile and then act upon it in various ways in order to cause certain things to happen to the real Jerusalem. Each day that he lay upon his side during the ritual resulted in an equivalent number of years of punishment for the profligate kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

The way in which the hymns and ritual diagrams function as the “software’ on which the magic of the ritual operates is similar to the function performed by the written law in any society, as the Tablets of the Law did to the ancient Israelites. Those Tablets were placed inside of a ritual coffer (the Ark of the Covenant) and made into the centerpiece of the ritual, the altar upon which the sacrifices were made. The priests treated the Ark as if it actually contained the body of their God. This is because the Law acted as their primary bond with their deity.

To this day, legal, political, and financial systems, as well as the institutions that govern them, are all made up of imaginary ideas that we as a society make real by playing along. Indeed, the word “reality”

comes from the root word “real”, which means “royal”, because historically the monarch defined truth within his own “realm.” Reality was whatever the king or queen said it was.

Even in modern times with our modern “secular” government, the functions of government, and the exercise of sovereignty, and largely ritual practices that get their power from their spiritual significance in the minds of men. Whether they know it or not, people in government and other powerful institutions are actually practicing ritual magic. Kingship and sovereignty, worship and priesthood, money, and laws governing commerce can all be traced back to the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians and Babylonians were very clear in their records stating that these institutions were handed down to them directly by their gods, and that legal contracts were believed to have spiritual power. Indeed, most religious rituals in the ancient world, as in the modern practice of ritual magic, involve the forming of a contract or covenant between the deity and the priesthood. In ancient times, the priests made deals with the gods and spirits on behalf of the entire community.

A deity whose symbolism was associated with the very idea of a divine contract was Mithras, whose cult flourished in Rome from the 1st to 4th centuries AD, but was based on the older tradition of Persian Zoroastrianism. Mithras was known as the “god of contracts”, and was attributed with having invented the legal system. People would invoke him as a witness when drawing up a contract of any sort between two parties, and it was believed that he would punish severely all those who broke their contracts. These deals would be sealed with a handshake, which, according to mythology, was another invention of Mithras, first taught by him to mankind when he was inducting priests into his cult. In these rites, the initiates were made to shake the hand of Mithras (usually played in the ritual by another cult member), as a seal of the pact between the inductee and his new teacher, referred to in the ritual by the nickname “the Friend.” Many aspects of this ritual were absorbed into the rites of Freemasonry.

A standard belief among those who practice ritual magic is that the spirit world is subject unto man, and commanded by God to do the bidding of qualified priests and magicians, as are all of the creatures of Earth. This stems from Genesis 1:28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Furthermore, traditions based on both biblical and extra-biblical lore tell of the angels that fell from Heaven being imprisoned in the Earth, and that they can be called upon by men when needed.

Koranic tradition states that Satan and the fallen angels rebelled because God tried to make them bow down to Adam, and they refused. After being defeated in the War in Heaven, many occult practitioners believe that the spirits were bound with a duty to serve man. Islamic legends of King Solomon enslaving the demon Asmodeus for help building the Temple derive from this belief. Commonly, it is thought that you can control a god, demon, or spirit of any sort if you know and can pronounce its “true name.” When you call upon them thusly they are compelled to answer. As Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess:

“In ancient times, once a god’s secret name had been discovered, the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it. The Romans made a regular practice of discovering the secret names of enemy gods and summoning them to Rome with seductive promises, a process technically known as ‘elicio’ … Naturally, the Romans, like the Jews, hid the secret name of their own guardian deity with extraordinary care.”

It is also possible to graft a new name onto the spirit, supposedly, and oblige it to answer to this substitute name instead. While the dominion of the children of Adam over the fallen angels is based on

a covenant supposedly made in Adam’s time, it is customary for those “trafficking” with spirits to form further agreements with them, promising them rewards in exchange for their services.

But in addition to forming contracts with existing entities in the spirit world, there are many legends dealing with the artificial creation of servants through spiritual means. Just as God created Adam from clay and breathed into him the “breath of life”, in the Jewish mystic tradition of the Golem, human priests can do the same. However, in this case, the golem is more of a robot, kind of mindless. All it knows how to do is what the priest programmed it to do.

The golem is animated when the word “Emet” (“Life”) is written upon its forehead, and deactivated when the “E” is erased to leave the word “Met” (“Death”). Golems can be made of any inanimate material, even dead bodies. The art of reanimating a corpse through magic is specifically called “necromancy.” The Frankenstein story is based on a myth about a Jewish doctor who created a golem out of various human body parts stitched together.

These golem legends date to the medieval period. However, the Old Testament talks about rogue Levite priests who created “Teraphim”, which were human heads that were animated through magic and used for oracular purposes. Supposedly the teraph was animated when a scrap of parchment containing magic words was placed inside of its mouth.

Later on, medieval alchemists created the concept of the “Homunculus.” The word literally means “little man,” and using the alchemical process, you could allegedly create one that would actually germinate as a fetus and then grow into a baby right there in your flask! From that point on, the Homunculus is bound as your servant and can assist you in the rest of your alchemical works, including the creation of gold. The Homunculus plays a key role in the story of Faust, the character who made a pact with the Devil in exchange for the service of the demon Mephistopheles in his alchemical quest for riches and wisdom.

The most modern incarnation of this concept is that of the “Servitor” in “Chaos magick,” an occult tradition with its origin in the 20th century. This is basically very similar to the concept of the “imaginary friend.” It’s a fictional person that you create, usually just by making up a name, drawing a hieroglyph to represent it, and drafting a description of its purpose. You then infuse spiritual power into it through ritual, and it becomes animated, but remains invisible. However, its influence can allegedly be felt in your life, and it can be assigned any task desired, just like a demon.

Although servitors seem like a modern invention, it appears that our ancestors understood the concept as well. It is likely that most of the demons mentioned in grimoires and spell books are largely concocted by the author, although their names and descriptions may be based on others already known to exist at the time. And the ancient world was rife with compound gods that were combinations of deities from different cultures. These were usually created when one kingdom usurped another, and then amalgamated the pantheon of the defeated nation into their own. These essentially resulted in the creation of new gods that served the new master by combining the attributes of the old gods, and thus they were servitors. But instead of just serving a single magician, they were serving an entire priesthood, and indeed, an entire community.

A servitor that serves a collective and not just an individual is called, in modern parlance, an egregore, a group thoughtform animated through magic. Religions, governments, and businesses all make use of egregores, and can be thought of as egregores in themselves as well. In fact, the modern concept of the “corporation” is very much like a homunculus, servitor, golem, or egregore, and indeed, governments

are just corporations.

We are constantly told that we live in a “Capitalist” society. But what does “Capitalism” mean? The word comes from the Latin “capitalis”, meaning “of the head”, and the relation of this concept to the later financial connotation of the word “capital” is unclear. Its first use in that sense was actually the word “capitale”, meaning “stock or property.” The basic building unit of capitalism is the corporation, and these first started in the 1600s. The development of the corporation was spurred on by the improvement of sailing and navigation technology, and the ensuing boom of the shipping industry. This is why the root word “mer”, meaning “sea” is at the heart of the word “mercantile”, and why we still say “shipping” when we are referring to the transport of goods, no matter the method. Theimprovement of seafaring led to the blossoming of a new form of economy. Now merchants could sail to India, Asia, Africa, or even the Americas, and trade an unprecedented variety of goods.

But ships and crew were still expensive, and the voyages dangerous. If one trip went bad, an investor could find himself in debt for life, and worse, in debtor’s prison. So the government of Holland, a leading power amongst the sea merchants of Europe, came up with a novel concept by which numerous merchants could pool their resources and minimize their individual investment risk. They created a “corporation”: a group of investors who would collectively invest in a business venture to form a company, which then became a “legal person” according to a declaration in the company’s charter, granted by the government. This “person” was then able to enter into legal contracts and business ventures, just like a regular person. But there was one important difference: unlike a real person, the corporation could not be thrown into debtor’s prison.

Indeed, there was, and is still, no real way to force a corporation to pay its debts. When the corporation determines that it is no longer viable, it declares bankruptcy and, more often than not, leaves those to whom it owes money holding the bag. This arrangement worked out well for the Dutch merchants of the seventeenth century, and soon the idea was picked up by other countries, like Britain. Thus the formation of the famous “British East India Company”( rival to the “Dutch East India Company”) was possible.

In a corporation, the total worth of the company is divided into “shares”, which are sold to the investors as percentages of the company’s worth – slices of the pie. The more shares each investor owns, the greater his slice of the pie. The price, or value, of each share fluctuates along with the overall value of the company. Dividends from the company’s profits are paid to the investors annually in relation to the number of shares that they own. At any time, an investor may sell his shares to another investor. It did not take the Dutch merchants long to realize that these shares of a corporation could be traded almost as a form of currency. This led to the creation of the first stock exchange in Holland in the year 1631, a year after “capitale” began being used as a financial term.

It is interesting to note that there is actually a connection between modern notions of “freedom”, representative government, and corporations. In feudal times, everyone was the “subject” of the monarch, and most people lived as serfs on land owned by noble families. The word “serf” is related to “servitude”, and implied exactly that. Only the nobles and royals who ruled their own lands had any “sovereignty.” Nobody else had any rights, autonomy, or control over their own affairs. It wasn’t until trade expanded in the Renaissance that the merchant class arose to challenge the aristocracy, because they had money to buy their own land. Then they were no longer serfs, but “freemen.”

The City of London is a prime example of this connection. Few people in America know that “London” is a much larger metropolis than the 1-mile-square area that technically constitutes the “City of London

Corporation” from whence it originated. This had been a Saxon merchant city before the island was conquered by the Romans in 43 AD, and had been ruled by an “ealdorman” or “underking.” When the Normans took over, William the Conqueror promised to respect the city’s sovereignty, and basically built his kingdom around London, in cooperation with it, but not subduing it. Because of this, London became known as “the Sovereign City”, and is headed by its own “Lord Mayor” to this very day.

