March of the Monahan Brothers
On May 16, 2010, brothers Laird and Robin Monahan began a cross-country march to mobilize support for MovetoAmend.org. Follow their route and daily reports here . . .
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photos from the road
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Monopoly: Not a Childs Game
Dear Friends, friends and believers in justice.
Hope you enjoy this ( with some gramatical flaws got past my proofread). One of the saddest and most tragic trends in US politics for the last 30-40 years has been the bonding of evangelical Christianity with the big business interests. Glenn Beck's recent shameless performance this past weekend, trying to claim the mantle of one of the finest Christian social justice leaders, Martin Luther King, makes me sick at heart-- and motivated.
The Herald ( or your local paper) is looking for new talent. Perhaps your grasp on grammar exceeds mine, I am especially fond of the comma splice.
Brad Cotton
Monopoly: Not a Child’s Game Published Circleville Herald 31 August 2010
I played Monopoly with my brothers for days on end. It sometimes took a day or so to destroy the economic life of one’s sibling who was unlucky enough to come to own lower rent properties while I happened to land on and come to own the higher rent chattels. My younger brothers would become upset while I foreclosed on their mortgaged properties, they losing their game-world livelihoods and domiciles. I explained to them that it was just a game, the rules are the rules. You lose. Tough!
Quaker and political activist Elizabeth Magpie designed “Monopoly” to make a moral point. The tophatted captain of industry, the banker, the railroad monopolies , the artillery piece; the properties and tokens of the game originally called “The Landlord’s Game” demonstrated Magpie’s moral lesson: that money always wins, enriching the player who starts off with the advantage of landing on the best properties. The most fortunate player wins the money and possessions of the less fortunate. The bank always wins.
Left out of Monopoly as well as the history of our nation is the role of labor, the common folks, you and I. So much high school history is top-down, we learn about politicians, bankers, generals, as if history is their story alone. Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States should be widely read as it tells of how you and I labored under the politicians, bankers and generals. It is not pretty.
Columbus enslaved the Taino natives of Hispaniola. They died by the hundreds of thousands laboring on the mines and plantations. When you visit Williamsburg, Virginia, of late a favorite destination of Tea Partiers wherein they ask the costumed Colonial re-enactors scripted questions, be sure to visit the few tours and sites that highlight the backbreaking labor of the black slave population that built Williamsburg. Slaves were the ultimate in cheap, replaceable plantation labor.
I visited Stone Mountain, Georgia this past summer, also known as the “Confederate Mount Rushmore” for the huge bas-relief renditions of Jefferson Davis, “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The Civil War was fought so the south could preserve cheap slave labor. The sharecropper system after the war left former slaves in economic captivity. The Ku Klux Klan, refounded twice on Stone Mountain, made sure former slaves had little rights or abilities to escape their bondage to the cotton owner. In the North, a man of means could buy his way out of the Union Army, officially and above-the-board for $300. Poor? You served and died. Vietnam era and college bound? Deferred. Poor? You served and died. Analysis of the socio-economic background of enlistees dying in Iraq and Afghanistan shows some stories never change.
While African-Americans were trapped in virtual slavery as sharecroppers, the industrial revolution fed workers, immigrants, children into 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week into meatgrinder steel mills, coal mines, textile mills, or, as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle showed the nation, literally into the meatgrinder itself. There was no Workmen’s Compensation, thousands perished or were maimed daily. 146 workers were burned or jumped to their deaths in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. The exit doors to the fire escapes were chained closed by the owners as they believed workers took too many breaks. Many photos exist of children chained to their sweatshop machine, their misery and loss of what should have been childhood painfully evident in their blank stares and unsmiling faces. My own grandfather Hiram, age 12 in 1912, shoveled coal in the boilers of Great Lakes freighters. The right wing Taft Supreme Court ruled in 1916 that it could not limit a child’s right to sell his labor to the highest bidder.
By the 1930’s the search for cheap labor had taken the textile mills out of the unionized north into the south. 6 workers were shot to death, 20 wounded by company goons in the 1934 Honea Path textile strike. All those killed were shot in the back. Tom M, Girdler , CEO of the union busting Republic Steel plant in south Chicago supplied police with weapons, “customized” nightsticks and tear gas out of his corporate stock. On May 30,1937 company goons and Chicago police were caught on film charging the striking workers and families shooting and killing 1O men, all fatal wounds in the back. 60 more strikers were shot, beaten. Half of the injured required hospitalization, 9 were permanently disabled.
