Van Jones/MoveOn 'Rebuilding the Dream' coalition

The Icebergs Cometh: Retaking the USA Titanic Before the 2012 Elections: "

he Icebergs Cometh: Retaking the USA Titanic Before the 2012 Elections

• By Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins
  August 8, 2011
  
  

In the wake of a super-nova of exploded hope in President Obama, a power vacuum is now spinning in our political universe. A desperate need to fill the void (lest it someday be filled with the unthinkable; a babbling Bachmann or weeping Boehner) has led to a frenzy of organizing among mainstream Democrats and Progressives.

Some, like the Van Jones/MoveOn "Rebuilding the Dream" coalition, are attempting to rekindle that obliterated Obama flame before the 2012 elections. To accomplish this they are strategically pointing the blame finger at "evil corporations," while carefully avoiding drawing a direct line from corporate headquarters (like those of Goldman Sachs, GE, and Monsanto) to the White House. Others, like the New Progressive Alliance (NPA), led by activists such as Cindy Sheehan, Cornel West and David Swanson, are taking a more honest and radical position, boldly calling out the Democratic Party leadership as sold-out corporate shills, incapable of reform and unworthy of further support. In other words, the power vacuum of the Left has a deeper split within - a true black hole that threatens to pull all of us into oblivion between now and November, 2012.

Free-floating in the void are record numbers of left-leaning Americans who lost all hope after what they perceive as Obama's Great Betrayal, followed by the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, unleashing an unfettered free market for the rich to buy our candidates. (We may now envision them as a far less cool version of NASCAR drivers, slathered with the logos of their corporate sponsors). Many activists have likewise despairingly turned their efforts away from the grim spectre of national politics toward non-electoral campaigning, movement building, and direct action.

Yet we all realize that the 2012 elections will have major consequences for every aspect of our accelerating Crisis: global warming, permanent war, redlining economic and ecological collapse, and the growing power of the National Security State.

We cannot, in the end, afford to drift into personal oblivion, no matter how the Pharmaceutical Industry offers help in doing so. Too much is at stake.

The NPA and a large number of organizations such as RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America have been hard at work on developing a body of comprehensive new Progressive platforms. This, ostensibly to galvanize Americans to rally again for the values that once defined the Democratic Party. All well and good, but we've got to have inspiring candidates to rally around, don't we? The lesson learned from Obama is that pretty words do not action make - and the Establishment Democrats and their Wall Street backers tell us what we want to hear in order to keep themselves in power. We also know that our two-party system is walled like a fortress against a third party uprising.

The NPA, for its part, is undaunted by this Corporate citadel that was once our government. They are planning the long-needed coup - an electoral insurgency of true Progressive candidates to challenge the compromised Democrats, and if that doesn't work, redoubling strength and charging forward as a new party.

Do they have the right positions?

Definitely!

Do they have the support numbers?

Yes!

Can they win?

No.

Not yet, anyway. The problem is that some of the changes the NPA - or any true Progressive coalition - will make once in power, need to be made before they can take power.

The reason we now suffer a ruthless Corporatocracy is because we no longer control our own democratic system. Puppet candidates have rigged themselves into office and manipulated our government to hand corporations the keys to the kingdom. We the People are now the rabble outside the gates, reduced to begging the rulers within to please be just a little less ruthless. Funny how they don't listen.

Our elections have been bought or stolen for decades, but the People are only now waking up. Most of the public (including Al Gore) knows that George W. Bush stole the Presidency in 2000, and many are aware (including John Kerry) that he stole it again in 2004. Republican operatives apparently decided not to steal the White House in 2008 once it became clear that Obama was headed for a landslide. But whether elections - or politicians - are literally stolen, or simply bought (including Barack Obama), the outcome is the same.

The democratic system itself is rigged against us - and this rigging is not just another Progressive issue, like ending the Wars on Terror and Drugs, or securing universal healthcare, or getting the 100,000 toxic chemicals out of our bodies, or preventing Monsanto from taking over our food and seed supply. To offer a descriptive metaphor; these issues and many more are where our ship of state is heading. The democratic process is who is controlling the ship.

Until not only Progressives, but also Radicals and Populists, unite and organize strategically, en masse, to take control of our ship of state, we are unlikely to ever wrest power from the super-wealthy elite and their global military-industrial complex.

So, how is the system rigged against us?

* Corporate campaign finance. Unless you are willing to be sponsored by the mega-corporations, you will never get out of the political gate. That's why it actually makes no sense to say Obama "betrayed" his constituency, or that he's a naive political player (from Chicago? Are you kidding?) Like the rest at the top, Obama is beholden to his powerful corporate backers. Reports from the Center for Responsive Politics indicate he's raising more money than ever from Wall Street in preparation for 2012 - as he must! You pay to play. Is Obama a good guy? Is he naive? Is he a Manchurian Candidate? It doesn't really matter. It's not about him. It's about the System.

* Corporate media control of elections. Unless you're saying what the small cadre of uber-powerful corporate media controllers want to hear, you'll be relegated to late-night Public Access and online blogs. And if you are a serious contender, you may not make it within a stone's throw of top-level televised debates (Ralph Nader wasn't even allowed in the audience of the 2000 Presidential Debates, blocked by three state troopers). The corporate media actively maintain the status quo with unrivaled power. Until there is free, fair and equal coverage of every candidate, there will be no real freedom of information within the sphere of elections - and no real democracy.

* Corporate control of computerized voting machines. If the good guys and gals manage to make it far enough to pose a real threat to the corporate Establishment, the voting booth is where they'll get the knife in the back - though most of them won't even know it. Over 40 years of citizen investigation has proven that our votes are regularly stolen within secretly programmed "black box" computerized voting machines. These Trojan Horses are owned by a handful of incestuous corporations with long criminal histories and strong ties to extremist, right-wing groups. Their machines now count about 99% of American ballots. Many of the Touchscreens don't even produce a paper audit trail to check the veracity of the totals (though even this audit is not sufficient - every ballot must be counted by hand, at the precinct on election day, not days or weeks later).

Combine the above with a laundry list of now-standard dirty tricks, from purging the voter lists and voter intimidation to phony robo-calls giving voters the wrong information on how to cast a ballot.

See our list of resources below for more information on how our elections are undermined.

The hour is more than late. We can now say with very little hyperbole that Fascist boots can be heard in the hall, and if we don't want them on the back of our necks, we have to think strategically. It's not enough that we are right - we have to win. This extremist corporatist junta is ruthless, and if you think things are bad now, just wait and do nothing. Only two things will stop them: a violent revolution, or a non-violent revolution. We prefer the latter.

Currently a number of Progressive leaders are issuing calls for major gatherings, conferences, protests and uprisings in the coming year. So far, these efforts are unaligned, and not focused on a strategic recapture of our democratic process before November, 2012. Many of the leadership say they believe it's impossible to achieve.

It is not impossible.

We - the Progressives, Radicals, and Populists, who constitute the majority in America - must focus on aligning strategically to win by stunning landslides in 2012, running candidates on the newly revised Platforms that truly represent the Will of the People. We must first outlaw the use of riggable computerized voting machines and institute a public paper ballot count with appropriate procedure and oversight. We must demand full media access for candidates. And we must threaten a full-blown Egypt-style revolution if Citizen's United is not immediately overturned.

