Reclaim Democracy!

Ranchers and Dairy Farmers Win Two Battles Against Corporate and Government Foes

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By Jennifer Rockne
First published in the spring 2004 Insurgent

In a potentially transformative federal court decision, ranchers won a class-action lawsuit against the meatpacking giant, Tyson Foods, Inc., for violating the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 — created to protect farmers from the tyranny of that era’s meat giants. The suit was filed in 1996, when Tyson was known as IBP Inc. Tyson was ordered to pay $1.28 billion, spread among up to 35,000 ranchers. The corporation’s attorneys vowed to appeal the Alabama jury’s decision.

The system of regional meatpackers and competitive markets has given way to one in which producers sell, usually by pre-arranged contract, to any of four massive corporations — Cargill/Excel, Tyson/IBP, Farmland National Beef, and Swift/ConAgra, which jointly control nearly 85% of the market.

The Tyson case, and others pending against Cargill/Excel and Swift/ConAgra, stems from a practice in which cattle buyers contract for cattle ahead of the time of sale, then “store” the cattle to drop the bidding price. The Tyson verdict is the largest to date against anti-trust law abuse known as monopsony (or oligopsony), the opposite of monopoly. In a monopoly, the seller raises prices paid by buyers, while in a monopsony, a dominant company uses its market power to depress the prices it pays suppliers below what they would receive in a competitive market.

Though the meat processing industry is an oligopsony nationally (Tyson controls about a third of the market), a single company often enjoys a monopsony in a particular region.

Increased corporate concentration and lack of federal enforcement of anti-trust law across several industries is sparking a wave of civil litigation. The Tyson verdict is an encouraging sign that some courts may enforce laws that industry-coopted regulators are failing to uphold.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 24, the 3rd Circuit U.S. Appeals Court ruled a national milk “check-off” fee unconstitutional on grounds that it violates First Amendment rights. The plaintiffs in Cochran v. Veneman (Ann Veneman, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture) were family farmers who raised free-range, hormone-free cows. They believed the mandatory fee, collected by the federal government to promote milk as a generic commodity, undermined their product and amounted to forced speech with which they disagreed.

Federally-mandated commodity checkoffs are now 0 for 3 in recent appeals court rulings. Pork and beef check-offs (the beef case is under appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court) also were ruled unconstitutional for the same reasons as the milk fee.

Similar legal challenges have been waged with initial success in the grape, mushroom and pork industries.

Celebrating Independents

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America’s Independent Businesses Have Reasons for Optimism

By Stacy Mitchell
Published July 2, 2004

On a cold December night, 231 years ago, a band of patriots forced their way onto three ships docked in Boston Harbor and dumped more than 90,000 pounds of tea into the sea. Although we often forget it today, their actions were as much a challenge to global corporate power as they were a rebellion against King George III.

The ships were owned by the East India Company, a vast transnational corporation that exerted enormous power over the American economy. It had a firm grip on the British government too. In 1773 parliament passed the Tea Act, which exempted the East India Company from paying taxes on tea it sold in the colonies. The aim was to enable the company to undercut small competitors, all of whom were subject to the tax, and drive them out of business.

“Hence it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies,,” according to Tea Party participant George Hewes, “but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen . . . “

The British government and the East India Company were betting that the lure of cheap tea would overpower any sense of principle. But they misjudged. The colonists continued to support independent merchants, boycotted East India tea and, that night in the harbor, engaged in a bit of economic disobedience.

It’s impossible to read this history (as in Thom Hartmann’s Unequal Protection) without thinking of subsidies for Wal-Mart, favors for Halliburton, and banking policy designed to augment the power of big banks. Once again we have a government that operates largely in the interests of global corporations.

And once again, there are signs of defiance everywhere. Notably this week, as we celebrate our nation’s independence, thousands of small businesses, led by the new and fast-growing American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), are drawing attention to the importance of small-scale, local enterprise in guarding against economic tyranny.

They’ve declared this Independents Week and are urging Americans to reassert their economic independence, much as their Tea Party forerunners did, by avoiding global corporations and seeking out independently owned businesses.