The traditional government of London has always been representational, and the voting power came from its “Freemen”, the members of the “livery companies” that are at the heart of its foundation. These were the trade guilds, such as the Scriveners, the Longbow Makers, the Master Mariners, the Parish Clerks, etc., and they usually had names starting with the words “Worshipful Company of …” The word “livery” is related to the Latin “liberare”, meaning “to liberate.”

You see, originally, “freedom” implied that one had, either by apprenticeship, or by payment, or by blood inheritance, been emancipated from serfdom by practicing a trade. It meant that you were free to form your own contracts and conduct your own business in the City of London, and in order to gain your freedom you had to belong to one of the City’s companies. You were granted the “Freedom of the City” when you took the “Declaration of a Freeman”, a ceremony that qualified applicants can still partake in today. These livery companies each had their own authority derived from their members, and these combined to for the “Corporation” of the City government, deriving its sovereignty from its Freemen. This concept of freedom is of course at the heart of the word “Freemason”, an institution at least partially derived from the Mason guilds of England. Later on, in the American colonies, “Freemen” were those colonists who had paid for their immigration fees through indentured servitude (usually seven years), and were now free from debt or other legal restraint.

In London, a symbiotic relationship formed between the City Corporation and the Crown of England. Indeed, to this day, the monarch observes the custom of obtaining permission from the Lord Mayor before entering the one-mile-square City. The City became the prime influence on English politics, and gained a reputation as the maker of kings. The City would always upport the Crown, as long as the support was mutual. If not, the City would make sure that someone more cooperative took over. A book called London For Ever: The Sovereign City, by Colonel Robert Blackham, published in the early1930s, explains it well:

“The City was, indeed, always loyal to the Crown when loyalty was possible, but its citizens have never hesitated to oppose the King when they considered that their rights were imperiled.

“London stood for liberty and moderation, and was the champion of constitutional rights regardless of the nature of the oppressor.

“When the King ceased to respect the laws of the land and the interests of his people, the Sovereign City drove him from the throne. When the Commonwealth ceased to represent popular government and tried to rule by force of arms, the secession of the City brought back the exiled [dynasty].

“By its action the Sovereign City expressed the national dislike for Republican government and England’s firm belief in constitutional monarchy as the best form of government for a free people.”

The Lord Mayor of the City was largely responsible for forcing the Crown of England to respect the rights of its subjects, through the Magna Carta. This document was the basis of English “common law,” upon which the law of the American colonies was founded, in which male property owners were granted the rights of “freemen.” The American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were

grounded in common law. But here in America, after the Revolution came a truly revolutionary idea, influenced by the City of London Corporation: that a government could be formed to exercise the inherent sovereignty of freemen, and not just that of a monarch. The drafters of the Constitution recognized that We the people had formed the state governments to exercise our sovereignty, and thus the States became sovereign entities themselves. Those states then united to form a confederation on behalf of the sovereign people.

Interestingly, the colonization of the New World by Britain was done through corporations such as the Virginia Company. It was from London’s docks on the Thames that the ships departed. It was they who were ultimately in charge of the first colonial governments. And although we fought a war to remove the influence of England’s crown upon the American government, some question whether we ever truly broke away from the influence of British corporations. Indeed, the design of the American flag essentially stems from that which flew on the merchant ships of the British East India Company, which featured the same stripes, with the Union Jack as the standard in the upper left corner instead of the stars that later replaced it.

In a way this is altogether fitting, since it was through corporations and commerce that men in the New World had gained their freedom in the first place. But the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence indicate that this freedom is really inherent and “self-evident” in “all men”, not just something granted if you happen to have enough money to buy property. The founding fathers were influenced by Freemasonry, natural philosophy, and the belief in these “natural rights.” For religious people, the concept can be traced back to the previously-mentioned dominion over the Earth granted to Adam by God. This is what gives a man the right to form a contract with whomever he chooses (including spirits), and that’s what makes him free.

But something malodorous has occurred over the years since the American Republic was founded. Through a gradual process, the loose confederation of sovereign states became united into a national government. Originally, according to author John David van Hove in his book The Global Sovereign’sHandbook, the corporation called the District of Columbia controlled only the city of Washington, D.C., and the American territories, but not the sovereign states. There was a government located in DC, but it was merely exercising the power of the states through donation, which could be revoked at any time. Yet over the years, and especially after the Civil War, it took on the character of a national government, and asserted authority over the states. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which is thought to be responsible for freeing the black slaves in the South, actually had a much more sinister purpose: it defined the residents of the states as “citizens” of the national corporation located in Washington D.C. As Van Hove put it recently on this program, it actually “made slaves of us all.”

By signing this Amendment, States were not only forfeiting their own sovereignty, but that of the individuals within them. All of this, of course, was done legally, by getting the sovereigns to “agree” to give up their own power. Nobody realized that’s what they were doing, of course. Once they were owned by the national corporate government, the “USA”, as it became known, could borrow from private banks and use the slave labor of its “citizens” as collateral. This is of course exactly what happened. The privately-owned Federal Reserve was allowed to take over the entire country’s monetary system in 1913 as the nation’s central bank.

The Federal Reserve began printing money out of nothing, usurping the right of a sovereign government to coin money, or to issue a “fiat” bestowing value on paper money. The government could have done this on its own, but instead they allowed a private bank to do it for them, and agreed to pay face value plus interest for these “Federal Reserve Notes”, which took he place of US dollars. The

government become so indebted to banks that it chose to “hypothecate” all of the property in America to these banks in order to secure ore funding, as part of House Joint Resolution 192, “To Suspend The Gold Standard and Abrogate The Gold Clause”, signed in 1933.

From that time forward, the basis for our original legal and economic system — private property, and the exchange of goods and services through gold and silver coin — was replaced. People were forced to turn in all of their gold to the government, and were given paper dollars printed by the Federal Reserve instead. Really, they were no longer allowed to exchange real property, and thus part of the legal basis of their sovereignty was subverted. The land beneath their feet, unbeknownst to them, had been given away to private banks. This is why people now have “real estate” instead of actual property. The word “real,” again, comes from the French word for “king”, and stems from feudal times, when all serfs were tenants on the king’s land. We are in the same situation today. Many of us are paying a 30-year mortgage, paying three times the property’s actual value, for something that technically belongs to the private banks that own our corporate government. And that corporate government thinks that it owns us too.

America’s legal system, formerly governed by English common law, became replaced with “commercial code”, and all activities of the human subjects are now governed as though we are corporate entities engaging in international commercial enterprise. Thus, civil rights were brought to the south in the 1960s, not by government finally recognizing the inherent sovereignty of the individual regardless of race, sex, or property ownership, but by reinterpreting the Commerce Clause (governing interstate commercial activity) to apply to any activity which involves a product or service that has in any way, in whole or in part, been traded across state lines. Thus, schools using pencils or paper purchased from, or manufactured from parts purchased in, another state, must submit to federal statutes, etc. Most of our federal laws are applied to the states using the Commerce Clause.

Universal Commercial Code, first published in 1952, unifies the commerce laws of all of the 50 states in the US. It really stems from international trade treaties rooted in global maritime law (the Law of the Sea). In 1944, the Federal Reserve ponzi scheme was essentially extended to the rest of the world, at the barrel of a gun. Towards the end of WWII, when Europe and much of the world had been beaten into submission through years of combat, poor and desperate, 44 nations sent delegates to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to create an international monetary policy. The alleged rationale was that if all of these countries had their currencies linked, they couldn’t afford to go to war in the future, because it would be mutually destructive. They ended up deciding to make the US dollar the “reserve currency” of the world. The central banks of other countries would be linked to the dollar, and would hold at least a quarter of their reserves in US dollars. This put the privately-owned Federal Reserve essentially in charge of the whole global economy.

The International Monetary Fund was created at this meeting. This is the corporate entity through which the currencies in the international system are linked. The IMF forces loans upon needy countries, and if they can’t afford to make their interest payments on the IMF loans they’ve already got, the IMF loans them more money to make those payments. In exchange, of course, they demand complete control over the nation’s economy. This, in conjunction with the activities of the World Trade Organization, also created at Bretton Woods, is largely responsible for turning the entire world into a giant slave labor camp that runs for the profit of a handful of banks and corporations. They dictate to all of the member countries what labor costs will be, what sort of exporting and resource development they will do, who will trade with whom and at what price.

If you wonder why all of the jobs and production have been exported overseas, bear in mind that the

US no longer has any control over its own trade policy. The IMF literally has a mathematical formula that they use to calculate what the optimal level of trade is for each country and for each commodity. They use this to “balance” the values of different currencies. And it has been their stated goal all along to try to “balance” the standard of living throughout the world so as to make currencies easier to control. Now let me give you a hint: they don’t intend to bring other countries up to our standard of living. It’s the other way around. So that is why, no matter who you elect, no matter how many letters you send and phone calls you make to your congressman, they will always pursue policies that inflate the dollar, suppress wages and export production. Because we have no control over our monetary policy or our trade policy. Since the dollar is a global currency the Fed considers the effects of their policies on global currency markets before it even thinks about how these policies affect the US economy.

Another thing we clearly have no control over since Bretton Woods is our foreign policy. The UN was created shortly after Bretton Woods. The intention when creating it was that there would no longer be such a thing as war. Coincidentally, the US Congress hasn’t officially declared war since WWII. Everything the USA has done since then has been an unofficial police action. Why? Because we can’t declare war. We no longer have the authority to do that if we want to maintain participation in all of these foreign agreements that hamstring us. But your President and your Congress will never admit that to you. They want to maintain the illusion that we are still a sovereign country.

Over time, just like the federal government, all of the state governments likewise became reincorporated as commercial entities operating for the benefit of their private owners. The same is true for almost all municipalities such as cities, towns, and counties. This can be seen in their new corporate names (IN ALL CAPS), and on their Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, which reveal all of their investments, revenue streams, and bondholders. With Bretton Woods, the private USA corporation became subsumed into a global private corporate structure. The owned slaves (the “citizens”) became pieces of merchandise, whose future human labor could be securitized and used as the basis for the formation of financial derivatives that the banks could speculate with. Each individual human resource product was identified with a corporate name (IN ALL CAPS) and an account number (the Social Security Number).This is what is known in common parlance as the “Straw Man”, a magicalcorporation created by the government that has the same name as you, but in all capital letters, and which the government asserts ownership of. If you recognize the Straw Man as being you, then you are under their control.