It is not impossible.

Now is the time for fierce honesty and foresight, a recognition that business as usual is no longer acceptable. We've got to abandon the "my issue is more important than your issue" mentality that has so long divided and crippled the Movement.

If we begin now, immediately - today! - we just might be able to turn the USA Titanic around before the madmen at the helm slam us all into the icebergs ahead.

* To discuss and plan strategy for overthrowing the Corporatocracy and reclaiming democracy for the People before 2012, please join the discussion at the People's Congress.

* To support the powerful, vibrant movement for clean recall elections in Wisconsin, visit WI Citizens for Election Protection and Election Integrity on Facebook.

* Register to attend the upcoming Democracy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin on August 24-28.


Victoria Collier is Editor of www.votescam.org
Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Organic Consumers Association


Further Resources on election fraud and citizen movements:

www.votescam.org
www.bradblog.org
www.blackboxvoting.org
www.handcountedpaperballots.org
www.voterescue.org
www.electionintegrity.org
www.voteraction.org
www.reclaimdemocracy.org
www.thealliancefordemocracy.org
www.poclad.org

so-called leaders

Alt_News : Message: Fw: Elites "Shocked" at Violent UK Riots: "No one expected this. The so-called leaders . . . thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it aint Twitter.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

What I see here is the end of the corporation... the elite have all incorporated themselves into LLC's to control more with less liabilities and less responsibilities. Governments across the Globe are now all Corporate Cartels to exploit resources and avoid further responsibilities at the expense of citizens and the environment. We will see the end of this during this next generation. The next British revolution is coming. The ruling class that has destroyed all hope and education to create soldiers for continued exploitation and imperialism will soon find these troops are more inclined to "string them up."

Serves them right. . .

Why We Can Thank Republicans for a Double-dip Recession

Republicans repeatedly assured the nation that once the debt-limit deal was done, the economy would bounce back. Just the opposite seems to be happening.

August 5, 2011 |

John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got "90 percent of what we wanted" from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today's mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I'm being a bit facetious – but only a bit. It's always dangerous to read too much into one day's move in the stock market.

Yet the stock sell-off -- not just today's, but that of the last days -- cannot be easily dismissed. It marks Wall Street's largest losing streak since 2008.

Republicans repeatedly assured the nation that once the debt-limit deal was done -- capping spending, cutting the budget deficit, and getting "90 percent" of what they wanted -- the economy would bounce back.

Just the opposite seems to be happening.

Call it the Republican's double-dip recession.

Wall Street investors aren't ideologues. They don't obsess about budget deficits ten years from now, or the size of the government. One day doesn't make a trend, but a giant sell-off like this is motivated by hard, cold realities.

Here are the two hard, cold realities investors are most worried about:

First, the economy looks like it's dead in the water. The Commerce Department reports almost no growth in the first half of the year. And job growth is just about at a standstill. Far fewer jobs were generated in May and June than necessary just to keep up with the growth in the potential labor force -- meaning the employment picture is actually worsening.

Secondly, investors now know the federal government's hands are tied. The original stimulus is over; the Fed's "quantitative easing" is over.

This week's deal over the debt ceiling cinches it. The market is now on its own -- without enough rocket power get out of the continuing gravitational pull of the Great Recession.

Now that the deal is done, Obama and the Democrats will have a much harder time passing anything close to the stimulus necessary to breach the gap between what consumers (who are 70 percent of the economy) are willing to spend and what the economy can produce at or near full-employment.

Not incidentally, the Commerce Department's revised data for what happened to the economy in 2008 and 2009 shows the drop to have been far greater than had been supposed. The economy plunged 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 -- the steepest quarterly decline in more than half a century. And in 2009 household buying declined almost 2 percent (compared with a previous estimate of 1.2 percent). That's the biggest contraction in almost sixty years.

This means the original stimulus should have been much larger in order to offset the drop. With cash-starved state and local governments simultaneously scaling back their own spending, the federal stimulus needed to be even bigger.

So much for Republican claims that the original stimulus "didn't work." Of course it didn't, given the size of the slide.

It was never a debt crisis. The debt crisis was manufactured. It's been a jobs, wages, and growth crisis all along. And that reality has finally caught up with us.

Now that we're slouching toward a double-dip recession, the only hope is voters will tell their members of Congress -- who are now on recess back home -- to stop obsessing about future budget deficits and get to work on the real crisis of unemployment, falling wages, and no growth.

We need a bold jobs bill to restart the economy. Eliminate payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income for two years. Recreate the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The federal government should lend money to cash-strapped states and local governments. Give employers tax credits for net new jobs. Amend the bankruptcy laws to allow distressed homeowners to declare bankruptcy on their primary residence. Extend unemployment insurance. Provide partial unemployment benefits to people who have lost part-time jobs. Start an infrastructure bank.

And more.

The jobs bill should be number one on the nation's agenda. It should have been all along.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. His homepage is www.robertreich.org.

America In Decline -- In These Times

America In Decline -- In These Times: "America In Decline
By Noam Chomsky

ws » August 5, 2011 » Web Only

America In Decline

By Noam Chomsky

The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

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“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.

The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s was mostly self-delusion.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

Corporate power’s ascendancy over politics and society—by now mostly financial—has reached the point that both political organizations, which at this stage barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

For the public, the primary domestic concern is unemployment. Under current circumstances, that crisis can be overcome only by a significant government stimulus, well beyond the recent one, which barely matched decline in state and local spending—though even that limited initiative probably saved millions of jobs.

For financial institutions the primary concern is the deficit. Therefore, only the deficit is under discussion. A large majority of the population favor addressing the deficit by taxing the very rich (72 percent, 27 percent opposed), reports a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Cutting health programs is opposed by overwhelming majorities (69 percent Medicaid, 78 percent Medicare). The likely outcome is therefore the opposite.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed how the public would eliminate the deficit. PIPA director Steven Kull writes, “Clearly both the administration and the Republican-led House (of Representatives) are out of step with the public’s values and priorities in regard to the budget.”

The survey illustrates the deep divide: “The biggest difference in spending is that the public favored deep cuts in defense spending, while the administration and the House propose modest increases. The public also favored more spending on job training, education and pollution control than did either the administration or the House.”

The final “compromise”—more accurately, capitulation to the far right—is the opposite throughout, and is almost certain to lead to slower growth and long-term harm to all but the rich and the corporations, which are enjoying record profits.

Not even discussed is that the deficit would be eliminated if, as economist Dean Baker has shown, the dysfunctional privatized health care system in the U.S. were replaced by one similar to other industrial societies’, which have half the per capita costs and health outcomes that are comparable or better.

The financial institutions and Big Pharma are far too powerful for such options even to be considered, though the thought seems hardly Utopian. Off the agenda for similar reasons are other economically sensible options, such as a small financial transactions tax.

Meanwhile new gifts are regularly lavished on Wall Street. The House Appropriations Committee cut the budget request for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the prime barrier against financial fraud. The Consumer Protection Agency is unlikely to survive intact.