The odds of local businesses gaining ground in an economy where just twenty chains capture one-third of the $2.5 trillion in annual consumer spending seem about as good as, well, the odds that a group of ragtag rebels could beat back the British Redcoats. Independent businesses are outgunned and at the wrong end of a whole host of government policies that favor their big competitors. But like the colonial rebels, they have an ace up their sleeve: the stubbornly independent, self-reliant spirit of America .

“This is about community self-determination,” said AMIBA director Jennifer Rockne. Local ownership diffuses economic power. It ensures that critical decisions — whether to pay a living wage, protect a natural resource, sell produce from local farms, or contribute to a local charity — are made, not by some distant board of directors, but by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of their decisions.

AMIBA is publicizing Independents Week nationally, but many of the events will take place in the dozen cities where local business coalitions affiliated with AMIBA have formed.

In Austin, Texas, the 240-member Austin Independent Business Alliance has blanketed the city with posters calling on residents to “Celebrate Your Independents” and persuaded Mayor Will Wynn to issue an official Independents Week proclamation. Members are organizing a variety of events and contests, all of which are designed get people thinking about how their spending decisions affect Austin ‘s future.

Meanwhile, in Hudson, Ohio, fifty-five independent businesses have been running newspaper ads calling on residents to “dare to live a week without malls.” This Saturday, during a big celebration on Main Street, supporters are planning to link arms to form a giant circle around the downtown — a symbolic act organizers hope will spur opposition to a November ballot initiative that would open the way for big box development.

In Tampa, Florida, the Tampa Independent Business Alliance is hosting a public forum that members hope will galvanize a broad public discussion about the merits of pursuing chain store development versus nurturing locally owned enterprises. One vital difference, notes Carla Jimenez, co-owner of Inkwood, is that, unlike chains, independent businesses support a web of local economic activity.

“When we need shelves, we have them crafted here in Tampa,” she said. “We have a local printer, accountant, local bookkeeper that’s proficient with the Clio accounting service we sometimes need, we even have a local, independent pest control company.” The more localized a city’s trade, the less vulnerable it is to the fluctuations of the global economy and the whims of the stock market.

Jimenez was the person who first dreamed up the idea of Independents Week. It’s not surprising that an independent bookseller would connect the dots of political and economic democracy. Local businesses are our best weapons against chain store gatekeepers that increasingly control what books, records, and films end up on store shelves. This week, in my home state of Maine, had it not been for four independently owned theaters, there would have been a complete blackout on Fahrenheit 911.

“This a fun celebration of all of our great independent businesses,” said Michael Levinson, director of Build St. Louis, a fledgling independent business alliance in St. Louis, Missouri, which will kick-off Independents Week with a party at a local brewery emceed by the director of a community-owned radio station. “But it’s also about preserving economic freedom and local self-reliance, values that go back to the very beginning of this country.”

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project (a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance), serves on the board of the American Independent Business Alliance and is a frequent contributor to ReclaimDemocracy.or.

Right to Remain Silent Undermined by Supreme Court’s Hiibel Ruling

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By The Washington Post editorial board
First published June 22, 2004

Editor’s note: This editorial preempted an op-ed we were ready to write on the June 21 Supreme Court ruling. It represents our concerns well.

“You have the right to remain silent.” At least, you did before the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada yesterday. Now, when a police officer suspecting you of a crime stops you in the street and asks your name, you can be prosecuted for refusing to answer.

That’s what happened to Larry Dudley Hiibel, who was approached by a police officer investigating a report of an assault. Repeatedly asked to identify himself, Mr. Hiibel insisted he had done nothing wrong and refused. This was illegal under Nevada law, which requires any person stopped by the police “under circumstances which reasonably indicate that the person has committed . . . a crime” to “identify himself” if asked. But as justices have long presumed in previous cases, refusing to talk was also Mr. Hiibel’s right under the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that a person shall not be forced to act as a witness against himself. Not anymore.

The Supreme Court, voting 5 to 4, declared that there was nothing wrong with compelling people to answer police questions if the police were merely asking their names. It was okay to demand Mr. Hiibel’s name, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “because in this case disclosure of his name presented no reasonable danger of incrimination.” That might be true of Mr. Hiibel, but what if you’re wanted for a crime? What if your name is similar to that of a fugitive? What if your first name is Osama? Justice Kennedy doesn’t answer these questions, leaving them to future cases. But as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent, “A name can provide the key to a broad array of information about the person, particularly in the hands of a police officer with access to a range of law enforcement databases. And that information, in turn, can be tremendously useful in a criminal prosecution.”

