Now that the Supreme Court has stuck a stake in the heart of the constitution, rendering the quaint little notion of one man, one vote a thing of the past, by allowing corporations to contribute unlimited amounts,
WHAT CAN WE DO?
Actually, a lot.
We need to reinstitute monitoring of companies that support progressive policies.
We need to go out of our way to shop only at those establishments, and eschew, to the greatest extent possible, the rest.
We need to educate each other that while we must still act as if our votes at the ballot machine still count (whether they do or not) we must also realize that henceforth, every dollar we spend is also a vote, and we need to vote far more consciously and wisely.
There used to be websites like BuyBlue and ChooseTheBlue which listed companies that donated to Democrats and progressives. Both of those sites are essentially defunct or taken over now. So we need someone with skills and no-how to recreate that, and we need a lot of contributors.
Maybe a simpler way would be a group Wiki to track companies worth buying from.
We need to leverage boycotts – something the left hasn’t used much since the 1970s. They were actually very effective.
And I’d also like to see us organize some “pro-cotts” – have a day where everyone promised to buy at least one thing from a business if they donate to our cause.
Come on, people. Be creative. We still have this site. I’m ready to go drown my sorrows in a drink in one part of my brain, but I have to shove that aside and let the other part, the “hero” part of my brain, come to the fore. I suggest you let your inner hero out as well.
These are extraordinary times, and call for extraordinarily creative measures. Get busy!!!!
German corporations tried to buy Hitler when they installed him in office as Germany’s Chancellor, and it ultimately made a lot of them very, very rich. It also ended with the deaths of tens of millions of idividual “persons”, the reintroduction of slavery, industrialized genocide and the destruction of much of the West’s rich cultural heritage.
Now we are handing the power to decide who rules the world’s largest and most advanced military and the nation with the most atomic weapons to a bunch of CEO’s. This can only end badly.
I just came back from a so-called “Democratic” meetup group tonight. What a disappointment. The first three people I talked to watched Fox News, supported big business, and considered themself a libertarian, respectively. I had to leave the table when one of the so-called Democrats applauded the Supreme Court decision.
Then I came home and started to cry. I feel like except for a few at the Frog Pond and a very few others in my life, nobody gets how terrible this is, and what it portends. It’s just heartbreaking and scary.
And in case this wasn’t obvious, most of the idiots there were in the their twenties. The only ones who qualified as Democrats to me were from the group that was 30 and up.
You are what you consume. You eat up the garbage plate that Fox News provides and don’t use any critical thinking or fact checking skills and voila! Dead from the neck up Democrats.
I don’t even think they considred themselves Democrats, looking back. Maybe they just came for the free food or to try to discourage us. Who knows.
It’s so sad at so many levels. The under thirty bunch has grown up in the heady days of Reagenism—no less than thirty years of it, which includes the Clintons and, who knows, maybe even Obama. This SCOTUS decision can be seen as one summit of a mentality that goes all the way back at least to the Birchers and Barry Goldwater: government and taxes stink, let’s have a free for all.
The under-thirtiers have been fine tuned to buy, shop, consume and have lived through years of television hype, dizzying glitz and thoughts of endless riches attainable by all. There are exceptions, though. So don’t write them all off too quickly. Because if you do everything is lost. Maybe as times get tough they will slowly be forced to review their assumptions.
Probably the most vicious aspect is that no matter what happens, corporations need people to buy their stuff. This is if we accept that U.S. corporations won’t write the U.S. people off and concentrate on foreign markets as Chinese and Indians ‘buy more’ for their profits.
So as you say, consumer behavior can influence corporations (which has been known for a long time) and, in turn, politics (a spinoff which the SCOTUS has now enshrined as a constitutional right, although no one seems know which constitution they’re referring to). You vote by buying one toothpaste brand instead of another. To my mind we have hit rock bottom. But I have always underestimated the potential for things getting worse. It could be that this decision only opens the door to the next low point.
Obama (and I think others) say that the legislative branch needs to address the implications of this ruling. I have no idea how this can be done and if any decision of Congress or anyone else could have a positive influence.
If corporations have the same rights and liabilities as individuals, why aren’t they taxed as individuals? That might provide some kind of staring point.
Buy my vote by getting me to buy your toothpaste. Anyway, my dentist thinks that all toothpaste is worthless. So the toothpaste manufacturer can win in all ways. He sells you a useless commodity and then turns around and ignores your political preferences. Don’t forget that corporations already control the media which controls how people THINK about toothpaste. I’m sick of the stupidity. I’m getting dizzy. Anyone you turn it, it’s not at all encouraging.
And what if the company that makes the best toothpaste supports the most reactionary candidates and policies? So then we are forced to buy an inferior product to get support our political goals. Now everything comes down to buy and sell. This simplification of the life and society is nauseatingly shallow: one size fits all sizes.
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On Dec. 11, 1939 (nine weeks after the Hitler attack on Poland), the representative of International General Electric cabled from Berlin to GE official Dr. Zay Jeffries: “Our friends at Osram Co. [a German lighting company linked to GE] informed me yesterday that Krupp would be interested in capitalizing the royalties now being received from Carboloy … In this connection, Dr. Louis (a Krupp official) has asked for an appointment with me in Zurich where we shall both be next week. They are quite anxious that the Krupp name be kept out of correspondence, particularly telegrams that might reach improper hands and therefore I shall refer to them in the future either as the European licensor under Carboloy contract or simply as Dr. Louis…”
“The `improper hands’ could be either the United States government or the governments of Europe which had been attacked by Hitler,” reported the UE NEWS in 1948. “GE agreed to protect the Nazis.
“In 1940, with the American defense moves in full swing, GE was still reporting to the Nazi representatives, now stationed in Zurich, Switzerland, how much tungsten carbide was being used in the United States. GE paid royalties to the Nazis on every pound used here. That was money for the Hitler war chest.”
In other words, Hitler was getting 12 pounds of tungsten carbide at the price the U.S. government was getting one pound. For every pound of the material sold in the U.S., Hitler through Krupp was getting royalties with which he bought more munitions.
In 1940, with Europe at war, Krupp arranged to have its royalties from GE collected by a Swiss go-between.
Wall Street and the Nazi Inner Circle
The author presents a study of the functioning of Dutch industry, exemplified by the case of Philips, under German occupation during the Second World War. It is shown that economic collaboration with German economic institutions had its forerunners in peacetime arrangements, especially in patent pools with German enterprises and in cartels. The importance of patent pools as a vehicle for internationalization and their relative immunity from conflicts between nation-states is underlined.
When German authors argue that up to 1943 the international economy was functioning’as if there was no war’, then this is another way of saying that the international economy was an autonomous supersystem, for which no rules were effective other than the normal rules of economic behaviour under capitalism. But at the national level the exigencies of a totalitarian state do not allow much functional autonomy. Thus, one may conclude that whenever a state is labelled totalitarian, normal economic behaviour is, by definition, ‘collaboration’.
Justice delayed: IBM’s collaboration with Nazi Germany
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."