So essentially, our national government, our state governments, our municipalities, and we individual citizens have now been co-opted into a giant global Corporation Frankenstein, controlled by private banks. And the center of the international banking industry has always been, and still is, the sovereign City of London Corporation. It is they who assert ownership over our persons and property. Although this may chap our hides to think about it this way, the truth is that we have all unwittingly agreed to it. By responding to summons and demands made by the corporate government to the Straw Man, the Straw Man becomes reality, just as would a homunculus, golem, or servitor the first time it responded to the uttering of the name its creator had given it. And by responding that way, the servitor or straw man places itself in subordination to whoever summons it. Using Federal Reserve Notes, paying taxes, and receiving benefits from the government are all acts of subjugation.

In a way, a good portion of what’s accomplished with the creation of corporations, including governments, is separation of property from its actual owners in the eyes of the law, to shield them from taxes, regulation, and public scrutiny. Historically, monarchs and other sovereigns have used the magical power of their sovereignty to create imaginary realms or worlds in which things function by

different rules, and then create a corporate entity to rule over it in his or her steed. Several tax havens have been created in the British Commonwealth using this process. The process was perfected in the late Middle Ages by the Knights Templar, the inventors of banking, who used the special sovereignty granted them by the Pope to turn all of their preceptories throughout Europe into such autonomous zones. So the real reason our government is now structured this way is to keep us from recognizing the illusion we are all locked into. It is a confusing maze that is meant to hypnotize you. As long as we all remain trapped in the illusion, our masters have magical power over us. But this can end if we all wake up.

Corporations are not inherently evil. It is an extension of the power given to children of Adam to have dominion over the Earth and the spirits, and to make contracts with whomever we choose. We have the right as men to form corporations, just as we have the right to create golems, servitors, and homunculi. But it is a severe perversion of the natural order for a privately-owned corporation to take over an entire government and then take ownership of its citizens. We must not allow our personhood to be subsumed by corporate entities owned by others.

I have just finished The Corporation, a book by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan. It is an excellent book, very readable and accessible, and I recommend it to all who are interested in the state of our world. The book has also been made into an award winning documentary.

The basic premise of the book is that, as the corporate legal entity under present law is considered a person, then that person, based upon it's personality and characteristics, is a psychopath.

Bakan bases this viewpoint on a number of things but putting the question to a Psychologist and expert on psychosis, the assessment was as follows. The Corporation is:

Irresponsible - it puts others at risk in pursuit of its own goals.Manipulative - it manipulates people an opinion in pursuit of its goalsGrandiose - it always insisting that it is the bestReckless - it refuses to accept responsibility for its actionsRemorseless - it cannot feel remorseSuperficial - it relates to others always in a way that does not reflect their true selvesPut this all together, and you have a psychopath.

An important point to make at this stage is that the argument that Bakan makes in the book is that not necessarily are all corporations psychopaths, but that it is the very organizational structure of the corporation which makes it a psychopath. This quite simply is based on the fact that the corporation's single and solitary goal is to create profit and increase share value, all other concerns are secondary.

The sole responsibility of the officers of the corporation is to serve the interests of the shareholders, and most often the shareholders interest is to increase their share value. Altruistic desires and social responsibility do not increase the corporation's bottom line, necessarily, and thus such actions are in effect banned for the officers that run the companies, whether these officers may desire to be more socially responsible or not.

An example that Bakan uses is the story of Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop. Roddick always

refused to separate her personal values from her business, indeed, that is what made the Body Shop different; that it was a kindlier, gentler corporation. It was, and Roddick was extremely successful using this business model. Then in 1982 an initial public offering of Body Shop stock was floated on the London Stock Exchange; the money raised was needed to grow the business. Later, in the 1990's the company began to have troubles, and came under pressure from stockholders to revise it's business model. Outside managers were brought in to head the company and it was reorganized to make it more efficient. Roddick to her credit responded to the changes by working hard to maintain the companies progressive values and programs. Things came to head when during the Seattle protests against the WTO, Roddick wanted the Body Shop to take a public stand against the meeting, but the company leadership refused. "Roddick then realized that her once maverick, eccentric, unusual Body Shop had become all to usual" Bakan writes, she now looks at the initial stock offering as a "pact with the devil". The underlying moral to this story is how no matter how altruistic the goals of the executive they must always ultimately succumb to the will of the corporation goals of increasing shareholder value and the bottom line.

I do not believe that all corporations are bad, for some I think that their social responsibility is truthful, most often this is the case when social responsibility happens to also be good for the bottom line. An example is Toyota and their spearheading of the drive to get more hybrid vehicles on the road, and success in engineering the technology to make that possible. Yes, Toyota serves to gain quite a bit by selling hybrid cars and licensing the technology to other automakers, but spearheading such a new technology (new at least for the marketplace, if not for engineering) is a great risk for a company, with quite a lot of capital needed to back up those goals. I still believe that corporate officers can be visionaries and socially responsible. On the other hand, I also believe that some corporations are Hannibal Lecter incarnate.

So what to do? Bakan doesn't propose a world without corporations as some on the far left might advocate. He admits that corporations are here to stay, at least for a long time. But an important point that he makes is that the corporation is given its existence by laws, and that same law which creates the corporation can also dissolve it. And as well, as it is the law which dictates the structure of the corporation, and what the corporation can or cannot legally do, through political action to alter those laws the people can work to attempt to control the power of the corporation, at least in a functioning democracy.

In the end the book advocates a set of approaches for control the Frankenstein we have created. First is improve the regulatory system; give government more teeth in order to regulate the corporation to protect citizens, communities and the environment, next is strengthen political democracy; elections should be given back to the public and corporate manipulation of politicians should be curbed, next create a robust public sphere; we should think twice before the march down the road of privatization, some institutions should be protected from the potential vices of the capitalist system, and finally, challenge international neoliberalism; nations should work together to change the ideologies of international institutions such as the WTO and World Bank away from market fundamentalism.

While I may not believe in everything that the book advocates, I do believe in much of it. And Bakan uses a number of interesting and moving stories to present his case. I very much recommend the book; the subject matter is ever more important in the wake of somewhat recent corporate scandals, and the frightening power of the corporation internationally.

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/review-of-the-corporation-by-joel/#ixzz13mzUdRjK

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created."

- Chief Justice John Marshall, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819).

Years from now, when the fiction of campaigning for public office is dispensed with and political seats are simply bought, sold and traded on national and local exchanges resembling the stock market where other valuable commodities are negotiated to the highest bidders, we might ask ourselves how our political process came to look like a corporate version of one of those science fiction stories where humans lose control over the ever-sophisticated robots they have built and which end up taking over the earth. (Think, "I, Corporation," or perhaps, "The Corporator.")

For the corporations which the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed last month in its landmark campaign finance decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (NYLJ, Jan. 22) are just that; creatures of the states that beget them, legal fictions that exist only in the mind of the law as vehicles of commerce, protecting shareholders and management from personal liability for bad or unlucky business decisions. The corporate form is an artifice, a construct, for which special tax policies and other incentives are built in order to channel and promote economic growth. Corporations do not exist naturally, but are literally created by law, almost always the law of the particular state in which the corporation is incorporated, and with the powers and limitations that these corporate birthing statutes enumerate.

New York's incorporation statute is typical. It gives corporations spawned pursuant to New York law certain enumerated powers, such as to acquire and sell property; to sue and be sued; to enter into contracts; to borrow and lend money; to adopt by-laws and elect or appoint officers; to establish a pension plan; and to "make donations, irrespective of corporate benefit, for the public welfare or for community fund, hospital, charitable, educational, scientific, civic or similar purposes, and in time of war or other national emergency in aid thereof." The latter is clearly a reference to charitable—not political—giving, but the point is a corporation's powers are only those which are itemized in its state's incorporating statute. Whatever the corporation can do, it can do only because the state empowers it to do so; this includes its very ability to exist. Indeed, the federal Constitution is completely devoid of any requirement that states facilitate or permit corporate formation within their jurisdictions at all; the notion is almost laughable.

Yet now corporations stand on like footing with people in terms of their ability to participate in the political process. As surely as Citizens United eliminated any restrictions on corporations' independent expenditures in direct support or opposition to a candidate for office, the remaining distinctions between permissible corporate and citizen election activity will fall one by one under the weight of Citizens United's reasoning: the prohibition of corporate donations in federal elections; the lower limit on aggregate corporate contributions in New York state elections; etc.

Much has been written and said about the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision having overturned

a hundred years of precedent prohibiting corporations from participating in elections on equal terms with humans, but the notion that we Americans of the flesh-and-blood variety share our political rights with Americans of the books-and-records kind—the essential premise of Citizens United—has its legal antecedent in a 1978 case involving (not surprisingly) corporate efforts to prevent Massachusetts from instituting a graduated income tax. This is really where Dr. Frankenstein first lost control of his creation.

Before that case, First Nat'l Bank v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, the concept of corporations and political rights was a strictly utilitarian one. Those corporations whose very function is the exercise of speech or advocacy, such as publishing corporations like The New York Times or civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, were understood to enjoy the fundamental protections of the First Amendment. To deny them, would be to uniquely deny the protections of the corporate form to those "in the business," so to speak, of core political activities. But no one would have put every corporation engaged in any kind of business seeking to influence any given political situation on an equal footing, doctrinally, with real, live people when it came to the full force and effect of the first amendment. And as for the rest of the Constitution, some non-political rights enjoyed by people, such as the right to privacy or the right against self-incrimination, have been denied to corporations, while others, such as the prohibition against double jeopardy and unlawful searches and seizures, have been recognized.