We believe that people generally ought to cooperate with law enforcement. But we also believe that targets of law enforcement have a right not to do so. Carving out exceptions, even seemingly innocent ones, is a bad idea.

© 2004 Washington Post

Disenfranchising Blacks as Political Strategy

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“Spoilage” Rates Determined by Technology, Not Voters

By Greg Palast
First published on GregPalast.com, June 21, 2004

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. “Spoiled votes” is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them — half of the rejected ballots — were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse.

These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-’round.

How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It’s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played — with black voters the predetermined losers.

Florida’s Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state — and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in “Al Gore.” Optical reading machines rejected these because “Al” is a “stray mark.”

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee’s white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let’s not get smug about Florida’s Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, “It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. — about 1 million votes — were cast by nonwhite voters.”

This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.

Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It’s not surprising that the First Brother’s team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. That’s not surprising. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let’s shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida’s black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county’s procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.

In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named “Help America Vote Act,” signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corp.’s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida’s Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won’t fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts.

In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters’ ballots.

Greg Palast is the author of ‘The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – the New Expanded Election Edition ,” from which this article is taken.

© 2004 Greg Palast

Berkeley Becomes Latest U.S. Municipality to Oppose Corporate Constitutional “Rights”

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Last updated June 16, 2004

Members of our San Francisco Bay Area chapter spearheaded a campaign that culminated on June 15, 2004 with passage of this resolution by the Berkeley City Council. Berkeley is the third California municipality to pass such a resolution, following Arcata and Point Arena. The resolution does not carry immediate legal consequence, but has served as a valuable education and organizing tool to advance debate over the appropriate role for corporations in a democracy. It also provides an important tool to influence future municipal decisions.

The strategy of passing local and state resolutions has been used with great effect in more than 300 jurisdictions to build support for defending constitutional rights and stop expansions of the so-called Patriot Act. The spread of local resolutions or, even better, binding ordinances opposing illegitimate corporate privilege, also can lead to larger change. See bottom of page for further resources.

Berkeley Resolution on Corporate Constitutional Rights

WHEREAS, Chapter 3.68 of the Berkeley Municipal Code, which contains the initiative ordinance creating the Peace and Justice Commission, sets forth several functions of the Peace and Justice Commission, including, but not limited to, “(A) Advise the Berkeley City Council on all matters relating to the City of Berkeley’s role in issues of peace and social justice, including, but not limited to support for human rights and self-determination throughout the world; (B) Help create citizen awareness around issues of social justice [and] (C) Help develop proposals for the City Council in furtherance of the goals of peace and justice, and help publicize such actions in the community;” and

WHEREAS, under the United States and California Constitutions, all sovereignty resides with “We the People,” such that people hold all inherent political power and government derives its power from the consent of the governed; government is created by the people and for the people for our health, safety, and welfare; our system of government is a representative democracy, through which the people govern; and “We the People” are entitled to inalienable constitutional rights to wield against oppressive governmental regulation; and

WHEREAS, “corporation” is not mentioned in the United States Constitution; our founders did not grant corporations rights; rights were reserved for natural people; historically corporations were created as artificial entities, chartered by state governments to serve the public interest, cause no harm, and be subordinate to the sovereign people; and yet by judicial interpretations, corporations gained personhood status, free speech and other protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment; and

WHEREAS, with “corporate personhood” and First Amendment rights, corporations dominate the political process and interfere with citizens’ control over our government as follows: corporations lobby our legislative and regulatory bodies; with the Supreme Court’s assertion that money is a form of free speech, corporations spend vast amounts of money to influence elections; and by virtue of their enormous wealth, corporations wield much more influence over our government and over the media than do “We the People”; and

WHEREAS, this corporate influence is transforming our government from one that is “by and for the people” to one that is by and for corporate interests; corporate influence over our government denies citizens our right to govern through a representative democracy and subjects us to minority rule by the wealthy few; and corporate influence has made it difficult to maintain a living wage, a clean environment, affordable health care, and quality education for all; and

WHEREAS, the citizens of the City of Berkeley consider it to be our sovereign right and civic duty to recognize that corporations remain artificial entities created by the people through our state legislatures; hope to nurture and expand democracy in Berkeley and in our nation; and reject the concept of corporate constitutional rights based on “corporate personhood” or any other factor.