Congress wields other weapons in its battle against future generations. Faced with Republican opposition to environmental protection, American Electric Power, a major utility, shelved “the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming,” The New York Times reported.

The self-inflicted blows, while increasingly powerful, are not a recent innovation. They trace back to the 1970s, when the national political economy underwent major transformations, ending what is commonly called “the Golden Age” of (state) capitalism.

Two major elements were financialization (the shift of investor preference from industrial production to so-called FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) and the offshoring of production. The ideological triumph of “free market doctrines,” highly selective as always, administered further blows, as they were translated into deregulation, rules of corporate governance linking huge CEO rewards to short-term profit, and other such policy decisions.

The resulting concentration of wealth yielded greater political power, accelerating a vicious cycle that has led to extraordinary wealth for a fraction of 1 percent of the population, mainly CEOs of major corporations, hedge fund managers and the like, while for the large majority real incomes have virtually stagnated.

In parallel, the cost of elections skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper into corporate pockets. What remains of political democracy has been undermined further as both parties have turned to auctioning congressional leadership positions, as political economist Thomas Ferguson outlines in the Financial Times.

“The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.

Before the 2007 crash for which they were largely responsible, the new post-Golden Age financial institutions had gained startling economic power, more than tripling their share of corporate profits. After the crash, a number of economists began to inquire into their function in purely economic terms. Nobel laureate Robert Solow concludes that their general impact may be negative: “The successes probably add little or nothing to the efficiency of the real economy, while the disasters transfer wealth from taxpayers to financiers.”

By shredding the remnants of political democracy, the financial institutions lay the basis for carrying the lethal process forward—as long as their victims are willing to suffer in silence.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.

Chomsky: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault — What's Next? | | AlterNet

Chomsky: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault "Converting schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, privatizing them, slashing their budgets — do we really want this future?
Chomsky: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault — What's Next?

Converting schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, privatizing them, slashing their budgets — do we really want this future?