Massachusetts believed, sensibly in dissenting Justice William Rehnquist's view, that what the state giveth, the state can taketh away; or at least withholdeth. That is, the special charters given to corporate entities solely through the grace of state law providing them privileges and immunities not enjoyed by individuals or other associations of people, and which allow for the enormous accumulation of economic power, should in their terms be allowed to limit the ways in which such corporate entities use that enormous economic power to influence the political process of the mere humans who lack such special privileges and immunities.

Seems fair, no?

But five members of the Supreme Court didn't see it that way in 1978, and the idea of a corporate political soul was born. Massachusetts' prohibition on corporate political activity, narrowly tailored to political activity not directly affecting the corporate entity's actual business interests and operations, was stricken.

Thirty years later, the logical consequences of that decision were brought to fruition in Citizens United, giving corporations full equal rights with people in our political process, even as they have exponentially greater power than people due to the special treatment corporations receive from states; states which are no longer able to restrain their creations in any meaningful way.

Science fiction tales of human creations—be they machines or monsters—turning on their creators always describe the moment of epiphany when the creation gains self-awareness, a knowledge of themselves as being separate and apart from—and, upon reflection and consideration, superior to—their human creators. Either for humankind's own good or simply for the good of our newly sentient creations, the only logical solution in their view is to use their overwhelming power and advantage to shape the future to their own vision of what's best.

From Bellotti to Citizens United, Mary Shelly, Isaac Asimov and James Cameron would be horrified that facts have caught up with their fictions.

Rory Lancman represents the 25th Assembly district in Queens. He is a member of the Judiciary Committee and appellate counsel to Morelli Ratner.

http://www.quintessentialpublications.com/tracyrtwyman/?p=2636http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hL5KapAyTUhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4902958711956434701#docid=-1288240032139724045http://www.trendsresearch.com/journal.html

Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free? By BRUCE E. LEVINE

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes? NO. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing -- it can feel shameful; and there is nothing more painful than shame. And when one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of

shame is not constructive action but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one’s humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington D.C. protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested any of this.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That’s the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That’s also the one that the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was over-ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Yet, even all this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more psychological way we become even more broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses. They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don’t act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shutdown and escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, “What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base.” Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the “political genius” of the Bush-Cheney regime was fully realizing that Americans were so broken that they could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study (“Social Isolation in America:

Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades”) reported that 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant in 2004 (10 percent of Americans lacked a single confidant in 1985). Sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented—or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings—or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions – or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone. Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions : Aldous Huxley predicted, “And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude.” Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults.” An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the “disease” goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a “passive-aggressive revolution” by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything – this is one reason why the Soviet Empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug “treatments” have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.”

Television, Mander claimed, helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television: (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves—and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S.

Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commericalism of Damn Near Everything : While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become “opiates of the masses.”

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don’t set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals—at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals’ focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the Question & Answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, “Yeah, every evening . . .

If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything—they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism.”

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of the few U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, “When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the ‘hope’ was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read.”

An elitist assumption is that people don’t change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist “helpers” think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake

and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/levine12042009.html

Try (Just a Little Bit Harder) By ALEXANDER COCKBURN The good news first: we’re getting the encouraging impression that more and more of you CounterPunchers out there are taking us seriously when we tell you it’s crunch time and the wolves are circling the wagons and we need your money to keep CounterPunch on the road. Many of you are doubling up on your donations from last year. The greatest fund-raiser I ever heard was a Cockney shop steward from the Dagenham plant in East London. He’d work the solidarity rallies with irresistible humor, cozening the pound notes out of trouser pockets and purses. in today’s money, it would be: “ Fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a grand… “ You get the idea?

I hope so. The not-so-good news is that we need a lot more of you to step up to the plate, and reach for the phone, or your check book or hit the online donation button.

Here are the realities of 2010. We shout “wolf” because the wolves are real. We operate on a very thin margin. That means that money can get tight for us, very quickly. We’re not sitting on big reserves. Right now, we’re nearly two weeks into our fundraiser and we’ve still got a long way to go if we’re going to make that $75,000 in the next 17 days.

Face it, now more than ever you need CounterPunch, because almost all of what passes for the progressive left here has thrown in the towel, heading for the deep shelters while blaring out the terrible news that the barbarian Republicans are at the gate. A little realism, please. If Sharon Angle takes out Harry Reid in Nevada next Tuesday, and the Democrats hold on to the Senate, you know who will be Senate majority leader? Chuck Schumer of New York, Wall Street’s most pliant tool.

Many websites on the progressive side of the spectrum are cut-and-paste affairs, a mix of columns culled from mainstream newspapers, weeklies, blogs and so forth. Every day our CounterPunch site offers you up to a dozen original articles, and often twenty across our three-day weekend site.

I mentioned some of our regular writers last week. Here are more of them: Dave Marsh on music, Daniel Wolff on Rachel Carson, Diana Johnstone on the latest movements in Europe, Peter Lee on China, Winslow Wheeler and Chuck Spinney on the Pentagon, Mike Roselle on the coal industry, Saul Landau, Ellen Brown on the foreclosure crisis, David Price on Human Terrain Systems, Stephen Soldz on the use of Psychologists at Gitmo, Julie Hilden on the first amendment, George Ciccariello-Maher on Venezuela…

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The Twilight of Obama-time

The sun will rise next Wednesday on a new American landscape, the same way it rose on a new

American landscape almost exactly two years ago.

That was the dawn of Obama-time. Millions of Americans had dined delightedly on Obama's rhetoric of dreams and preened at his homilies about the inherent moral greatness of the American people.

Obama and the Democrats triumphed at the polls. The pundits hailed a "tectonic shift" in our national politics, perhaps even a registration of the possibility that we had entered a "post-racial" era.

The realities of American politics don't change much from year to year. The "politics of division" which Obama denounced are the faithful reflection of national divisions of wealth and resources wider today than they have been at any time since the late 1920s.

In fact the "dream" died even before Obama was elected in November 2008. Already in September that year Senator Obama, like his opponent, Senator McCain, had voted, at the behest of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) and of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, for the bailout of the banks. Whatever the election result, there was to be no change in the architecture of financial power in America.

Two events are scheduled for next Tuesday. If we are to believe the polls, the voters will install Republicans as the new majority in the House of Representatives. A longer shot - they may even win the Senate.

If that happens, Obama will be in exactly the situation that Bill Clinton found himself on November 9, 1994, the day after the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Also on Tuesday or maybe Wednesday, chairman Bernanke and the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve Board will convene in Washington and decide on how much money to create – "quantitative easing" - and hand to the banks, in order to lift the country out of a Depression which has 30 million Americans either without a job, or working part-time. Their deliberations will be more consequential, at least in the short term, than the verdicts of the voters in the democratic contest.

The November 2 election will at least settle a simple question: will the Tea Party movement, as nutty a bunch as has diverted America since the Goldwater movement of 1964, have any sort of decisive political effect?

So far as the US Senate is concerned, the Tea Party has been the prime factor in keeping Democrats in certain states in any sort of contention.

Even though persuasive detective work by CounterPuncher Pam Martens and others has established that a couple of oil millionaires from Wichita, Kansas, the Koch brothers, have been sluicing money into Tea Party-related political organizations, one can make a convincing case that purely on the basis of cui bono – who stands to gain – the Democrats surely invented the Tea Party out of whole cloth.

If it wasn't for Tea Party maiden Christine O'Donnell, the Republicans would be counting victory in Delaware as a sure thing. But in a primary race, O'Donnell defeated the orthodox Republican and courtesy of her jaunty admission that she had once dabbled in Satanic practices – something this very religious nation takes as a serious disqualification for political office – she now lags far behind Democrat Chris Coons who, by the way, is already pledging that when elected he’ll be working to keep the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich.

There are other states - Colorado, Nevada, Alaska and Kentucky - where Democrats may survive because of whacko performances by their Tea Party opponents. Joe Miller in Alaska has confessed to so many lies that Alaskans may well try to revert to Lisa Murkowski. But as a write-in candidate she labors under the burden of many Alaskans being unable to spell her name, so the Democrat, McAdams,

might squeeze through.

In Nevada, Harry Reid may live to lead the Senate majority another day because of Sharon Angle’s racist ads, targeting Hispanics. Dan Maes, a Tea Party man battling to win the Colorado governorship, has impaled his candidacy with the charge that Denver’s pro-bycycle program (espoused by Democrat gubernatorial contender, Hickenlooper, currently the mayor of Denver) is part of a one-world conspiracy promoted by the UN. Maes is probably right, but as a conspiracy it’s not drawn voters to his cause. Rand Paul’s security guards in Kentucky were photographed stomping on the head of a liberal protester. Also on Wednesday, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips came under fire for an Internet column published over the weekend in which he called for the defeat of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) because he is Muslim.

If the Tea Party may yet save the Senate for the Democrats, in House races its candidates may have had the effect of juicing up Republican voters. Or not. A lot of the electorate clearly can’t make up its mind about which of their houses should be more plague-ridden.

Contrary to a thousand contemptuous diatribes by the left, the Tea Party is a genuine political movement, channeling the fury and frustration of a huge slab of white Americans running small businesses – what used to be called the petit-bourgeoisie.

The World Socialist Website snootily cites a Washington Post survey finding the Tea Party to be a “disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings.” The WSW sneers that the Post was able to make contact with only 647 groups linked to the Tea Party, some of which involve only a handful of people. “The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated,” the WSW chortles, quoting the Post. You think the socialist left across America can boast of 647 groups, or of any single group consisting of more than a handful of people?

Who says these days that in the last analysis, the only way to change the status quo and challenge the Money Power of Wall St is to overthrow the government by force? That isn’t some old Trotskyist lag like Louis Proyect, dozing on the dungheap of history like Odysseus’ lice-ridden old hound Argos, woofing with alarm as the shadow of a new idea darkens the threshold.

Who really, genuinely wants to abolish the Fed, to whose destruction the left pledges ever more tepid support. Sixty per cent of Tea Party members would like to send Ben Bernanke off to the penitentiary, the same way I used to hear the late great Wright Patman vow to do to Fed chairman Arthur Burns, back in the mid-70s. Who recently called the General Electric Company “an opportunistic parasite feeding on the expansion of government? ” Who said recently, “There are strains in the Tea Party that are troubled by what they saw as a series of instances in which the middle-class and working-class people have been abused or hurt by special interests and Washington.” That was Barack Obama, though being Obama he added, “but their anger is misdirected.”

