April 29
1938 – “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies” President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message-congress-curbing-monopolies
2001 – Publication this month of “How Long Shall We Grovel: A Memo for the Record” by Richard Grossman, POCLAD co-founder
“…ANYONE who chooses to look will find massive evidence of chemical corporation murder, pillage & lies extending over a century. ANYONE who chooses to look will see persistent corporate denial of people’s constitutional and human rights, & government complicity. This country exalts the platitude ‘all political authority is inherent in the people…
“But our great corporations have long been protected by the rule of law … empowered by our own constitution and bill of rights. Our society has bestowed upon chemical corporation leaders, as upon top officials of all giant corporations, the highest rewards & honors, & great wealth.
“Great corporations have been exalted by legislators & judges, presidents & governors, police and national guards, by local, state & federal governments. How long shall we authorize chemical corporate officials to kill? How long shall we beg them to tell the truth? To make the earth’s air, water and soil, our foods and our jobs, a little less deadly? To please “give us” the right to know? How long shall we grovel before our elected public servants? Other species are counting on us to do more than regulate the destruction of the planet. What do YOU think we the people should do now?” http://poclad.org/BWA/2001/BWA_2001_APR.html
2023 – “The corporate criminals killing off democracy” posted article by Evan Jones
“There is another important dimension to the moral impasse in which we find ourselves. This is the elephant in the room, staring us straight in the face! It is the joint stock limited liability corporation and its rights and power under the legal fiction of “corporate personhood”.
“The “corporation” is antithetical to democracy — period. Never mind that it is the central economic institution underpinning that much-praised but murky system known as “liberal democracy”. Indeed, corporate personhood became standard Western fare before universal adult franchise was achieved in any country. Democracy, from the start, has been an unachievable work in progress…
“In particular, freeing corporations to make unconstrained political donations is based on the libertarian argument that a corporation is merely a collection of consenting individuals. The argument is fallacious — the corporation is a separate entity, the whole point of corporate personhood.”
April 30
1943 — Death of Martha Beatrice Webb, English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer.
“Democracy is not the multiplication of ignorant opinions.”
FYI, Webb coined the term “collective bargaining”.
2011 – Washington State Democratic Party passes “Amending the U.S. Constitution to Reserve Constitutional Rights for People, not Corporations” resolution
The resolution calls on the state legislature to pass a resolution urging Congress “to pass and send to the states for ratification a constitutional amendment to establish that a corporation shall not be considered a person eligible for rights accorded to human beings under the U.S. Constitution.” The resolution also declares “the use of money to influence elections or the acts of public officials shall not be considered a protected form of speech.”
2019 – “Corporate Leaning SCOTUS Makes It Easier For Employers To Steal From Workers” online article
“The US Supreme Court ruled that workers cannot filed lawsuits against employers for stealing their wages and instead they have to go in front of a panel of corporate friendly arbitrators that are always hand picked by the corporation. This story’s been kicking out there for a long time, I mean you’ve got a labor policy that makes it virtually impossible for individuals to sue their employers, in other words an employer literally steals money from them. They do it all kinds of ways.”
May 1
1847 – Birth of Henry Demarest Lloyd
“We are calling upon the owners of industrial power and property, as mankind called upon kings in their day, to be good and kind, wise and sweet, and we are calling upon them in vain…We have put power in their hands and ask them not to use it as power.”
American political activist and muckraking journalist Lloyd was best known for his exposes of the Standard Oil Company.
2012 – Publication of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” by Steve Coll
“The main themes of ‘Private Empire’ involved the ways that ExxonMobil saw itself as an independent, transnational corporate sovereign in the world, a power independent of the American government, one devoted firmly to shareholder interests and possessed of its own foreign policy. Exxon’s foreign policy sometimes had more impact on the countries where it operated than did the State Department.”
2024 – May Day
“International Workers’ Day, also known as Workers’ Day, Labor Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of laborers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labor movement which occurs every year on May Day (1 May), an ancient European spring festival.
“The date was chosen by a pan-national organization of socialist and communist political parties to commemorate the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago on 4 May 1886. The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on ‘all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace.'”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day
The US is one of the few countries not to celebrate their Labor Day on May 1 — done intentionally to dissuade workers from thinking and acting in solidarity with workers in other nations.
May 2
2000 – “Gender and Global Corporatization” by Molly Morgan, Virginia Rasmussen & Mary Zepernick published this month in Spring issue of Peace & Freedom, a publication of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
“The power-over model, because it is a human invention, arbitrarily assigns unequal value to human difference, establishing dominant and subordinate categories and the political concept of “other” as the basis for discrimination and exploitation. Though rooted in male dominance, patriarchal behavior applies to all of us when we exercise power over others and the Earth. Global “corporatization” is a logical extension of the “dismemberment” that accompanied the development of “civilization.” Far from being natural and inevitable, the transnational corporation, with its vast supporting infrastructure, is the most virulent manifestation of power-over to date.”