April 5, 2010 29 miners died at the Upper Big Branch mine. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship ignored hundreds of safety violations, bankrolled the campaigns of friendly Republican legislators and judges and boasted of union busting. January 2010 the Bush Supreme Court appointees Roberts and Alito ruled that corporations may spend unlimited funds to influence we, the people’s elections .After decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy 70% of our national wealth is held by 1% of the population. 45,000 die from lack of health insurance yearly. The Monopoly “game” rules have prevailed since 1980.Before this election, read A People’s History of the United States , see past the false selling of “faith and values” and Islamophobia and vote for economic and social justice.
Brad Cotton
Former member, International Molders and Allied Workers Union. Current Member of the Progressive Democrats of America and Physicians for a National Health Program.
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Monopoly: Not a Child’s Game
On 8/31/2010 4:08 PM, Brad Cotton wrote:
Dear Friends, friends and believers in justice.
Hope you enjoy this ( with some gramatical flaws got past my proofread). One of the saddest and most tragic trends in US politics for the last 30-40 years has been the bonding of evangelical Christianity with the big business interests. Glenn Beck's recent shameless performance this past weekend, trying to claim the mantle of one of the finest Christian social justice leaders, Martin Luther King, makes me sick at heart-- and motivated.
The Herald ( or your local paper) is looking for new talent. Perhaps your grasp on grammar exceeds mine, I am especially fond of the comma splice.
Brad Cotton
Monopoly: Not a Child’s Game Published Circleville Herald 31 August 2010
I played Monopoly with my brothers for days on end. It sometimes took a day or so to destroy the economic life of one’s sibling who was unlucky enough to come to own lower rent properties while I happened to land on and come to own the higher rent chattels. My younger brothers would become upset while I foreclosed on their mortgaged properties, they losing their game-world livelihoods and domiciles. I explained to them that it was just a game, the rules are the rules. You lose. Tough!
Quaker and political activist Elizabeth Magpie designed “Monopoly” to make a moral point. The tophatted captain of industry, the banker, the railroad monopolies , the artillery piece; the properties and tokens of the game originally called “The Landlord’s Game” demonstrated Magpie’s moral lesson: that money always wins, enriching the player who starts off with the advantage of landing on the best properties. The most fortunate player wins the money and possessions of the less fortunate. The bank always wins.
Left out of Monopoly as well as the history of our nation is the role of labor, the common folks, you and I. So much high school history is top-down, we learn about politicians, bankers, generals, as if history is their story alone. Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States should be widely read as it tells of how you and I labored under the politicians, bankers and generals. It is not pretty.
Columbus enslaved the Taino natives of Hispaniola. They died by the hundreds of thousands laboring on the mines and plantations. When you visit Williamsburg, Virginia, of late a favorite destination of Tea Partiers wherein they ask the costumed Colonial re-enactors scripted questions, be sure to visit the few tours and sites that highlight the backbreaking labor of the black slave population that built Williamsburg. Slaves were the ultimate in cheap, replaceable plantation labor.
I visited Stone Mountain, Georgia this past summer, also known as the “Confederate Mount Rushmore” for the huge bas-relief renditions of Jefferson Davis, “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The Civil War was fought so the south could preserve cheap slave labor. The sharecropper system after the war left former slaves in economic captivity. The Ku Klux Klan, refounded twice on Stone Mountain, made sure former slaves had little rights or abilities to escape their bondage to the cotton owner. In the North, a man of means could buy his way out of the Union Army, officially and above-the-board for $300. Poor? You served and died. Vietnam era and college bound? Deferred. Poor? You served and died. Analysis of the socio-economic background of enlistees dying in Iraq and Afghanistan shows some stories never change.
While African-Americans were trapped in virtual slavery as sharecroppers, the industrial revolution fed workers, immigrants, children into 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week into meatgrinder steel mills, coal mines, textile mills, or, as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle showed the nation, literally into the meatgrinder itself. There was no Workmen’s Compensation, thousands perished or were maimed daily. 146 workers were burned or jumped to their deaths in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. The exit doors to the fire escapes were chained closed by the owners as they believed workers took too many breaks. Many photos exist of children chained to their sweatshop machine, their misery and loss of what should have been childhood painfully evident in their blank stares and unsmiling faces. My own grandfather Hiram, age 12 in 1912, shoveled coal in the boilers of Great Lakes freighters. The right wing Taft Supreme Court ruled in 1916 that it could not limit a child’s right to sell his labor to the highest bidder.