In 1995 Bill Clinton clawed himself out of the political grave by the politics of triangulation – outflanking the Republicans from the right, while retaining the loyalty of his progressive base. Can Obama display similar flexibility. The President's aides are already confiding that the White House will move right. The question is: will his liberal base tolerate their hero colluding with Republicans in seeking to destroy Medicare (more likely than an onslaught on Social Security, which the Democrats may want to run on in 2012) in the interests of political survival. If that is the course Obama takes, look for a serious challenge to him from another Democrat, as we head towards 2012.

Last Call for Jerry Brown

Some Democrats may buck the tide. In California it looks very possible that next January Jerry Brown will shake Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hand and return to the job of governing California, a function he last exercised 27 years ago, in 1983. If he prevails this will be a huge shot in the arm for those who

believe that against all the evidence, American voters can appreciate a candidate who spends $100 million less than his opponent and didn’t campaign at all through the summer.

The first time I laid eyes on Jerry Brown was in College Park, Maryland. The newly elected governor of California had belatedly

plunged into the race for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, in which Jimmy Carter was marked as the favorite. With the help of the Baltimore political machine built up by Nancy Pelosi’s family, Brown stormed across Maryland. He was a good stump speaker, a refreshing contrast to Carter, with his earnest pledges about honesty and zero-based budgeting. Brown won the primary and went on to victories in California and Nevada.

Amid this bracing challenge to the peanut broker, I wended my way to Sacramento to view the governor in his local habitat. Whale song burst from loudspeakers in the street outside his office, in front of which was parked his demure official vehicle—a Plymouth Satellite. Stewart Brand, editor of the New Agers’ bible CoEvolution Quarterly, was at his elbow as an adviser. Tom Hayden was on the line.

By the time of my late spring visit, California had already peaked as the Golden State. Ahead lay accelerating destruction or misuse of the state’s natural assets, starting with water; the ruin of a marvelous system of public education; creation of a vast gulag (twenty-three prisons built since 1984); phalanxes of absurdly overpaid public employees; and paralysis of the legislature in Sacramento.

You can hang some of the blame around Brown’s neck, though not the seeds of legislative paralysis. Finger Earl Warren for that one. It was Warren’s Supreme Court that issued two decisions in the early 1960s—Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims—ruling that legislators should be apportioned on a “one-person, one-vote” basis. This required state legislatures to reconstitute themselves entirely by the measure of population. Rural counties lost their state senators. Los Angeles and San Francisco swelled in power. The reconstituted California Senate of forty—coupled with the two-thirds-majority requirement to pass the budget—permits a faction of fourteen senators to shut down the state once a year, and that is precisely what happens.

Nor can you blame Brown, who served as governor from 1975 to 1983, for the economic earthquakes that began in the late ’70s, when defense and aerospace contracts started to slow (California had been getting one in every five Pentagon dollars during the cold war boom); by the late ’80s as many as 2 million well-paid blue-collar workers and their families had quit Southern California.

The gulag is a different matter. Governor Brown didn’t start the “lock ’em up forever” boom—but he hopped on to the moving train nimbly enough.

In 1977 the legislature passed a new sentencing law, which Brown swiftly signed. It amended the state’s penal code to declare that punishment, not rehabilitation, was now the goal. The law ended “indeterminate sentencing”—whereby convicts could win significantly shorter sentences by dint of good behavior, self-improvement as assessed by boards including guards and prisoners. Liberals thought this somewhat ad hoc procedure was inherently unfair. Enter, across ensuing years, mandatory completion of prison terms; shriveling of opportunities for convicts to improve themselves; virtual extinction of parole; and open-ended “civil commitment,” with endless extensions of prison time. The result was a swelling population of cons, many of them now entering senility and the Alzheimer years, many of them nonviolent offenders, crammed into tiny cells or using beds stacked three tiers high in prison gyms, all maintained decade after decade at staggering public expense.

Among them are those incarcerated for life under the state’s “three strikes” law, passed in 1994. In 2004 a state initiative to soften three strikes was set to pass handily until Brown, along with several other former California governors, did a last-minute ad blitz that reversed the poll numbers and

defeated the proposition. Brown appears to have been the most enthusiastic participant; he flew to LA to do a series of ads with members of heavy metal groups, including Orgy.

Brown failed to fight the Prop 13 initiative effectively, though this prototypical Tea Party rebellion was probably unstoppable. When Prop 13 passed in 1978, the local governments that had already lost all power in the State Senate also lost any ability to raise money by increasing property taxes. Since then the only way to get dollars for education has been to go to Sacramento and beg or dream up another bond issue to place on the ballot. These bond issues can pass only with support from public employees—especially police, prison guards and firemen, uniting with teachers, nurses, etc.—and so the never-ending upward spiral of public employee salaries and pensions has no discernible limits.

By that time Brown had the damaging Governor Moonbeam label stuck on him by Mike Royko, though uncharacteristically this meanspirited Chicago columnist later apologized, just like Green Party punk rocker Jello Biafra later said he was wrong to call Brown a Nazi. It’s hard to be absolute about Jerry, though his stint as mayor of Oakland had very unattractive features. His tilt at Clinton in ’92 was most enjoyable, not least for the fun I had with Andrew Kopkind interviewing Brown for The Nation and with Robert Pollin when we jointly defended Brown’s flat-tax proposal in the Wall Street Journal, bringing down the wrath of the liberal nonprofit tax reform groups, which ardently defended the so-called “progressivity” of our existing tax code! He’s actually endorsed the appalling Peripheral Canal.

California’s problems are well beyond the curative powers of any one governor. Brown’s slogan in the mid-’70s was “We are entering an era of limits” (always excepting the prison population and the share of the very rich in the national income). So if he wins in November, there’s no need to nourish foolish hopes. I guess it’s Jerry’s last hurrah. I give him a decorous cheer, if only as homage to the ’70s, when politics were a lot more fun and more optimistic than they are now.

John Burns’ Career of Infamy

From: Johnstone Diana <diana.josto@yahoo.fr>Date: October 28, 2010 3:38:52 AM PDTTo: Alexander Cockburn <alexandercockburn@asis.com>Subject: Tr : John Burns - master of the "pack interview"

John Burns of The New York Times wrote a smear piece on Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, designed to make him sound like a criminal loony.

This interview was attacked by Glenn Greenwald.

What people are forgetting is that some 18 years ago, when John Burns was covering the war in Bosnia, he interviewed a genuine criminal loony and swallowed every word. The loony was a Bosnian Serb named Borislav Herak, whose peculiarity was to confess to even many more crimes than he had ever committed -- especially in prison in Sarajevo where he was beaten by Bosnian Muslim guards. For his interview with this prisoner, presented to him by Muslim authorities as a sample of "Serb bestiality", Burns won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

A few years later, it emerged that at least two of the "Muslim victims" Herak confessed to murdering were alive and well, living in a Sarajevo suburb:

John Burns is a successful "pack" journalist -- one who runs with the pack that unquestioningly sniffs out the story that will be rewarded by editors devoted to trashing whoever is on the Pentagon's hit list, whether it be the Bosnian Serbs, the Taliban (Pulitzer Prize number two) or Wikileaks.

The Pulitzer prize is to journalism what the Nobel Peace Prize has become to peace -- a

travesty serving the interests of the US war machine.

Diana

The Iron Ceiling

You can read more in our new newsletter about the grand British coalition, ranging from New Labour to the Conservative/Liberal Democrats, slashing at social spending. Susan Watkins, editor of New Left Review, offers our subscribers a trenchant report on Britain’s Tri-partisan Electoral Monolith and how the Slash-and-Burn Tory Coalition is picking up from where New Labour left off. Remind you of anything – like who’s now pushing for Social Security “reform” over on this side of the Atlantic? Welcome to the world of capital and its iron ceiling. Needless to say, as Susan describes, New Labour’s new leader, Ed Miliband, has already triumphantly deflated the rash hopes of those who thought this feeble fellow would represent any sort of shift to the left for New Labor.

Also in this terrific issue, released to subscribers this weekend, Larry Portis reports from France on the mass protests and the shrivelling of Sarkozy. Peter Lee gives us an amazing piece on the awful tragedy of China’s Yellow River – from Chang Kai-shek’s breaching of the levees, to the vast, tragic drama of the Communists’ efforts to master the river with the San Men Xia Dam reservoir.

I urge you strongly to subscribe now!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

The Fair Elections Now Act (S. 752 and H.R. 1826)

About the Bill

Summary of Fair Elections Now ActThe Fair Elections Now Act (S. 752 and H.R. 1826) was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and in the House of Representatives by Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.), Walter Jones, Jr. (R-N.C.), and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). The bill would allow federal candidates to choose to run for office without relying on large contributions, big money bundlers, or donations from lobbyists, and would be freed from the constant fundraising in order to focus on what people in their communities want.

Participating candidates seek support from their communities, not Washington, D.C.

• Candidates would raise a large number of small contributions from their communities in order to qualify for Fair Elections funding. Contributions are limited to $100.

• To qualify, a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives would have to collect 1,500 contributions from people in their state and raise a total of $50,000.

• Since states vary widely in population, a U.S. Senate candidate would have to raise a set amount of small contributions amounting a total of 10% of the primary Fair Elections funding. The number of qualifying contributions is equal to 2,000 plus 500 times the number of congressional districts in their state. For example:

A candidate running for U.S. Senate in Maine, which has two districts, would raise 3,000

qualifying contributions – the base of 2,000 donations plus an additional 500 for each of the two congressional districts.

A candidate running for U.S. Senate in Ohio, with 18 districts, would require 11,000 qualifying contributions before receiving Fair Elections funding.

Qualified candidates would receive Fair Elections funding in the primary, and if they win, in their general election at a level to run a competitive campaign.

• Qualified House candidates receive $900,000 in Fair Elections funding split 40% for the primary and 60% for the general.