The following is a partial transcript of a recent speech delivered by Noam Chomsky at the University of Toronto at Scarborough on the rapid privatization process of public higher education in the United States.
A couple of months ago, I went to Mexico to give talks at the National University in Mexico, UNAM. It's quite an impressive university — hundreds of thousands of students, high-quality and engaged students, excellent faculty. It's free. And the city — Mexico City — actually, the government ten years ago did try to add a little tuition, but there was a national student strike, and the government backed off. And, in fact, there's still an administrative building on campus that is still occupied by students and used as a center for activism throughout the city. There's also, in the city itself, another university, which is not only free but has open admissions. It has compensatory options for those who need them. I was there, too; it's also quite an impressive level, students, faculty, and so on. That's Mexico, a poor country.
Right after that I happened to go to California, maybe the richest place in the world. I was giving talks at the universities there. In California, the main universities — Berkeley and UCLA — they're essentially Ivy League private universities — colossal tuition, tens of thousands of dollars, huge endowment. General assumption is they are pretty soon going to be privatized, and the rest of the system will be, which was a very good system — best public system in the world — that's probably going to be reduced to technical training or something like that. The privatization, of course, means privatization for the rich [and a] lower level of mostly technical training for the rest. And that is happening across the country. Next year, for the first time ever, the California system, which was a really great system, best anywhere, is getting more funding from tuition than from the state of California. And that is happening across the country. In most states, tuition covers more than half of the college budget. It's also most of the public research universities. Pretty soon only the community colleges — you know, the lowest level of the system — will be state-financed in any serious sense. And even they're under attack. And analysts generally agree, I'm quoting, "The era of affordable four-year public universities heavily subsidized by the state may be over."
Now that's one important way to implement the policy of indoctrination of the young. People who are in a debt trap have very few options. Now that is true of social control generally; that is also a regular feature of international policy — those of you who study the IMF and the World Bank and others are well aware. As the Mexico-California example illustrates, the reasons for conscious destruction of the greatest public education system in the world are not economic. Economist Doug Henwood points out that it would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product. The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That's the same as three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than four months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare system, which is an international scandal.
It's about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact it's the basis for the famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind of healthcare system as other industrial countries, not only would there be no deficit, but there would be a surplus. However, to introduce these facts into an electoral campaign would be suicidally insane, Henwood points out. Now he's correct. In a democracy where elections are essentially bought by concentrations of private capital, it doesn't matter what the public wants. The public has actually been in favor of that for a long of time, but they are irrelevant in a properly run democracy.
We should recall that the great growth period in the economy -- the U.S. economy -- was in the several decades after WWII, commonly called the "Golden Age" by economists. It was substantially fueled by affordable public education and by university research. Affordable public education includes the GI Bill, which provided free education for veterans — and remember, that was a much poorer country than today. Extremely low tuition was found even at private colleges. Actually, I went to an Ivy League college, and it cost $100 a year; that's more now, but it's not that high, it's not 30 or 40,000, you know?
What about university-based research? Well, as I mentioned, that is the core of the modern high-tech economy. That includes computers, the Internet — in fact, the whole IT revolution — and a whole lot more. The dismantling of this system since the 1970s is among the many moves toward a very sharply two-tiered society, a very narrow concentration of wealth and stagnation for most everyone else. It also has direct economic consequences. Take, say, California. What they are doing to the public education system is going to undermine the economy that relies on a skilled work force and creative innovation, Silicon Valley and so on. Well, apart from the enormous human cost of depriving most people of decent educational opportunities, these policies undermine the U.S. competitive capacity. That's very harmful to the mass of the population, but it doesn't matter to the tiny percent of concentrated wealth and power. In fact, in the years since the Pell Memorandum, we've entered into a new stage in state capitalism in which the future just doesn't amount to much. Profit comes increasingly from financial manipulations. The corporate policies are geared toward the short-term profit, and that reduces the concern for loyalty to a firm over a longer stretch. We'll talk about this more tomorrow, but right now let me talk about the consequences for education, which are quite significant.
Suppose, as is increasingly happening not only in the United States, incidentally, that universities are not funded by the state, meaning the general community. So how are the universities going to survive? Universities are parasitic institutions; they don't produce commodities for profit, thankfully. They may one of these days. The funding issue raises many troubling questions, which would not arise if fostering independent thought and inquiry were regarded as a public good, having intrinsic value. That's the traditional ideal of the universities, although there are major efforts to change that. Take Britain. According to the British press, the Arts and Humanities Research Council was just ordered to spend a significant amount of funding on the prime minister's vision for the country. His so-called "Big Society," which means big corporate profits, and the rest look out for themselves. The government produced what they call a clarification of the famous Haldane Principle. That's the century-old principle that barred such government intrusion into academic research. If this stands, which I think is kind of hard to believe, but if it stands, the hand of Big Brother will rest quite heavily on inquiry and innovation in the arts and humanities as the masters of mankind follow the advice of the Pell Memorandum. Of course, defending academic freedom in ways that would receive nods of approval from Those-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, borrowing my grandchildren's rhetoric. Cameron's Britain is seeking to take the lead on the assault on public education. The rest of the Western world is not very far behind. In some ways the U.S. is ahead.
More generally, in a corporate-run culture, the traditional ideal of free and independent thought may be given lip service, but other values tend to rank higher. Defending authentic institutional freedom is no small task. However, it is not hopeless by any means. I'll talk about the case I know best, at my own university. It is a very striking case, because of the nature of its funding. Technically, it's a private university, but it has vast state funding, overwhelming, particularly since the Second World War. When I adjoined the faculty over 55 years ago, there were military labs. Since then, they've been technically severed. The academic programs, too, at that time, the 1950s, were almost entirely funded by the Pentagon. Under student pressure in the time of troubles, the 1960s, there were protests about this and calls for investigation. A faculty-student commission was formed in 1969 to investigate the matter. I was a member, thanks to student pressure. The commission was interesting. It found that despite the funding source, the Pentagon, almost the entire academic program, there was no military-related work on campus, except in the sense that virtually anything can have some military application. Actually, there was an exception to this, the political science department, [which] was deeply engaged in the Vietnam War under the guise of peace research. Since that time, Pentagon funding has been declining, and funding from health-related state institutions — National Institute of Health and so on — that's been increasing. There's a reason for that. It's reflecting changes in the economy.
In the 1950s and 1960s the cutting edge of the economy was electronics-based. The Pentagon was a natural way to steal money from the taxpayers, making them think they're being protected from the Russians or somebody, and to direct it to eventual corporate profits. That was done very effectively. It includes computers, the Internet, the IT revolution. In fact most of the modern economy comes from that. In more recent years, the economy is becoming more biology based. Therefore state funding is shifting. Fifty years ago, if you looked around MIT, you found small electronics startups from the faculty. They were drawing on Pentagon funding for research, and if they were successful, they were bought up by major corporations. Those of you who know something about the high-tech economy will know that that's the famous Route 128. That was 50 years ago. Now, if you go around the campus, the startups are biology based, and the same process continues. The genetic engineering, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and the big buildings going up are Novartis and so on. That's the way the so-called free enterprise economy works. There's also been a shift to more short-term applied work. The Pentagon and the National Institutes of Health are concerned with the long-term future of the advanced economy. In contrast to a business firm, it typically wants something that it can use — it can use and not its competitors, and tomorrow. I don't actually know of a careful study, but it seems pretty clear that the shift toward corporate funding is leading towards more short-term applied research and less exploration of what might turn out to be interesting and important down the road.
Another consequence of corporate funding is more secrecy. This surprises a lot of people, but during the period of Pentagon funding, there was no secrecy. There was also no security on campus. You may remember this. You walk into the Pentagon-funded labs 24 hours a day, and no cards to stick into things and so on. No secrecy; it was all entirely open. There is secrecy today. A corporation can't compel secrecy, but they can make it very clear that you're not going to get your contract renewed if your work leaks to others. That has happened. In fact, it's lead to some scandals, some big enough to appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Outside funding has other effects on the university, unless it's free and unconstrained, observing the Haldane Principle. Indeed, it has been true to a significant degree by funding from the Pentagon and the other national institutions. However, any kind of outside funding [has effects], even keeping to the Haldane Principle, supposing it establishes a teaching or research facility. That kind of automatically shifts the balance of academic activity, and that can threaten the independence and integrity of the institution. And in the case of corporate funding, quite severely.
Corporatization can have considerable influence in other ways. Corporate managers have a duty. They have to focus on profit making and seeking to convert as much of life as possible into commodities. It's not because they're bad people; it's their task. Under Anglo-American law, it's their legal obligation as well. There's a lot to say about this topic, but one element of it concerns the universities and much else. One particular consequence is the focus on what's called efficiency. It's an interesting concept. It's not strictly an economic concept. It has crucial ideological dimensions. If a business reduces personnel, it might become more efficient by standard measures with lower costs. Typically, that shifts the burden to the public, a very familiar phenomenon we see all the time. Costs to the public are not counted, and they're colossal. That's a choice that's not based on economic theory. That's based on an ideological decision, which applies directly to the "business models," as they're called, of the universities. Increasing class-size or employing cheap temporary labor, say graduate students instead of full-time faculty, may look good on a university budget, but there are significant costs. They're transferred and not measured. They're transferred to students and to the society generally as the quality of education, the quality of instruction is lowered.
There's, furthermore, no way to measure the human and social costs of converting schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, abandoning the traditional ideal of the universities. Creating creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting external constraints. That's an ideal that's no doubt been flawed in practice, but to the extent that it's realized is a good measure of the level of civilization achieved.
That idea is being challenged very openly by Adam Smith's Principal Architects of Policy in the State Corporate Complex, the direct attack on the Haldane Principle in Britain. That's an extreme case; in fact so extreme I assume it may be beaten back. There are less blatant examples. Many of them are just inherent in the reliance on outside funding, state or private. These are two sources that are not easy to distinguish given the control of the state by private interest. So what's the right reaction to outside funding that threatens the ideal of a free university? Well one choice is just to reject it in principle, in which case the university would go down the tubes. It's a parasitic institution. Another choice is just to recognize it as a fact of life that when I'm at work, I have to walk past the Lockheed Martin Lecture Hall, and I have to look out my office window at the Koch building, which is named after the multibillionaires who are the major funders of the Tea Party and a leading force in ongoing campaigns to wipe out the remnants of the labor movement and to institute a kind-of corporate tyranny.
Now, if that outside funding seeks to [influence] teaching, research and other activities, then there's a strong argument that it should simply be resisted or rejected outright no matter what the costs. Such influences are not inevitable, and that's worth bearing in mind.

Read more of Noam Chomsky's work at Chomsky.info.

Pc FIX: Asus EEE: How the CapsLock Gets Stuck

Gizmos Grabowski: Asus EEE: How the CapsLock Gets Stuck: "Asus EEE: How the CapsLock Gets Stuck

How: CapsLock gets stuck when the lid of the netbook is closed while the computer is still running. This puts the netbook into sleep mode, but also forces on CapsLock.

Solution: As I noted in an earlier posting, the solution is to press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, which reboots the X Windows managers, and resets the CapsLock to normal. So, don't close the lid; or else shut down the computer before closing the lid.

Why: I don't know why the problem occurs happens. Now that we know the how, maybe Asus can find the why.

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | | AlterNet

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | | AlterNet: "

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.

July 31, 2011 |

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.

The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).

Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist. His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination

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Banning Corporate Personhood: How Communities Are Taking the Law Back from Big Companies | | AlterNet

Banning Corporate Personhood: How Communities Are Taking the Law Back from Big Companies | | AlterNet:

Banning Corporate Personhood: How Communities Are Taking the Law Back from Big Companies

Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund explains how communities can fight corporate power with a new legal weapon.

July 14, 2011 |

These last few days for gas drilling news in New York as been critical and a new level of urgency has been reached as the country watches how New York defines and decides its fate, the future of its famous unfiltered water supply, and communities in the directly impacted regions, whether for or against drilling are forging ahead to determine their immediate future and that for future generations.

It's coming down to Home Rule and self-determination as a way to protect municipalities from fracking. As the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) releases New Recommendations for Drilling in New York explained in the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) released a few days ago, environmental groups, like Catskill Mountainkeeper are calling for a statewide ban and municipalities organize to decide the fate of their towns.