By the 1930’s the search for cheap labor had taken the textile mills out of the unionized north into the south. 6 workers were shot to death, 20 wounded by company goons in the 1934 Honea Path textile strike. All those killed were shot in the back. Tom M, Girdler , CEO of the union busting Republic Steel plant in south Chicago supplied police with weapons, “customized” nightsticks and tear gas out of his corporate stock. On May 30,1937 company goons and Chicago police were caught on film charging the striking workers and families shooting and killing 1O men, all fatal wounds in the back. 60 more strikers were shot, beaten. Half of the injured required hospitalization, 9 were permanently disabled.
April 5, 2010 29 miners died at the Upper Big Branch mine. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship ignored hundreds of safety violations, bankrolled the campaigns of friendly Republican legislators and judges and boasted of union busting. January 2010 the Bush Supreme Court appointees Roberts and Alito ruled that corporations may spend unlimited funds to influence we, the people’s elections .After decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy 70% of our national wealth is held by 1% of the population. 45,000 die from lack of health insurance yearly. The Monopoly “game” rules have prevailed since 1980.Before this election, read A People’s History of the United States , see past the false selling of “faith and values” and Islamophobia and vote for economic and social justice.
Brad Cotton
Former member, International Molders and Allied Workers Union. Current Member of the Progressive Democrats of America and Physicians for a National Health Program.
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Next: Vincennes; Cincinnati; Chillicothe; Columbus; Athens
When; 12:00 to 1;00 Friday September 3rd
Cincinnati: where; First Unitarian Church, Linton and Reading Road
when: Meeting-Monday, September 13 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Chillicothe:Thursday / Sept. 16 / Chillicothe work in progress
Columbus: Sunday / Sept. 19 / Columbus work in progress
Athens: Where: Appalachian Peace and Justice Network (APJN). at the First Christian Church
When: Sept. 24th
Where: Ohio University
When: ?
I will update this post as appropriate.
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A MUST READ
It is historically preposterous to think that our Founders considered corporations to be part of “We The People”, much less that corporations were eligible for protection under our Bill of Rights. And even more preposterous is the suggestion that our Founders would consider money equivalent to free speech.
Yet five individuals on the Supreme Court now claim the preposterous is true, and have thereby changed our world. And only a Constitutional Amendment can change it back. That's because all three branches of our government have been put out of action on this issue. The Judicial Branch started it all when the Supreme Court erased 103 years of anti-corruption laws at a single stroke. The Legislative Branch is now forbidden from writing any meaningful replacement laws because they will be ruled unconstitutional by the Judicial Branch. And the Executive Branch, whose job it is to enforce laws, cannot enforce laws that have been erased, nor laws that cannot be written.
We have but one alternative: the Constitution provides for amendment of itself when needed. We The People have the right and the duty to demand an amendment that removes corporate corruption from our elections.
Let me emphasize the seriousness of what has happened. The five-person majority on the Supreme Court grossly overstepped its bounds and violated its own rules. They willfully and extensively changed a case, called Citizens United, that was brought before them. Citizens United was originally a case about accounting, that is, which pot of their money the wealthy nonprofit political corporation, Citizens United, should use to pay for political ads within 30 days of an election. The issue was whether the ads should be paid for using money from a corporate general account or from a political action committee (PAC) account. The corporation Citizens United never claimed that its speech had been restricted, much less censored or banned. The corporation simply wanted to use a different pot of money to pay for broadcasting their movie.
Instead of ruling on the matter of accounting brought before them, the Supreme Court completely changed the case in order to rule on issues that the case did not raise, and some issues that no case had ever raised. This blatantly violated 220 years of American tradition and their own Supreme Court rule, called “judicial restraint”. In an unprecedented case of legislating from the bench, they overturned the last 103 years of American anti-corruption laws and tradition. While Citizens United is a nonprofit political corporation, the Supreme Court applied its ruling to all corporations, profit and nonprofit, commercial and political. They justified this massive purge of laws using a hypothetical case they themselves invented. They have now made it virtually impossible for Congress to fight political corruption because they have now legalized the corruption process. According to the Supreme Court, corporations are now people who are protected by Constitutional freedom of speech, and their money is their speech.
The result is that the most common form of corporate bribes, campaign contributions, are now treated as free speech. All laws regulating corporate political contributions have been thrown out. The public no longer even has the right to know which corporations give how much money to which campaigns. Corporate campaign contributions can now be secret. And the court made no distinction between US corporations and foreign corporations. Foreign corporations now have equal right to bid for and buy American elections, alongside of domestic corporations, and all in secret.