• The formula to determine the amount of Fair Elections funding for qualified Senate candidates is as follows: Qualified candidates receive $1.25 million plus another $250,000 per congressional district in their state. The funding is split 40% for the primary and 60% for the general election.

Qualified candidates would be also eligible to receive additional matching Fair Elections funds if they continued to raise small donations from their home state.

• Donations of $100 or less from in-state contributors would be matched by four dollars from the Fair Elections Fund for every dollar raised.

• The total Fair Elections Funds available is strictly limited to three times the initial allocation for the primary, and again for the general, available only to candidates who raise a significant amount of small donations form their home state.

• If a participating candidate is facing a well-financed or self-financed opponent, or is the target of an independent expenditure, they will be able to respond by utilizing this matching fund provision.

Joint fundraising committees between candidates and parties would be prohibited.Fair Elections helps offset fundraising for, and the excessive cost of, media.

• Participating candidates receive a 20% reduction from the lowest broadcast rates• Participating Senate candidates who win their primaries are eligible to receive $100,000 in

media vouchers per congressional district in their state. House candidates receive one $100,000 media voucher.

• Participating candidates may also exchange their media vouchers for cash with their national political party committee.

Participating candidates could set up leadership political action committees but would be limited to a $100 contribution limit per individual per year.The cost of Fair Elections for Senate races would be borne by a small fee on large government contractors and for House races would come from ten percent of revenues generated through the auction of unused broadcast spectrum.

• The largest recipients of federal government contracts would pay a small percentage of the contract into the Fair Elections Fund.

• If the system proves popular like similar laws at the state level, the new system could cost between $700 and $850 million per year.

For the full text of the House version of the bill, click here.

For the full text of the Senate version of the bill, click here.

Fair Elections Now Act Summary.pdf

Statements from Sponsors"Americans would be shocked if they knew how much time Members of Congress and candidates seeking office must spend dialing for dollars and attending fundraisers. Without a fundamental reform of the way we finance campaigns, we cannot bring real reform to Capitol Hill. Our bipartisan bill will give candidates the opportunity to focus on dealing with our nation's problems and not chasing after campaign cash."

-Asst. Sen. Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

"States across the country, including my home state of Connecticut, have acted as laboratories for reforms like the Fair Elections Now Act. States have shown overwhelming success in taking the influence of big donors out of their legislative process and allowing lawmakers to get back to the people's business rather than spending their time dialing for cash. Now it is time to bring this kind of real change to Washington. President Obama showed us all how small donations and average Americans can make a difference in an election. With the Fair Elections Now Act we can bring that sort of grassroots enthusiasm and involvement to our Congressional races."

-House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-Conn.)

"It's time to return government to the people. And the first step is for Congress to debate legislation like the Fair Elections Now Act, which would help ensure that the average citizen has a voice."

-Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.)

“The American people deserve a better government than they are getting. The big banks and drug companies have way too much influence in Washington. If they want to invest in our government, let them pay their fair share of taxes rather than paying for politicians who’ll write them special tax breaks. It’s time to get corporate money out of politics and put elections back in the hands of ordinary Americans.”

-Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine)

NOTE: If you can't see a reason for supporting this Fair Elections Now Act, your head is in the sand and you could care less if big corporate businesses and even foreign corporations pick your representatives for you. There has never been a more important bill to work for approval on than this one. We must put people, of our country, back in the drivers seat for electing the officials we want and need for the betterment of our country. We are truefully getting to the point where we may not have the money or desire to change this thing around. Yes, money because if you look at the money these political parties are spending to elect the representatives they want to represent them, it's mind boggling. In order to turn this around, we'll have to come up with enough money to fight the Chamber of Commerce, big oil companies, Koch Indusries and foreign corporations. I might add that this should include our own Supreme Court Judges that made the foreign corporate influx of money possible. If the American people knew where and what amount of money came through the Chamber of Commerce, I'm sure it would enlighten them and help them to make a better choice in their voting. REMEMBER, FOLLOW THE MONEY FOR THE CORRUPTION DETAILS: Bobbyhttp://www.pushhamburger.com/

TAVISTOCK - THE BEST KEPT SECRET IN AMERICA

TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE . . . . . . . . . 30 Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4DD.--

Formed in 1947, the Tavistock Institute is an independent not-for-profit organization which seeks to combine research in the social sciences with professional practice. Problems of institution-building and organizational design and change are being tackled in all sectors - government, industry and commerce, health and welfare, education, etc. - nationally and internationally, and clients range from multinationals to small community groups. A growth area has been the use of a developmental approach to evaluation of new and experimental programs, particularly in health, education and community development. This has also produced new training events alongside the regular program of group relations conferences. The Institute owns and edits the monthly journal Human Relations (published by Plenum Press) which is now in its 48th year, and has recently launched (in conjunction with Sage Publications) a new journal Evaluation.

Three elements combine to make the Institute unusual, if not unique: it has the independence of being entirely self-financing, with no subsidies from the government or other sources; the action research orientation places it between, but not in, the worlds of academia and consultancy; and its range of disciplines include anthropology, economics, organizational behavior, political science, psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology.

The ideology of American foundations was created by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. In 1921, the Duke of Bedford, Marquess of Tavistock, the 11th Duke, gave a building to the Institute to study the effect of shellshock on British soldiers who survived World War I. Its purpose was to establish the "breaking point" of men under stress, under the direction of the British Army Bureau of Psychological Warfare, commanded by Sir John Rawlings-Reese.

Tavistock Institute is headquartered in London. Its prophet, Sigmond Freud, settled in Maresfield Gardens when he moved to England. He was given a mansion by Princess Bonaparte. Tavistock's pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines of "controlling" humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute, Esalen, MIT, <http://watch.pair.com/Hudson.html>Hudson Institute, <http://watch.pair.com/heritage.html>Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, where State Dept. personal are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations. The personnel of the corporations are required to undergo indoctrination at one or more of these Tavistock controlled institutions. A network of secret groups, the Mont Pelerin Society, Trilateral Commission, Ditchley Foundation, and the Club of Rome is conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network.

[Editor, Tim Aho's note: See Watch Unto Prayer report on The Heritage Foundation founded by Paul Weyrich with funding from Joseph Coors, who also founded and financed respectively the Moral Majority and Council for National Policy.]

Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used experimentally on American prisoners of war in Korea. Its experiments in crowd control methods have been widely used on the American public, a surreptitious but nevertheless outrageous assault on human freedom by modifying individual behavior through topical psychology. A German refugee, Kurt Lewin, became director of Tavistock in 1932. He came to the U.S. in 1933 as a "refugee", the first of many infiltrators, and set up the Harvard Psychology Clinic, which originated the propaganda campaign to turn the American public against Germany and involve us in World War II.

In 1938, Roosevelt executed a secret agreement with Churchill which in effect ceded U.S. sovereignty to England, because it agreed to let Special Operations Executive control U.S. policies. To implement this agreement, Roosevelt sent General Donovan to London for indoctrination before setting up OSS (now the CIA) under the aegis of SOE-SIS. The entire OSS program, as well as the CIA has always worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report on <http://watch.pair.com/jbs-cnp.html>The John Birch Society & Council for National Policy for information regarding CIA operations on the Christian Right.]

Tavistock Institute originated the mass civilian bombing raids carried out by Roosevelt and Churchill purely as a clinical experiment in mass terror, keeping records of the results as they watched the "guinea pigs" reacting under "controlled laboratory conditions". All Tavistock and American foundation techniques have a single goal---to break down the psychological strength of the individual and render him helpless to oppose the dictators of the World Order. Any technique which helps to break down the family unit, and family inculcated principles of religion, honor, patriotism and sexual behavior, is used by the Tavistock scientists as weapons of crowd control.

The methods of Freudian psychotherapy induce permanent mental illness in those who undergo this treatment by destabilizing their character. The victim is then advised to "establish new rituals of personal interaction", that is, to indulge in brief sexual encounters which actually set the participants adrift with no stable personal relationships in their lives, destroying their ability to establish or maintain a family. Tavistock Institute has developed such power in the U.S. that no one achieves prominence in any field unless he has been trained in behavioral science at Tavistock or one of its subsidiaries.

Henry Kissinger, whose meteoric rise to power is otherwise inexplicable, was a German refugee and student of Sir John Rawlings-Reese at SHAEF. Dr. Peter Bourne, a Tavistock Institute psychologist, picked Jimmy Carter for President of the U.S. solely because Carter had undergone an intensive brainwashing program administered by Admiral Hyman Rickover at Annapolis. The "experiment" in compulsory racial integration in the U.S. was organized by Ronald Lippert, of the OSS and the American Jewish Congress, and director of child training at the Commission on Community Relations. The program was designed to break down the individual's sense of personal knowledge in his identity, his racial heritage. Through the Stanford Research Institute, Tavistock controls the National Education Association. The Institute of Social Research at the National Training Lab brain washes the leading executives of business and government.

Such is the power of Tavistock that our entire space program was scrapped for nine years so that the Soviets could catch up. The hiatus was demanded in an article written by Dr. Anatol Rapport, and was promptly granted by the government, to the complete mystification of everyone connected with NASA. Another prominent Tavistock operation is the Wharton School of Finance, at the University of Pennsylvania. A single common denominator identifies the common Tavistock strategy---the use of drugs. The infamous MK Ultra program of the CIA, in which unsuspecting CIA officials were given LSD, and their reaction studied like "guinea pigs", resulted in several deaths.

The U.S. Government had to pay millions in damages to the families of the victims, but the culprits

were never indicted. The program originated when Sandoz AG, a Swiss drug firm, owned by S.G. Warburg Co. of London, developed Lysergic Acid [LSD]. Roosevelt's advisor, James Paul Warburg, son of Paul Warburg who wrote the Federal Reserve Act, and nephew of Max Warburg who had financed Hitler, set up the <http://watch.pair.com/FreedomHouse.html#ips>Institute for Policy Studies to promote the drug. The result was the LSD "counter-culture" of the 1960s, the "student revolution", which was financed by $25 million from the CIA.