One of the important and positive points in the otherwise very problematic and potentially dangerous draft, combined with a governor apparently wanting to surge forward with gas extraction is this: "Local Land Use & Zoning: Applicant must certify that a proposed activity is consistent with local land use and zoning laws. Failure to certify or a challenge by a locality would trigger additional DEC review before a permit could be issued." These words in the SGEIS give further power to Home Rule.

The Highland and Lumberland Committees on Energy and the Environment formed last year to decide the fate of their towns. They sponsored a forum on February 19th that was held at the Eldred High School to talk about the options that municipalities have to protect themselves from being industrialized and how the power of Home Rule can be preserved. The speakers were Helen Slottje, an attorney with the Community Environmental Defense Council based in Ithaca, NY and Ben Price, the Projects Director from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) located in Chambersburg, PA. Ben Price has been advising residents about stopping fracking in their communities acting on the premise that they already have the right to say no. He states, "...You have the right to protect your community, your families, your kids, your property values, your drinking water. These are fundamental rights..."

More towns in upstate New York are re-writing their plans and residents are becoming involved in their town politics whether organizing educational meetings, deciding to run for office and reaching out for advice. One such person is Narrowsburg resident Andrea Reynosa, an artist and farmer who lives with her family on a homestead that has been farmed since 1841. Their farm includes river frontage on the East Ten Mile River and sits in the Delaware River Valley, an area under urgent threat from drilling as its neighbor Pennsylvania sits across the Delaware with drill pads in the watershed waiting for approval.

Andrea says, "In November of 2010, we created a local chapter of Concerned Citizens, Tusten Concerned Citizens, whose primary focus is initiating and establishing stringent Land Use laws into our municipal zoning ordinances that address Heavy Industrial Use, i.e. gas drilling, to protect the health, safety and welfare of the citizens of the Town of Tusten. The Town of Tusten is working with Helen and David Slottje and the Tusten Concerned Citizens along with its First Saturday of the Month SkyDog Supper Club will be hosting a Democracy School led by Ben Price later this year." In addition to organizing the town hall meeting supper club as a place for community engagement, Andrea and her partner Kevin Vertrees have been organizing collaborative art events, Flow Projects that are celebrations of pure water as their community is threatened by drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

This is the continuation of the story of individuals speaking up when the gas corporations are attempting to control their hometowns and of individual becoming increasingly involved in their local government, collaborating with each other as they face drilling throughout the area.

The following is from Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund speaking to residents of the Sullivan County Catskills in Eldred, New York. You can read (or hear) Helen Slottje’s part of the talk here. The event was moderated by John Conway.

John Conway: Ben Price, will talk about a little bit different approach. And Ben's approach involves an outright ban, passing a local law that would provide an outright ban on drilling.

Ben Price is the Projects Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Ben coordinates community organizing across Pennsylvania, where over 100 communities have already adopted Legal Defense Fund-drafted laws. He has served as consultant to the Pittsburgh City Council; assisted in drafting Pittsburgh's Protection from Natural Gas Drilling Ordinance; and is working with other communities in both Pennsylvania and New York, as well as Maryland and Ohio, to adopt community rights ordinances that assert the authority of municipalities to protect their community health, safety, welfare, quality of life, and the natural environment by banning industrial activities such as gas extraction. As Projects Director, Ben offers communities free organizing assistance and training for municipal officials and residents for the adoption of local laws.

He also assists with strategic organizing in New England and northern California, and is the First Chair Democracy School lecturer. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Price.

Ben Price: Thank you, John, and thanks to everybody for being here this morning. I'll tell a little bit more about the Legal Defense Fund in just a second, but before I begin I wanted to say something maybe you may not expect, but I agree with everything that Helen said. I do. That is where we are right now. And I actually do believe that given the state of affairs with New York law, that land use laws are a viable tool in order to actually keep the drilling out. I think that makes sense as a starting point.

I'm here, I guess in a way, to offer a cautionary tale. I think that it behooves you and your communities to engage in precautionary measures in anticipation of what has happened in other states. The Legal Defense Fund opened its doors in 1995, and the plan was to offer free legal services to municipalities and community groups in order to assist them to protect their quality of life, their health, safety and welfare, their environments, because in general it's those small municipalities and towns -- it's the community groups -- that don't have the financial wherewithal to fight the large corporations when they come in and they say, "Here's what we're going to do whether you like it or not." And whether you like it not, sometimes -- as everyone has heard already -- you can sue anybody for anything with one small caveat -- if you've got the cash. And the industries have the money, and in general the municipalities and the people do not.

Our experience early on back in '95 when the Legal Defense Fund opened their doors was pretty typical. We engaged in rather traditional community organizing, which is to say that we assisted community groups and individuals to challenge permits from being issued, to review the applications for permits that would allow for some legal activity -- and by the way, gas drilling in Pennsylvania and in New York, and Ohio and West Virginia and Maryland is legal. It's legal. And it's regulated -- we know that, too.

But the permits are the license to engage in the activity.

What we found was that the state more and more -- the state legislature -- adopted laws wherein they occupied the field of regulation and stripped local governments of the opportunity to regulate industry and the activities they engage in locally. And just to give you an example, the Legal Defense Fund didn't start working with communities on the gas drilling issue. That's become a huge issue. Everywhere I go, the crowds get larger and larger. When we go to municipal meetings and talk to folks, the crowds are getting huge. People are just energized about this issue.

But that's not where we started working. Frankly, we began working in rural communities in Pennsylvania on issues generally having to do with agriculture -- communities that were concerned about the establishment of factory farms as the new way of engaging in agriculture in Pennsylvania. That wasn't seemingly such a big problem back before the mid-1990s. We had about 400 communities -- municipalities in Pennsylvania at the time -- that had ordinances in place -- legal ordinances -- not challenging any existing law, that said that factory farms essentially were excluded. They wanted to support independent family farming.

Unfortunately -- and this is part of the precautionary tale I want to tell -- is that just because you have what looked like strong local authority under your home rule provisions of your constitution doesn't mean they're permanent. And I don't mean that just to scare you. As a Pennsylvanian, I envy your Home Rule law. I think it's great as it stands. It really does afford a degree of local control that the folks in Pennsylvania -- 12-1/2 million of them in over 1,200 municipalities -- wish they could have back.

We have experienced, though, that when industry wants to make it easier to get what they want, they change the laws for us. That's what we experienced. That's why we changed our strategy in terms of what to do in order to combat the industrialization of our communities, and really ... you'll hear me talk about corporations -- I'm not anti-corporation; I actually work for one. It's a nonprofit, but I actually work for one. They're good tools; they're good legal tools. They can also be used in a negative way, just like a lot of legal things can be.

