Michael Heister

Raconteur

One more item for Edward Murray's Occupy Wall Street list

I'd like to add one more item to this list.

6. Call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood and the concept that money is speech.

It took a deeply twisted and tortured interpretation of the 14th Amendment to anoint corporations as legal persons. And corporations have been throwing around Samolians by the tankerload in DC ever since. Worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott. There is a sick symmetry to this, though. The Court ruled Dred Scott, a slave, was not a person, and later ruled a piece of paper IS a person.

It took three amendments - and a freaking Civil War - to reverse that, one of which is the rather dubious basis for corporate personhood. So it's going to take a fourth one to fix this.

What to do? Write your city councilpersons, your mayor, your state legislators, your congressmen and senators, and your governor. A constitutional amendment has to be approved by 3/4 of the states, and it certainly helps to have congress rubber-stamp it and send it to them, so this is an all-hands-on-board operation.

Then why mayors and city councilfolk? To build momentum. To show that this is an idea whose time has come. Los Angeles is the first large city to do this. They say all politics is local. Turn the pressure on your local politicos and have them help push it up the line.

Batman v Billionaires

We could '60s TV Batman old school on this.

"Holy Crumbling Infrastructure Batman!"

"That's right Robin. Other than one you know (ahem) fairly well, Gotham's billionaires are a murder of self-centered, money-worshipping soulless dickweeds."

"A murder, Batman?"

"Yes, Robin, like a murder of crows. Crows, like rats, live and feed off the good work of others, neither asking permission or giving thanks. Left unchecked, they can pick an area so clean it will be barren for generations. 'Murder' is quite the correct term for a congregation of such rapacious feathered beasts, wouldn't you say Robin?"

"But Batman, how do we get rid of them?"

"We don't Robin. Soulless as these billionaires are, they are still God's creatures. No, the best we can do is keep them in check. Protect the good citizens of Gotham from their rapaciousness by making them do the one thing crows don't do."

"But Batman, how do we do that?"

"Taxes, my comrade in fighting the evil that plagues our fair city. Taxes."

Glenn Beck's Internet Television Experiment

CNN and other networks have dabbled in the direction Glenn Beck is going, reading selective Tweets and using iReports (give us your content and we'll happily use it for free), but the man who really plowed the ground for Beck is Howard Stern.

Stern's Sirius/XM deal is similar in that he went from being available for free every morning to people paying to hear him (on a satellite radio network nobody really cared about before he showed up), and it was a huge success for both Stern and the network.

Beck's now asking his audience to dig deep and pay for his content. Beck, for his part, is reaching out and making the effort to involve his audience in ways that no other television personality has yet tried, or at least pulled off. His viewers will help greatly in the generation of content for his show, and they may well feel much more involved for it.

Also, it may not be, as Keith Olbermann pointed out, anywhere near the audience Beck pulled in on Fox, but this is not 230,000 people whose only cost is their time and having to put up with pitches for gold and prescription pharmaceuticals. These people put their money where their affections are, and if they stick around and their numbers increase - even incrementally - Beck's experiment here will be a huge success.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/14/glenn-beck-new-web-network-gbtv_n_961772.html