One part of MK Ultra was the Human Ecology Fund; the CIA also paid Dr. Herbert Kelman of Harvard to carry out further experiments on mind control. In the 1950s, the CIA financed extensive LSD experiments in Canada. Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, president of the Canadian Psychological Association, and director of Royal Victorian Hospital, Montreal, received large payments from the CIA to give 53 patients large doses of LSD and record their reactions; the patients were drugged into weeks of sleep and then given electric shock treatments.

One victim, the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, is now suing the U.S. companies who provided the drug for the CIA. All the records of the CIA's drug testing program were ordered destroyed by the head of MK Ultra. Because all efforts of the Tavistock Institute are directed toward producing cyclical collapse, the effect of the CIA programs are tragically apparent. R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., writing in the Washington Post August 20, 1984, cites the "squalid consequences of the 60s radicals in SDS" as resulting in "the growing rate of illegitimacy, petty lawlessness, drug addiction, welfare, VD, and mental illness".

This is the legacy of the Warburgs and the CIA. Their principal agency, the Institute for Policy Studies, was funded by James Paul Warburg; its co-founder was Marcus Raskin, protege of McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy had Raskin appointed to the post of President Kennedy's personal representative on the National Security Council, and in 1963 funded Students for Democratic Society, through which the CIA operated the drug culture.

Today the Tavistock Institute operates a $6 Billion a year network of Foundations in the U.S., all of it funded by U.S. taxpayers' money. Ten major institutions are under its direct control, with 400 subsidiaries, and 3000 other study groups and think tanks which originate many types of programs to increase the control of the World Order over the American people. The Stanford Research Institute, adjoining the Hoover Institution, is a $150 million a year operation with 3300 employees. It carries on program surveillance for Bechtel, Kaiser, and 400 other companies, and extensive intelligence operations for the CIA. It is the largest institution on the West Coast promoting mind control and the behavioral sciences.

One of the key agencies as a conduit for secret instructions from Tavistock is the Ditchley Foundation, founded in 1957. The American branch of the Ditchley Foundation is run by Cyrus Vance, former Secretary of State, and director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Winston Lord, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[Editor, Tim Aho's note: The wife of Winston Lord (CFR, Bilderberg, Skull & Bones), Bette Bao Lord (CFR, Bilderberg), is Chairman of the Board of Freedom House whose manipulation of the Christian Right via the Religious Persecution issue is documented in our report <http://watch.pair.com/FreedomHouse.html>Freedom House: A CFR Front.]

One of the principal but little known operations of the Rockefeller Foundation has been its techniques for controlling world agriculture. Its director, Kenneth Wernimont, set up Rockefeller controlled agricultural programs throughout Mexico and Latin America. The independent farmer is a great threat to the World Order, because he produces for himself, and because his produce can be converted into capital, which gives him independence. In Soviet Russia, the Bolsheviks believed they had attained total control over the people; they were dismayed to find their plans threatened by the stubborn

independence of the small farmers, the Kulaks.

Stalin ordered the OGPU to seize all food and animals of the Kulaks, and to starve them out. The Chicago American, February 25, 1935 carried a front page headline, SIX MILLION PERISH IN SOVIET FAMINE; Peasants' Crops Seized, They and their Animals Starve. To draw attention from this atrocity, it was later alleged that the Germans, not the Soviets, had killed six million people, the number taken from the Chicago American headline by a Chicago publicist.

The Communist Party, the Party of the Peasants and Workers, exterminated the peasants and enslaved the workers. Many totalitarian regimes have found the small farmer to be their biggest stumbling block. The French Reign of Terror was directed, not against the aristocrats, many of whom were sympathetic to it, but against the small farmers who refused to turn over their grain to the revolutionary tribunals in exchange for the worthless assignats. In the United States, the foundations are presently engaged in the same type of war of extermination against the American farmer.

The traditional formula of land plus labor for the farmer has been altered due to the farmer's need for purchasing power, to buy industrial goods needed in his farming operations. Because of this need for capital, the farmer is especially vulnerable to the World Order's manipulation of interest rates, which is bankrupting him. Just as in the Soviet Union, in the early 1930s, when Stalin ordered the Kulaks to give up their small plots of land to live and work on the collective farms, the American small farmer faces the same type of extermination, being forced to give up his small plot of land to become a hired hand for the big agricultural trusts. The Brookings Institution and other foundations originated the monetary programs implemented by the Federal Reserve System to destroy the American farmer, a replay of the Soviet tragedy in Russia, with one proviso that the farmer will be allowed to survive if he becomes a slave worker of the giant trusts.

Once the citizen becomes aware of the true role of the foundations, he can understand the high interest rates, high taxes, the destruction of the family, the degradation of the churches into forums for revolution, the subversion of the universities into CIA cesspools of drug addiction, and the halls of government into sewers of international espionage and intrigue. The American citizen can now understand why every agent of the federal government is against him; the alphabet agencies, the FBI, IRS, CIA and BATF must make war on the citizen in order to carry out the programs of the foundations.

The foundations are in direct violation of their charters, which commit them to do "charitable" work, because they make no grants which are not part of a political goal. The charge has been made, and never denied, that the Heritage-AEI network has at least two KGB moles on its staff. The employment of professional intelligence operatives as "charitable" workers, as was done in the Red Cross Mission to Russia in 1917, exposes the sinister political economic and social goals which the World Order requires the foundations to achieve through their " bequests ".

Not only is this tax fraud, because the foundations are granted tax exemption solely to do charitable work, but it is criminal syndicalism, conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States of America, Constitutional Law 213, Corpus Juris Secundum 16. For the first time, the close interlocking of the foundation "syndicate" has been revealed by the names of its principle incorporators---Daniel Coit Gilman, who incorporated the Peabody Fund and the John Slater Fund, and became an incorporator of the General Education Board (now the Rockefeller Foundation); Gilman, who also incorporated the Russell Trust in 1856, later became an incorporator of the Carnegie Institution with Andrew Dickson White (Russell Trust) and Frederic A. Delano. Delano also was an original incorporator of the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Daniel Coit Gilman incorporated the Russell Sage Foundation with Cleveland H. Dodge of the National City Bank. These foundations incorporators have been closely linked with the Federal Reserve

System, the War Industries Board of World War I, the OSS of World War II and the CIA. They have also been closely linked with the American International Corporation, which was formed to instigate the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Delano, an uncle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was on the original Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in 1914. His brother-in-law founded the influential Washington law firm of Covington and Burling. The Delanos and other ruling families of the World Order trace their lineage directly back to William of Orange and the regime which granted the charter of the Bank of England.

Tavistock Institutions In The United States

Flow Laboratories Gets contracts from the National Institutes of Health.

Merle Thomas Corporation Gets contracts from the U.S. Navy, analyzes data from satellites.

Walden Research Does work in the field of pollution control.

Planning Research Corporation, Arthur D. Little, G.E. "TEMPO", Operations Research Inc. Part of approximately 350 firms who conduct research and conduct surveys, make recommendations to government. They are part of what President Eisenhower called "a possible danger to public policy that could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite."

Brookings Institution Dedicates its work to what it calls a "national agenda." Wrote President Hoover's program, President Roosevelt's "New Deal", the Kennedy Administration's "New Frontiers" program (deviation from it may have cost John F. Kennedy his life), and President Johnson's "Great Society." Brookings has been telling the United States Government how to conduct its affairs for the past 70 years and is still doing so.

Hudson Institute This institution has done more to shape the way Americans react to political and social events, think, vote and generally conduct themselves than perhaps any except the BIG FIVE. Hudson specializes in defense policy research and relations with the USSR. Most of its military work is classified as SECRET. (One idea during the Vietnam War was to build a moat around Saigon.) Hudson may be properly classified as one of the Committee of 300's BRAINWASHING establishments. One of its largest clients is the U.S. Department of Defense which includes matters of civil defense, national security, military policy and arms control.

[Editor, Tim Aho: This is the same <http://watch.pair.com/Hudson.html>Hudson Institute which gave us GOALS 2000 and authored the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act, which became the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. This law required the creation of a federal commission to monitor religion chaired by a presidentially-appointed Ambassador-at-Large on International Religious Freedom under the mandates of the United Nations' covenants and authority of the International Criminal Court.]

National Training Laboratories One of the key institutions established for this purpose in the United States was the National Training Laboratories (NTL). Founded in 1947 by members of the Tavistock network in the United States and located originally on an estate in Bethel, Maine, NTL had as its explicit purpose the brainwashing of leaders of the government, educational institutions, and corporate bureaucracies in the Tavistock method, and then using these "leaders" to either themselves run Tavistock group sessions in their organizations or to hire other similarly trained group leaders to do the job. The "nuts and bolts" of the NTL operation revolves around the particular form of Tavistock degenerate psychology known as "group dynamics," developed by German Tavistock operative Kurt Lewin, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and whose students founded NTL.

In a Lewinite brainwashing group, a number of individuals from varying backgrounds and

personalities, are manipulated by a "group leader" to form a "consensus" of opinion, achieving a new "group identity." The key to the process is the creation of a controlled environment, in which stress is introduced (sometimes called dissonance) to crack an individual's belief structure. Using the peer pressure of other group members, the individual is "cracked," and a new personality emerges with new values. The degrading experience causes the person to deny that any change has taken place. In that way, an individual is brainwashed without the victim knowing what has taken place.

This method is the same, with some minor modification, used in all so-called "sensitivity groups" or "T-groups," or in the more extreme rock-drug-sex counterculture form, "touchy-feely groups," such as the kind popularized from the 1960s onward by the Esalen Institute, which was set up with the help of NTL.

From the mid-1950s onward, NTL put the majority of the nation's corporate leaderships through such brainwashing programs, while running similar programs for the State Department, the Navy, the Department of Education, and other sections of the federal bureaucracy. There is no firm estimate of the number of Americans who have been put through this process in last 40 years at either NTL, or as it is now known the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, which is based in Rosslyn, Virginia, or its West Coast base of operations, the Western Training Laboratories in Group Development, or in various satellite institutions. The most reliable estimate is in the several millions.