What we experienced beginning in the early 2000s was a transformation of state law that stripped local communities of the authority to say "no" to the industrialization of agriculture ... by the way, to say "no" to mining. We had land use laws under the Municipalities Planning Code -- that's the state code of land use law -- that did not prohibit communities from zoning out mining, and did not prohibit them from zoning out agriculture that was industrialized. The Municipalities Planning Code was amended any number of times, and it's a litany of surrender of local control and Home Rule authority to industry, where the Municipalities Planning Code was amended to disallow local municipal control or regulation of the timber industry, of mining, of water withdrawals, of agriculture, one after another after another, to the point where what we have left in terms of our ability to deal with an industry like gas drilling is, we can regulate the roads and impact on roads. We can attempt to impose conditions in terms of putting up fences and what color paint is used on the drilling rigs so that they blend in with the background.

Doesn't mean we have no local control over gas drilling in Pennsylvania. We can say where they can drill, but not whether or not they can drill -- the idea of zoning being that we still retain the authority to segregate incompatible uses of land, to try to keep the drill rigs away from the swings and the monkey bars in the kids' playground. We can try to do that.

You can separate incompatible uses of land, but you're not allowed to say "no" to a legal use of land. That's where we are in Pennsylvania. I don't want that to be where you come to in New York.

When it comes to what authority and what power we have to protect our health, safety and welfare at the local level, we're up against three main obstacles. The first one is state preemption, which I just talked about briefly, which is where the state decides to adopt state laws, or to amend existing laws that strip that local authority. In New York, as well as in other states, general laws of the state apply to all communities, and if a general law specifically preempts -- in other words, it strips the authority of the municipality -- to say "no" to a particular legal use of land -- and how do we know it's a legal use of land? Well, permits are issued for it. Permits are issued for gas drilling by the State of New York. You have not yet been preempted to adopt local land use laws that have the effect of excluding gas drilling. And I do agree with Helen -- that's a tool you should use. You have it, you should use it. You should, in fact.

Preemption is one of the main obstacles we have to overcome if it's in place. Right now, you don't have preemption of land use in place, but you do have preemption in terms of regulating the industry. State law essentially says, yes, you can in effect preempt it through your land use decisions, but you can't say anything about the process of the extraction. You can't regulate the industrial activity itself. The state has occupied the field of regulation there, and that is to say you are preempted.

But those laws in existence today in New York that say you can stop it through land use are not immutable, and they're not perpetual.

There's another obstacle to local control called "Dylan's Rule," and it's a theory of law that says -- by the way, it's not in the U.S. Constitution; it's not really even in the state constitution -- but it's a tradition of and a theory of law that says municipalities essentially have the same relationship to the state -- the state legislature -- as a child has to a parent -- which is to say that the municipality has no authority of its own and no agency of its own unless the state delegates that power and that authority ... which also means that at any given time the state can withdraw that power or that authority. That's the experience I've been relating to that we've had in Pennsylvania on lots of issues.

By the way, it's also the experience they have in Ohio. In 2005, the state legislature adopted a law dealing with the regulation of oil and gas, and they stripped municipalities of the authority to regulate -- to do anything at the local level that applies to those industries.

We're used to hearing about that horrible term, the "Halliburton loophole." Most of you have heard that, right? It's that horrible thing that they did at the federal level that said this gas industry is exempt from a host of federal laws that purport to protect our environment and our communities -- you know, the Clean Drinking Water Act; the Clean Air Act; the Superfund Act -- things like that.

We don't generally think about the fact that in many states -- and by the way, in New York as well, the industry is also exempt from local control, local regulation in New York, fortunately, as Helen pointed out, except in terms of land use.

But in terms of industrial activities themselves, they are exempt from local laws. I'd just like to question, what does that word "exempt" mean? It means you don't have to obey laws that everybody else does. It means you're above those laws. It means you're exceptional and you have privileges that no one else in the community, the state or the land has. And that's the position of the gas industry in terms of those ostensibly protective laws. Why would they have to be exempt from them? Maybe it's because they couldn't live up to them; maybe it's because they couldn't actually obey them and actually continue to engage in the industrial activities that they want to be involved in.

So, I mentioned preemption and Dylan's Rule, and what I'm getting at now, too, is a third obstacle that we have to actually creating the kinds of communities that we want to live in, and that is corporate supremacy. As individuals, we don't get exemptions from laws that the rest of our neighbors have to obey. That's not a privilege that we as human beings have. But corporations do, and corporations have been recognized by the courts to share protections of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution as though they were living human beings. Again, I'm not against corporations -- I think they're actually very useful tools.

Folks who benefit from private for-profit corporations benefit also from the fact that they often have limited liability; that the individuals who benefit from those corporations that engage in activities that in general community majorities find to be harmful -- that those individuals benefitting from those harmful activities are not responsible for the harm. That's the joy of a limited liability.

On top of that, they get an extra scoop of rights to come in to your community as a corporation. As individuals, every member of the board of directors of a corporations has individual constitutional protections. As individuals, every investor in a corporation retains those rights -- not the responsibilities for the harms they inflict using that legal tool of the corporation when they enter your community. They hold on to their rights and they aren't responsible for the actions.

Now, I know you're at a good spot here where you can potentially adopt land use laws to actually prohibit ... keep out the drilling for now. You can't use other types of laws because you have been preempted from doing so. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, in Maryland and West Virginia, communities there have no such comparable Home Rule power through land use laws. So, what do they do and what have they begun to do?

Well, in Pittsburg, which is probably the one community that you may have heard of dealing with it in this way, in a community rights forum ... What they've done is, they adopted a law -- and I'll just describe it in general terms. It's not simply an outright prohibition on gas drilling, although it does prohibit gas drilling. That's not where it starts. We refer to them as "community rights laws" because it starts with a local bill of rights that enumerate rights such as the right to local self-government on issues with direct impact on the community -- the assertion that the state does not have the authority to license corporations to engage in activities that actually violate the rights of the members of the community.

We actually are self-governing people with rights that we retain and have not surrendered, and we're going to act on that premise, and if the state believes we do not have the right to protect our health, safety, welfare, quality of life, natural environment, they'll need to come and take away our rights 'cause we're not going to sit on our hands and act as though we do not have those rights. That's a pretty profound and provocative thing for them to do, I admit it. And they didn't do it lightly. And we don't engage ... The Legal Defense Fund does not engage in the kind of community organizing that we do lightly either.

But when the consent of the governed is denied, and when private interests are licensed to engage in activities against the consent of the governed, we're left with a question of what to do about it, and I think maybe there's about three choices that we can select from, and I mean it sincerely -- it's not up to me to decide for any given community. I have a voice in my own, but not in yours or anyone else's. Which choice your community takes is up to you and your community, and I'm not being sarcastic about it when I go through these three choices, the first one being, you can decide to do nothing.

And even with the strength of your land use laws in New York, the ability to use them to stop the drilling, there will be communities, I dare say, that will decide to do nothing -- they won't pursue that. They may not be convinced. And Helen, I hope you do convince them because I think it would behoove them all to do it, if at minimum to do that. Absolutely.

But some won't do it, and they'll have arguments to say -- and I don't mean ... again, this isn't meant in any judgmental way -- "Well, we're too busy; we're not really that concerned about it." Whatever the reasons are, that is a valid choice. But we're the adults in the room and we're responsible for the outcomes of our decisions, and if we decide to do nothing, and the outcome of our decision is that our communities are destroyed for future generations to live in them and enjoy their natural environment, their drinking water and the rest of it, we are responsible to that choice; we in our communities are responsible for those choices.

