MDMD birth of a nation, sponsored by...

"this Age sees a corruption and disabling of the ancient Magick.
Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon a global Scale ,
Enterprisers and Quacks,-- these are the last poor fallen and feckless
inheritors of a Knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed.
The coming Rebellion istheirs,-- Franklin andthat Lot,--andHeaven help the
rest of us, if they prevail." (M&D 487,488)

"Our wealthy founding fathers devised a system that allowed them to
maintain power -- by restricting citizenship to propertied white men, and
through elite-controlled institutions such as the U.S. Senate and Supreme
Court that could corral any wild ideas that regular people might pursue
through the relatively more democratic House of Representatives, or state
and local governments. Still, the democratic principles on which the
country was founded were real, and popular movements over time expanded the
franchise and agitated for more democracy. At the same time those battles
have been going on, lawyers and lobbyists have waged a war to expand
corporate power. Often relying on judges to do what even well-lobbied
legislatures wouldn't, corporations went from being limited entities in the
18th and first half of the 19th centuries that could be controlled by the
people and their representatives, to today's concentrations of wealth and
power that have almost completely escaped popular control.  [...]
corporations began as entities subordinate to the sovereign people but
eventually became masters, eroding the core concept of democracy -- power
resides in We the People. Key to this was the courts' granting to
corporations the rights of persons, including 14th Amendment rights and
eventually even free speech rights. POCLAD points out the obvious: Rights
can be claimed only by persons, and corporations aren't real persons but
only fictional ones, creations under law. According to POCLAD, we should
move beyond fighting corporations on their terms -- battling to control the
worst of their offenses through regulatory law or asking them to curb
abuses through voluntary codes of conduct. Instead, citizen-activists
should demand that corporations act responsibly in accord with their
charters or face charter revocation, the death penalty for corporations."

from:
June 27, 2002
Alternative Futures:
a Review of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy
by Robert Jensen
http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen0627.html


book at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1891843109/qid=1025202422/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1
_1/103-8205388-7861446