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Council of the City of Berkeley supports amending the United States and California Constitutions to declare that corporations are not granted the protections or rights of persons, and supports amending the United States and California Constitutions to declare that the expenditure of corporate money is not a form of constitutionally protected speech.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the City Council directs the City Manager to send a copy of this Resolution to our state and federal government representatives including: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Majority and Minority Leaders of the California Senate Don Perata and James Brulte, California Assemblymember Loni Hancock, United States Senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, and United States Representative Barbara Lee.

Resources
* For more on the Berkeley resolution, contact PhoeBe at: phoebeso”@t”earthlink.net.
* To learn more about our Bay Area chapter, contact Kirsten at: sfpersonhood”@”yahoo.com or 1-866-280-1409, ext 600.
* Tips on passing passing a local resolution (large pdf file designed to print at 11 ” x 14″ for brochure. Thanks to Jan Edwards).
* The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund also are excellent resources.

Democrats in Washington State Officially Oppose “Money = Speech” Precedent and Corporate Personhood

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Published June 9, 2004

Editors’ Note: Introducing positions into any local or state political party’s platform is one effective tool for broadening awareness of important issues among politically active citizens. We share below examples of statements passed by the Washington State Democratic Party on June 5, 2004, which occured after many citizens helped pass similar resolutions in their county platforms — a truly bottom-up process. Much of the language comes directly from our articles on campaign finance reform — we’re thrilled to see it put to such effective use!

Related platforms and resolutions have been passed in Oklahoma, New Hampshire and Maine. 

Resolution: Money Is Not Speech

Whereas, thirty-six years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the poll tax, which was a pay-to-vote scheme levied by several Southern states with the intention of disenfranchising Blacks. The Court struck down this scheme in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections by prohibiting deliberate economic exclusion of citizens from the electoral process, and;

Whereas, the bias of wealth still plagues our politics, largely due to the 1976 US Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo where the Court made a leap of logic to declare that spending money to influence elections was a form of “Free Speech,” protected by the First Amendment and largely beyond democratic control, and;

Whereas, as a result, we have two distinct classes of democratic participation. One class includes the majority of us who are entitled to turn out on Election Day to choose from a menu of candidates pre-selected because of their ability to raise (or possess) huge sums of money. The other class includes those wielding the real power – – the ability to finance candidates’ campaigns. This elite group determines the options for the rest of us and subsequently controls the political agenda, and therefore;

Be it resolved, that in order to provide all citizens, regardless of wealth, with more equal opportunities to influence elections, to influence public policy, and to run for office; and to further the principle of “one person, one vote” in a participatory and democratic republic; and to limit corruption and the appearance of corruption in our government, we, the people, declare the unlimited use of money to influence elections to be incompatible with the principle of Equal Protection established under the Fourteenth Amendment, and;

Be it further resolved, that we, the people, support all efforts:

  • To give Congress the power to set limits on contributions and expenditures made to influence the outcome of any federal election, including the power to ban such contributions and expenditures,
  • To ensure that each state shall have the power to set limits on contributions and expenditures made to influence the outcome of elections in that state for all offices, and

State Platform Plank on Corporate Power

Editor’s note: The language here was negotiated by the local activists who succeeded in passing the plank over vigorous objections. This is an example of their individual success, not model language.

  • We believe:
    • corporations are vital to our economy and standard of living;
    • business-friendly laws can be beneficial; and
    • corporations should not exert undue influence on our body politic or use our Constitution in the courts to thwart our democratically enacted laws.
  • We support:
    • revoking the charters of corporations that repeatedly violate our laws; and
    • a government created by, or, and for the people, not corporations.
  • We oppose:
    • the Supreme Court precedent that corporations are people, and further oppose corporate rights as persons under our Constitution and their associated constitutional rights, including the First Amendment right to make political contributions in the corporate capacity; and
    • tax breaks to corporations and other corporate welfare, unless a verifiable public interest is served.

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