The second of three possible decisions we might make is to attempt to use existing structure of law to create the outcomes that we want. We don't want drilling; let's try to use the laws we have, and that means use your land use laws to try and stop the drilling. But you can't use other types of laws; you don't have regulatory authority over the industry in your municipality, so you don't have that option.

What we can try to do is regulate it. In general, that's what we're given. What does it mean to regulate? It doesn't mean to disallow. It means to allow under certain conditions. And so, a community might say, "Well, we're not really going to impose land use laws that have the effect of eliminating the drilling; we're going to allow it in certain places," which means we're going to decide which parts of our municipality to surrender to the industry -- that's a choice. I think doing nothing and using existing law, you have a very strong possibility of getting fracked -- a very strong possibility.

The third option is the one that the Legal Defense Fund has been pursing and advising communities on, and it has to do with acting on the premise that you already have the right to say "no," that you already have the right to protect your community, your families, your kids, your property values, your drinking water -- that those are fundamental rights. It's a crazy thing -- in Pennsylvania we actually have it. It says it right in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 27, that we have a right to clean air, clean water, clean soil, and that the state has the responsibility to protect the resources of the state and to be the steward of those resources for all of Pennsylvania for generations to come. And then the Supreme Court of the state says things like, "However, Article 1, Declaration of Rights -- those rights are actually non-self-executing." I'm not a lawyer, if I didn't mention that, but sometimes they say silly things like that, which is to say, "These rights -- long list of rights -- they're not self-executing."

What does that mean? It means that the state has not created explicit statutory law to tell us how we're allowed to enjoy those rights. I know I'm speaking colloquially; I'm not being precise in my legal language. I engage in community organizing around these issues, and I think it's important for people to understand what it is -- what does it really mean?

And what we're being told is, the right to clean air, clean water and the rest of it -- well, that's protected by the Department of Environmental Protection. The laws and the regulations of the state through that agency -- that's how we can enjoy those rights. And then we look to see what those agencies actually do. They issue permits to industry to engage in activities that the people in our communities are told they have no authority to say "no" to -- and that's how our rights get protected.

What can we do in anticipation of New York going the way of Pennsylvania and Ohio and Maryland and West Virginia? There really are differences among the states in terms of Home Rule authority. About 46 states have some form of Home Rule at the municipal level. Some of it is statutory; some of it's constitutional; some of it is a mix.

In Pennsylvania, in 1968, they amended the state constitution to allow for municipal home rule. Well, we've got quite a few municipalities in Pennsylvania; 67 of them have decided to go Home Rule. Why so few? Because the state legislature has been very busy since 1968 adopting laws that newly preempt Home Rule authority. So, we had statutory municipalities before, and they were being preempted; and now we have Home Rule communities and their local Home Rule authority is being whittled away one after another.

How does that happen? Our experience is that industry has the ear of our legislators. And, for instance, when the DEP talks about their clients, they're talking about the industries that they're charged with assisting to engage in the activities that they permit. It's kind of an upside-down view of what an environmental agency might do.

So, by the way, is the regulatory system of most states, including New York, where when it comes to preemptive power, what they say is, "Here is the maximum amount of protection legally that a municipality will be offered -- that the members of a municipality will be offered by the state." And you would be acting beyond your authority to adopt laws that regulate that industry any more strictly and offer more protection to your community. If we had legislatures who considered the human beings in the state to be their constituents, we might see a regulatory regime that said, "Here is the minimum amount of protection every community must offer its members, and if they so decide, they can impose more strict regulations to protect the health, safety and welfare of their communities." Just the opposite is the case.

What we're suggesting is that communities take seriously their rights -- and members of the communities take seriously the rights. When Pittsburgh adopted their ordinance, they were not the first in Pennsylvania or the first in other states ... By the way, we have worked in communities in New Hampshire, in Maine, in Virginia and elsewhere where local laws have been adopted that stand in the face of state preemption and challenge those laws and say, "The state is acting beyond its authority to deprive the rights of the members of this community by licensing state-chartered corporations to engage in activities that threaten our rights." The ordinances do a couple of other interesting things. They recognize the inalienable rights of natural communities and ecosystems to exist and flourish -- what does that mean? And does it mean that the communities that adopted these ordinances have all gone "enviro," or turned into Druids or something? No, it doesn't mean that.

Most of the communities that have adopted rights-of-nature provisions have been what I would describe as rather conservative, but they understand the real pragmatic reason for doing so. When it comes to protecting your environment -- and yes, we can litigate over anything we want to ... But if you want to sue a corporation for engaging in a harmful activity in your community and you go to court, one of the first things they're going to ask is, "Well, what's your interest in this?" to explore to see if you have standing. Are you actually going to be materially harmed, or have you been materially harmed by this corporate activity? In other words, do you own the land that's been harmed? Has your property value been damaged? Something along those lines. And if the answer is "No, I live on the other side of town but I just didn't want to see our environment destroyed," your case is dismissed.

What if, in your bill of rights, in a community rights ordinance you include a recognition of the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish, and you further recognize that every member of the community has legal standing to advocate for those rights in a court of law? And then the legal relationship in terms of property is not the relevant question. The question is, "Have these rights been violated?"

One other provision, which is a key one ... Sometimes we're told what we're really interested in is just getting rid of corporate rights, and there's bill of rights protections that corporations have been granted.

We have a provision in the ordinance that says corporations that would violate the prohibitions of this law will not be recognized to have the legal protections of the Bill of Rights and similar protections of state law. Why would we do that? It's not just because we want to be nasty. It's because people in our communities are at disadvantages when lawyers for corporations come in and they say, "We're suing; we're bringing a Section 1983 lawsuit, which is a civil rights lawsuit, on behalf of the civil rights of the corporation that are being violated." It's that "takings" thing. "Takings" means that your Fifth Amendment protections of government not to take private property for public use without just compensation are being violated. And a corporation lawyer comes in and claims, "That's exactly what your municipality's doing to us by adopting a local law that says we can't access our minerals, or we can't exercise the lease, or the permit." That's the type of argument we get.

Nullifying that claim is not about stripping rights from corporations; it's about making sure that the rights of the members of the community are understood to be superior to the privileges of state-chartered corporations -- chartered corporations, and they are chartered by the state legislature in the name of the people. The state cannot turn around, not legitimately, and issue permits to them in a way that would have the effect of violating the rights of the very people who chartered the corporation. It's a Frankenstein model. It makes no sense to allow that to stand, and so we do challenge that.

This is very provocative stuff. We know it. We understand that this isn't for everybody, because it takes a lot to explain it, and I, with 30 minutes quite frankly, have really but scratched the surface.

What would we suggest in terms of New York and where you are? And again, it's back to the cautionary tale, and I think the precautionary measures that I would suggest, we would suggest, which is to say, put in place your land use laws to eliminate the use of land for gas extraction, combined with community rights provisions that recognize that you're doing so not only because you acknowledge the authority of the state which has devolved these powers to you, but also because you understand and embrace the rights of the community to adopt laws and have the effect of governing state-chartered corporations in the name of the people. This is about, I believe, putting in place local laws that anticipate the possibility of losing the one tool you do have right now. I wish you had more tools, because in a self-governing democracy, the people wouldn't simply be allowed one last shot at self-governance through land use; it would actually be a broad spectrum of authority understood and recognized by the state.