One of the groups that went through the NTL mill in the 1950s was the leadership of the National Education Association, the largest organization of teachers in the United States. Thus, the NEA's outlook has been "shaped" by Tavistock, through the NTL. In 1964, the NTL Institute became a direct part of the NEA, with the NTL setting up "group sessions" for all its affiliates. With funding from the Department of Education, the NTL Institute drafted the programs for the training of the nation's primary and secondary school teachers, and has a hand as well in developing the content of educational "reforms," including OBE.

Also known as the International Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences. This institute is a brainwashing center in artificial stress training whereby participants suddenly find themselves immersed in defending themselves against vicious accusations. NTL takes in the National Education Association, the largest teacher group in the United States. While officially decrying "racism", it is interesting to note that NTL, working with NEA, produced a paper proposing education vouchers which would separate the hard-to-teach children from the brighter ones, and funding would be allocated according to the number of difficult children who would be separated from those who progressed at a normal rate. The proposal was not taken up.

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance & Commerce Founded by Eric Trist One of the "brain trusts" of Tavistock, Wharton has become one of the more important Tavistock in so far as "Behavioral Research" is concerned. Wharton attracts clients such as the U.S. Department of Labor---which teaches how to produce "cooked" statistics at the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates Incorporated. This method was very much in demand as we came to the close of 1991 with millions more out of work than was reflected in USDL statistics. Wharton's ECONOMETRIC MODELING is used by every major Committee of 300 company in the United States, Western Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Institute for Social Research Among its clients are The Ford Foundation, U.S.Department of Defense, U.S.Postal Service and the U.S. Department of Justice. Among its studies are "The Human Meaning Of Social Change", "Youth in Transition" and "How Americans View Their Mental Health".

Institute For The Future This is not a typical Tavistock institution in that it is funded by the Ford Foundation, yet it draws its long-range forecasting from the mother of all think tanks. Institute for the Future projects what it believes to be changes that will be taking place in time frames of fifty years. So

called "DELPHI PANELS" decide what is normal and what is not, and prepare position papers to "steer" government in the right direction to head off such groups as "people creating civil disorder." (This could be patriotic groups demanding abolition of graduated taxes, or demanding that their right to bear arms is not infringed.) This institute recommends action such as liberalizing abortion laws, drug usage and that cars entering an urban area pay tolls, teaching birth control in public schools, requiring registration of firearms, making use of drugs a non-criminal offense, legalizing homosexuality, paying students for scholastic achievements, making zoning controls a preserve of the state, offering bonuses for family planning and last, but most frightening, a Pol Pot Cambodia-style proposal that new communities be established in rural areas, (concentration camp compounds). As can be observed, many of their goals have already been more than fully realized.

INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES (IPS) One of the "Big Three", IPS has shaped and reshaped United States policies, foreign and domestic, since it was founded by James P. Warburg and the Rothschild entities in the United States. Its networks in America include the League for Industrial Democracy. Lead players in the League for Industrial Democracy have included Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Irwin Suall of the ADL, Eugene Rostow, Arms control negotiator, Lane Kirkland, Labor Leader, and Albert Shanker. IPS was incorporated in 1963 by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnett, both highly trained Tavistock Institute graduates. The objectives of IPS came from an agenda laid down for it by the Tavistock Institute, one of the most notable being to create the "New Left" as a grass roots movement in the U.S. Its been said that Barnett and Raskin controlled such diverse elements as the Black Panthers, Daniel Ellsberg, National Security Council staff member Halprin, The Weathermen Underground, the Venceramos and the campaign staff of candidate George McGovern. No scheme was too big for IFS and its controllers to take on and manage.

Through its many powerful lobbing groups on Capitol Hill, IPS relentlessly used its "Big Stick" to beat Congress. IPS has a network of lobbyists, all supposedly operating independently but in actual fact acting cohesively, so that Congressmen are pummeled from all sides by seemingly different and varied lobbyists, In this way, IPS was, and is still, able to successfully sway individual Representatives and Senators to vote for "the trend, the way things are going." By using key pointmen on Capitol Hill, IPS was able to break into the very infrastructure of our legislative system and the way it works.

IPS became, and remains to this day, one of the most prestigious "think tanks" controlling foreign policy decisions, which we, the people, foolishly believe are those of our law makers. By sponsoring militant activism at home and with links to revolutionaries abroad, by engineering such victories as "The Pentagon Papers," besieging the corporate structure, bridging the credibility gap between underground movements and acceptable political activism, by penetrating religious organizations and using them to sow discord in America, such as radical racial policies under the guise of religion, using establishment media to spread IPS ideas, and then supporting them, IPS has lived up to the role which it was founded to play.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report on <http://watch.pair.com/FreedomHouse.html>Freedom House: "Grants (for the IPS) came from the Samuel Rubin Foundation and the Stern Family Fund. Samuel Rubin was himself a member of the elite Comintern of the Communist Party, founded by none other than Lenin himself. Billionaire Armand Hammer assisted Rubin in making the fortunes which helped launch IPS. Philip Stern, an IPS trustee, was the president of Stern Fund. The executive director of the Stern Fund, David R. Hunter, was previously an official of The National Council and the World Council Of Churches. (Dr. James W. Wardner, Unholy Alliances, p.125)]

STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Jesse Hobson, the first president of Stanford Research Institute, in a 1952 speech made it clear what lines the institute was to follow. Stanford can be described as one of the "jewels" in Tavistock's Crown in its rule over the United States. Founded in 1946 immediately after the close of WWII, it was presided over by Charles A. Anderson, with emphasis on mind control research and "future sciences." Included under the Stanford umbrella was Charles F. Kettering Foundation which developed the "Changing Images of Man" upon which the Aquarian Conspiracy rests.

Some of Stanford's major clients and contracts were at first centered around the defense establishment but, as Stanford grew, so, did the diversity of its services:

Applications of Behavioral Sciences to Research Management Office of Science and Technology

SRI Business Intelligence Program

U.S. Department of Defense Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering

U.S. Department of Defense Office of Aerospace Research

Among corporations seeking Stanford's services were Wells Fargo Bank, Bechtel Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Blyth, Eastman Dillon and TRW Company. One of Stanford's more secret projects was extensive work on chemical and bacteriological warfare (CAB) weapons. Stanford Research is plugged into at least 200 smaller "think tanks" doing research into every facet of life in America. This is ARPA networking and represents the emergence of probably the most far reaching effort to control the environment of every individual in the country. At present Stanford's computers are linked with 2500 "sister" research consoles which include the CIA, Bell Telephone Laboratories, U.S. Army Intelligence, The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), Rand, MIT, Harvard and UCLA. Stanford plays a key role in that it is the "library", cataloging all ARPA documentation.

"Other agencies".....one can use one's imagination here, are allowed to search through SRI's "library" for key words, phrases, look through sources and update their own master files with those of Stanford Research Center. The Pentagon uses SRI's master files extensively, and there is little doubt that other U.S. Government agencies do the same. Pentagon "command and control" problems are worked out by Stanford.

While ostensibly these apply only to weapons and soldiers, there is absolutely no guarantee that the same research could not , and will not be turned to civilian applications. Stanford is known to be willing to do anything for anyone.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report <http://watch.pair.com/dolphin.html>Lambert Dolphin & the Great Sphinx, which documents the connections of SRI's Lambert Dolphin with the Edgar Cayce Foundation and The Discernment Ministries.]

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT), ALFRED P. SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

This major institute is not generally recognized as being a part of Tavistock U.S.A. Most people look upon it as being a purely American institution, but that is far from the truth. MIT- Alfred Sloan can be roughly divided into the following groups:

Contemporary Technology Industrial Relations NASA-ERC Computer Research Laboratories Office of Naval Research Group, Psychology Systems Dynamics

Some of MIT's clients are:

American Management Association Committee for Economic Development GTE Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) NASA National Academy of Sciences National Council of Churches Sylvania TRW U.S. Army U.S. Department of State U.S. Navy U.S. Treasury Volkswagen Company

RAND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

Without a doubt, RAND is THE think tank most beholden to Tavistock Institute and certainly the RIIA's most prestigious vehicle for control of United States policies at every level. Specific RAND policies that became operative include our ICBM program, prime analyses for U.S. foreign policy making, instigator of space programs, U.S. nuclear policies, corporate analyses, hundreds of projects for the military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in relation to the use of mind altering drugs like peyote, LSD (the covert MK-ULTRA operation which lasted for 20 years).

[Editor, Tim Aho's note: The founder of the Rand Corporation, Herman Kahn, also founded the Hudson Institute in 1961. In Educating for the New World Order, B.K. Eakman tells of a training manual for "change agents" developed for the U.S. government by Rand Corporation: ". . . a how-to manual with a 1971 U.S. Office of Education contract number on it entitled 'Training for Change Agents'; seven volumes of 'change agent studies' commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education to the Rand Corporation in 1973-74; scores of other papers submitted by behaviorist researchers who had obtained grants from the U.S. Office of Education for the purpose of exploring ways to 'freeze' and 'unfreeze' values, 'to implement change,' and to turn potentially hostile groups and committees into acquiescent, rubber-stamp bodies by means of such strategies as the 'Delphi Technique.'" (p. 118)]

Some of RAND's clients include:

American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) Chase Manhattan Bank International Business Machines (IBM) National Science Foundation Republican Party TRW U.S. Air Force U.S. Department of Health U.S. Department of Energy

There are literally THOUSANDS of highly important companies, government institutions and organizations that make use of RANDS's services. To list them all would be impossible. Among RAND's specialities is a study group that predicts the timing and the direction of a thermonuclear war, plus working out the many scenarios based upon its findings. RAND was once accused of being

commissioned by the USSR to work out terms of surrender of the United States Government, an accusation that went all the way to the United States Senate, where it was taken up by Senator Symington and subsequently fell victim to scorn poured out by the establishment press. BRAINWASHING remains the primary function of RAND.

These institutions are among those that fund The UNIFORM LAW FOUNDATION, whose function is to ensure that the Uniform Commercial Code remains the instrument for conducting business in the United States.

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