May 3
2002 – “The End of Agribusiness: Dismantling the Mechanisms of Corporate Rule:” by Dave Henson, Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) and POCLAD principal, published this month
“However, an honest assessment of the overall effectiveness of this strategy of regulating corporate harms must conclude that it is a limited strategy and that it has ultimately licensed an unsustainable and unacceptable level of ecological destruction and marginalized our most fundamental concerns. We have been fighting corporate assaults against nature timber harvest plan by timber harvest plan; factory farm by factory farm; dying stream by dying stream. We are constantly being called to fight against new and more virulent crises. If we win one, there is little time to celebrate because there are many more crises created by corporate agribusiness every day. Corporations have grown and become far more powerful in this regulatory environment. In short, corporations have successfully framed both the arena of struggle and the terms of the debate, and have limited us to incremental compromises…
“What happens when we try to reassert democratic, public control over major economic decisions?… Corporate attorneys (and they are plentiful) respond with legal defenses based on the fiction that a corporation is a legal “person” in terms of constitutional protections. They use the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to assert that states, counties, and cities have no authority to restrict interstate and transnational commerce. They assert for the corporation the property rights, due process, and equal protection guarantees meant in the Constitution for real, human persons…
“To win this fight… we must do three kinds of activism at once.
1. Fight Fires…
2. Create Alternatives…
3. Dismantle the Mechanisms of Corporate Rule…
http://www.poclad.org/BWA/2002/BWA_2002_MAY.html
2016 – Pennsylvania Township passes law legalizing direct action against corporate frack wastewater injection well
From a press release
“Grant Township, Indiana County, PA: Tonight, Grant Township Supervisors passed a first-in-the-nation law that legalizes direct action to stop frack wastewater injection wells within the Township. Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) has sued the Township to overturn a local democratically enacted law that prohibits injection wells.
“If a court does not uphold the people’s right to stop corporate activities threatening the well-being of the community, the ordinance codifies that, “any natural person may then enforce the rights and prohibitions of the charter through direct action.” Further, the ordinance states that any nonviolent direct action to enforce their Charter is protected, “prohibit[ing] any private or public actor from bringing criminal charges or filing any civil or other criminal action against those participating in nonviolent direct action.”
May 4
1886 – Haymarket Massacre
What began as a peaceful labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago in support of workers striking for an eight-hour workday, the day after police killed one and injured several workers, turned violent after a bomb was thrown at police. The blast and resulting gunfire killed several police officers and civilians, as well as injuring others.
The internationally publicized trial that resulted in the conviction of eight anarchists, seven of whom were sentenced to death, was highly prejudiced toward the defendants. No evidence was ever presented linking any of them to throwing the bomb.
The event sparked the origins of International Workers’ Day – a celebration of solidarity and the contributions laborers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labor movement and occurs every year on May 1 (May Day).
Despite its U.S. origins, “Labor Day” is officially celebrated in the U.S. in September. This was an attempt to culturally separate U.S. workers and workers movements from those internationally. May Day is growing in in significance in the U.S. every year, with greater numbers of planned educational and mass action events by groups representing workers, immigrants and others calling for justice.
2014 – Launch of Cooperation Jackson
Cooperation Jackson is an emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership.
Our vision is to develop a cooperative network based in Jackson, Mississippi that will consist of four interconnected and interdependent institutions: an emerging federation of local worker cooperatives, a developing cooperative incubator, a cooperative education and training center (the Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development), and a cooperative bank or financial institution.
Cooperation Jackson’s basic theory of change is centered on the position that organizing and empowering the structurally under and unemployed sectors of the working class, particularly from Black and Latino communities, to build worker organized and owned cooperatives will be a catalyst for the democratization of our economy and society overall.
http://www.cooperationjackson.org/intro/
2020 – “JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Fossil Fuel Industry Get Bailed Out Under Fed’s ‘Main Street’ Lending Program”
“Americans need to sit up and pay attention to what’s going on here because the U.S. Treasury has committed $75 billion of taxpayers’ money to support this program under the illusion that it’s going to mom and pop operations on a typical Main Street in America. That initial $75 billion will be levered up to $750 billion under the Fed’s ability to create money out of thin air, with taxpayers eating the first $75 billion of losses. Once the loans are originated by a lender, they will then be bought up by a Fed-created Special Purpose Vehicle, thus removing bad loans from the balance sheets of banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and the like. The banks will only have to retain 5 percent of the exposure.”
[Note: The FIRE – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – interest group is #1 in political campaign contributions to Congress, https://www.opensecrets.org/industries ]
May 5
1882 – Birth of Sylvia Pankhurst, British suffragette, socialist and anti-fascist – on democracy
“My belief in the growth and permanence of democracy is undimmed. I know that the people will cast off the new dictatorship as they did the old. I believe as firmly as in my youth that humanity will surmount the era of poverty and war.”
1911 – Birth of Edward J. Devitt, United States Senior District Judge District of Minnesota, author of article “Your Honor” in “Handbook for Judges”
“Being called ‘Your Honor’ day in and day out is a constant reminder, not alone of the prestige of the office, but more importantly of the tremendous power and heavy responsibility and absolute independence of the federal judge.
“We are practically immune from discipline or censure or supervision. We cannot be defeated at an election or discharged by a superior…By striking down many government decisions…the Supreme Court has established itself as a major participant in the policy-making process.”
“Handbook for Judges,” Glenn R. Winters, ed. (The American Judicature Society, 1975)
2003 – UU WORLD May/June issue “Does He Have More Rights Than You Do?” published this month
The Unitarian Universalists become the first religious denomination in the US to devote an entire issue of their monthly magazine to the issue of corporate personhood as it relates to self-governance. The whole issue is worth reading: http://archive.uuworld.org/2003/03/index.html
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