There is a fundamental, provable error in the Citizens United decision. The Supreme Court majority stated that a corporation's right of free speech derives from the Constitutional right of the human beings that comprise it. And they stated that the identity of the corporation derives from the identity of the human beings that comprise it, and therefore that identity cannot be discriminated against. The majority's decision hangs on these two statements of self-evident derived rights. They state that these two derived rights require that a corporation be treated as a legal person.
Yet a corporation can buy and sell itself and other corporations, literally buying and selling its rights and its identity along with itself. A human person cannot buy or sell anyone, much less buy and sell their rights or identity. That is a Constitutional freedom "granted" (or more exactly "denied") to human beings by the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery. But that Constitutional freedom obviously does NOT transfer to corporations. If that Constitutional mandate does not transfer to corporations, why must others, like freedom of speech? Constitutional mandates are not optional. They are not a shopping list from which a judge can pick and choose. If you must derive one, you must derive them all. This categorically proves that the Constitutional freedoms of corporations, if they exist at all, do NOT self-evidently derive from the rights and identities of their members. And this illuminates the hypocrisy of the Supreme Court, which chose to recognize as self-evident only those Constitutional freedoms they considered convenient to corporations.
The Supreme Court majority based their decision on no evidence other than their preconceived opinions. This is astonishing: they gathered and presented no evidence. They ignored the documented fact that our Framers were more concerned with controlling corruption than almost any other issue. The Framers repeatedly stated that a democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold. They pointed to concentrations of wealth as the source of that corruption, and they knew protections were needed to control that corruption.
The Supreme Court majority fabricated a wildly imaginative history about the intent of the Framers of our Constitution. They justified their ruling using sheer speculation about possible future legal issues, issues that have not happened and may never happen. This is in blatant violation of their own 220-year-old rules to never address a Constitutional issue until compelled to do so.
Having fabricated a case for doing so, they addressed it with a sledgehammer, not the precise scalpel that their own rules and American legal tradition require they use. In essence, five people have overturned the rule of law in the United States, replacing it with the rule of their personal whim. This is a violation of American principles so vast, so breathtaking in scope, that it defies description. This travesty must not stand.
MoveTo Amend.org and other national groups are organizing public support for a Constitutional amendment to end this travesty. One proposed wording of the amendment is:
Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to Constitutional rights.
Money is not speechm, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech.
That's it. That's all that's needed. Nothing complicated. Just two fundamental American truths: (1) We The People includes only human beings, and (2) money is not speech. These are the two fundamental American truths that the Supreme Court majority has just overturned, and we must restore.
It takes three-quarters of the states to pass a Constitutional Amendment. No individual party can win on its own. The Framers of our Constitution designed the amendment process that way, and for good reason. If an issue does not unite across party lines, it is not worthy of being a Constitutional Amendment.
Many American citizens are concerned about the corrupting influence of big unions in addition to big corporations. The wording of the amendment applies equally to both. Unions and many other types of politically active organizations could be listed explicitly, but it would make no legal difference. All collective organizations, from Big Business to Brownies, are addressed equally by this wording.
This movement is about to go head-to-head with Big Corporations, the biggest concentrators of wealth and power. Not small businesses. Small businesses are on our side and always have been, back to the founding of the United States. This will be head-to-head between Humans and BIG Business.
Big Business will try to break us into factions, left versus right. But this issue is not left versus right, it is top versus bottom. It is corporations versus human beings.
Corporations have vast amounts of money, $13.1 trillion dollars in the last election cycle. They have vast amounts of power. They do not grow old, so time is always on their side. As our Founders frequently said, corporations are soulless. They do not need clean air to breathe. They do not need clean water to drink. They have protections from being sued that we do not. They don't pay taxes on their expenses such as electricity, gasoline, and supplies, as we do, and they pay taxes at a lower rate than we do. They can outspend and outlive human beings in courts. They cannot be put in jail. They own all the popular media. (By the way, that's why you won't hear much about this on CNN or Fox News.) And while they know they can NOT defeat our ideas, they also know they don't have to. All they have to do is break us into factions and outlast us. If that happens we will defeat ourselves.
And we will lose our voice in our democracy.
This January the Supreme Court gave Big Corporations, foreign and domestic, the legal right to secretly buy all American elections, federal and local. A Constitutional Amendment is the only way to overrule the Supreme Court. It is legal and ethical and it is our duty. The Framers planned for this sort of thing to happen. They gave us the tools and entrusted WE THE PEOPLE with the responsibility. It's been done 27 times already. But if we don't move quickly to overrule the Supreme Court, we could lose our country. It will no longer be run by human citizens. It will be run by big corporations. Not just partially, as it has been for much of our history. But completely.