There's a lot to this, and if you have further questions, I'm happy to answer them. Thanks.

Conway: Thank you, Ben.

Ben, our first question: "What role, or what impact, if any, would a public health officer in a town or the county or public health law have on gas drilling?" Can public health issues be used in a town ordinance to prohibit gas drilling?

Price: I'm not going to presume to speak on New York law specifically. I'm not an attorney to begin with, but New York law -- I'm familiar with it to the degree I am.

When we talk about a bill of rights and these local ordinances, they're not limited in scope. I mean, if it's a matter of retained rights of the people being enumerated locally, and prohibitions being put in place as Pittsburgh did, the prohibition on gas drilling is not simply a free-floating prohibition. It's put in place, and specifically the language of the law says, "This prohibition is intended to protect the rights enumerated in this ordinance." And so, a right to health and not to have health damaged would seem to be a legitimate jumping-off point for prohibition on drilling.

Conway: Ben, you mentioned the Pennsylvania State Constitution. I'm not sure if you can address this, but, "Does New York have the same right to clean water, land, soil, in our state constitution, and can we enact a ban or a bill of rights at the same time? And once a ban or a bill of rights is enacted, can it be overturned once it's passed?"

Price: To my knowledge, the New York Constitution isn't quite as explicit as Pennsylvania's, but it's not based on Pennsylvania's constitution that these ordinances are being drawn up the way they are. We're not claiming that we get our authority or our rights from Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. That right preexists the Pennsylvania Constitution.

The theory of government, in this country at least, going all the way back to the Declaration of Independence -- it declares that governments are instituted -- what for? -- by the people to defend and protect their rights. And when governments no longer act in that manner, then it is not only the right, but it says the duty of people to alter or abolish it.

So, the rights precede the constitution, and it doesn't matter whether you have that language in the New York Constitution. That's not the question to ask on whether or not you can institute local bills of rights that recognize those rights. Retained rights -- I mean, if you want to look for a place, the Ninth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution talks about unenumerated rights being retained by the people. Unenumerated -- just because there's 10 amendments to the Constitution early on doesn't mean that the listing of those rights is exhaustive. Unenumerated rights are retained by the people. Let's enumerate them and protect them.

Conway: Ben, if corporations are considered a person, as has become prevalent of late, do they have the same protections as a person might expect?

Price: Well, the same and more. And there are specific examples I could give. There are particular amendments to the Constitution that corporate attorneys will claim belong to corporations now. The 14th Amendment was the first one, and it guaranteed equal protection of the law and due process of law. The 14th Amendment was adopted after the Civil War. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, and the 14th Amendment -- at least as I read it, and many folks read it -- was intended to guarantee equal protection of the law and due process of the law to those freed slaves -- and, by the way, to everyone, 'cause it didn't mention that it was just freed slaves.

The courts looked at the word "person" and the second clause of that amendment, and determined in 1886 that the word "person" also referred to corporations as well, and in that particular case, the Santa Clara case, decided that corporations had the 14th Amendment protection of equal protection of the law, which was the foot in the door, and now we see that corporations are recognized to have First Amendment free speech protections -- that was first decided in the Bilotti case of 1978; it wasn't the Citizens United case that actually opened that can of worms; that was just the cherry on top.

You know, Fifth Amendment protections -- wonderful stuff. In 1922, Pennsylvania had a state law on the books that said corporations must leave columns of coal under the ground. They couldn't just strip out all of the coal with the effect of the surface collapsing in, subsidence, destroying surface properties and ponds and having streams disappear, and the rest of it.

Well, Pennsylvania Coal Company went to court and they got a nice decision from the Supreme Court that said, "You know, that's a violation of the Fifth Amendment protections of that corporation under the 'Takings' clause, because making them leave their coal underground -- those pillars of coal -- that's their property. It's stuff they could have harvested and made a profit selling on the market. And so, you can't make them ... Pennsylvania ... you can't make them leave that there." And the state law was overturned.

It's a bizarre thing. Do corporations have the same rights as people? I don't know. I think that in that case, and in many similar cases, in fact the people living on the surface lost their rights and the corporations gained them.

And by the way, it wasn't just the Pennsylvania Coal Company that gained that Fifth Amendment "Takings" protection. It was every corporation in the country. Every time that the U.S. Supreme Court decides to find, to discover, corporations in the U.S. Constitution, the word doesn't appear there, by the way. Every time they discover corporations in the Constitution, that's a discovery for every corporation, not just for the one that goes to court. We don't get such benefits when we get a court decision in general.

And by the way, future lost profits as a property right belonging to corporations -- can you imagine? I'm going to exaggerate a little bit here, but what if you went down to a nearby business, filled out a job application, and said, "I'd like this job," and you got turned down? Imagine trying to sue for the future profits you could have made if they'd have only hired you. Well, it sounds absurd, I know. I think it's absurd that a corporation could, under any guise, say that the gas they have plans to retrieve is something that they can claim a vested property right in under any guise.

Conway: Okay, we're going to call this the last question, and I'm combining a bunch here, Ben, so I'd ask you to try to address this in its entirety as quickly as possible. A number of people expressed kind of a helplessness here. "Are there any actions that citizen groups can take if their townships are all pro-drilling? How does a resident stop a test well from becoming a production well now, and, based on your experience, what is the timeframe it would take to put your community rights provisions into effect?"

Price: The work we do really is not so much about making sure that we stop drilling, just to be honest with you. Our job is to make sure that we attempt to empower community majorities to establish local control to the greatest degree possible.

Having said that, if you have a community majority that is against gas drilling, how long would it take to get an ordinance in place? In general, the process I'm used to in Pennsylvania and elsewhere -- there's usually ... there's a legal process you have to go through of advertising a proposed ordinance at one meeting, and then as soon as possible would be to have a hearing, and then maybe a vote on it at that very meeting. So, a couple of months. But that's a couple of months after you've persuaded your community, "This is the way to go"; after you've secured and persuaded your local officials to vote in the affirmative, assuming you don't have initiative and referendum; and also, assuming that you've got the language in place. We don't simply hand communities, "Here's the finished product," and say, "There it is; go with it."

We engage in a real dialogue with people in the community; find out what it is precisely they want to do. We have some communities, all they want to do is ban drilling -- that's it. Someone'll say, "We want to ban drilling. We also want to ban them from depositing the frack water anywhere in our community. We want to ban them from withdrawing water and using that for the drilling process, even if they don't do it in our community." There are a number of things that we can discuss about what outcome you're looking for -- what the law's going to look for. Length of process -- it varies. The shortest would be a couple of months. That would be real fast, I think.

Sabrina Artel is the creator and host of Trailer Talk, stories from America's kitchen table. Her weekly radio show explores community engagement through conversations about culture, politics, the arts and the environment. To find out more about Trailer Talk's Frack Talk Marcellus Shale Water Project please visit Trailer Talk.