I served briefly in the Army, and I worked much of my career with various defense contractors throughout the Cold War. I studied the Soviet Union in detail. I participated in many war games against them. I understood clearly the Soviet threat to America.
But there has never been a threat to American democracy as serious as we now face. The Soviets could have hurt us, but they could not have dismantled the idea of American democracy. That idea cannot be destroyed from outside. But it can be and is being dismantled from inside.
In addition to my military experience I am an engineer, an entrepreneur, and a businessman. I live my life by facts and hard data. And the data tell States is in the middle of a monumental power grab by the super rich. These are the owners and top executives and board members of the largest corporations. They are fortifying their way of life at the expense of ours. Ideology is not involved, though they will use ideology as a smokescreen to polarize us. On this issue there is no left, and no right. It's simply about money and power.
I don't dispute their right to money. Money is property, and in American tradition property is protected. But I DO dispute their right to claim money is free speech. And I DO dispute their right to legalize bribery and use their money to buy American elections.
This power grab will affect every American. And ultimately it will affect the world. There is no place to hide. We're all in this struggle, like it or not.
This violation of American tradition seriously damages every political party in America. How is a political party benefited when corporations now have more money and legal power to influence elections than political parties do? Take the traditional Conservative principles for instance: family values, small government, and low taxes. In what way does legalized bribery promote family values? In what way does legalized special interest and pork barrel politics promote smaller, cheaper government? In what way do bribed corporate tax loopholes reduce your taxes?
All of us, every political party and persuasion, were just pushed over the brink unexpectedly. A mere five individuals have just changed our world, and we have to move fast and with purpose while we still can.
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This Just In from Ben Manski
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This Just In from Ben Manski
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Veterans walk the
Veterans walk the country in support of Constitutional amendment
Gil Halsted
Monday, August 30, 2010
(STATE CAPITOL) Two Vietnam veterans are walking across the country to rally support for a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution. At their stop in Madison, the Monahan brothers visited the state capitol where they spoke about their effort to abolish corporate personhood.
Laird and Robin Monahan left San Francisco in mid-May and hope to bring their message to the halls of Congress in October. Both in their 60's, they served in the Navy from 1964 to 1968.
When the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United case was decided in January, Laird Monahan says he laughed out loud at the language that gave equal speech rights to corporations and equated money with speech. But, he says it’s not a joke.
“Corporations are an efficient economic tool, but a Supreme Court that puts an economic tool above human beings will guarantee our exclusion from representative government," he says.
That belief is what is what has inspired Laird and his brother to urge city councils in each place they stop to pass a resolution supporting a constitutional amendment stating clearly that money is not speech and that only human beings -- not corporations -- have free speech rights.
Both men realize that it could take a decade to get all 50 states to ratify such an amendment, but Robin Monahan says it's really a very simple concept.
“Everyone is going to die. Corporations are immortal, and that gives them a long period of time to appeal decisions that they find unfavorable to their profit margin."
Joining the Monahans at the Madison news conference were two candidates for the state assembly and one for Congress who all pledged if elected to push for passage of the amendment
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Veterans walk the
Veterans walk the country in support of Constitutional amendment
Gil Halsted
Monday, August 30, 2010
(STATE CAPITOL) Two Vietnam veterans are walking across the country to rally support for a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution. At their stop in Madison, the Monahan brothers visited the state capitol where they spoke about their effort to abolish corporate personhood.
Laird and Robin Monahan left San Francisco in mid-May and hope to bring their message to the halls of Congress in October. Both in their 60's, they served in the Navy from 1964 to 1968.
When the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United case was decided in January, Laird Monahan says he laughed out loud at the language that gave equal speech rights to corporations and equated money with speech. But, he says it’s not a joke.
“Corporations are an efficient economic tool, but a Supreme Court that puts an economic tool above human beings will guarantee our exclusion from representative government," he says.
That belief is what is what has inspired Laird and his brother to urge city councils in each place they stop to pass a resolution supporting a constitutional amendment stating clearly that money is not speech and that only human beings -- not corporations -- have free speech rights.
Both men realize that it could take a decade to get all 50 states to ratify such an amendment, but Robin Monahan says it's really a very simple concept.
“Everyone is going to die. Corporations are immortal, and that gives them a long period of time to appeal decisions that they find unfavorable to their profit margin."
Joining the Monahans at the Madison news conference were two candidates for the state assembly and one for Congress who all pledged if elected to push for passage of the amendment
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One of the nicest walking days in many weeks
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