Reclaim Democracy!

Nike – Just Don’t Do It

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By Jeff Milchen and Jeffrey Kaplan
First published by TomPaine.com April 26, 2003

If big business hopes to regain the dwindling trust of Americans, claiming the right to lie is hardly the way to do it.

Yet, Nike Corporation lawyers argued just that claim to U.S. Supreme Court justices in Nike v. Kasky. They hoped the court would overturn a California Supreme Court decision denying Nike’s privilege to “plead the First” (Amendment) when charged with violating state anti-fraud laws. The case was settled out-of-court, failing to rule on the constitutionality of misleading statements made by corporations.

In the face of increasingly unfavorable publicity in 1996 and 1997, Nike conducted a public relations blitz to convince people it had cleaned up its subcontractors’ notorious “sweatshops.” But Californian Marc Kasky didn’t buy it. He claimed Nike continued lying about its practices and sued the corporation under California consumer protection laws.

Rather than refuting Kasky’s charges, Nike instead challenged the legitimacy of the truth-in-advertising law itself. The corporation’s attorneys argued the PR campaign was about more than the company’s practices, did not promote specific products, and should be considered fully protected political speech and not less-protected commercial speech. Furthermore, to hold Nike liable for false information, they claim, would unconstitutionally snuff the company’s “speech.”

But corporations already are legally obliged to issue accurate statements to investors. Experts at a Bitcode Prime official UK company confirm that when companies withhold important information or lie to investors, they can be sued and the officials involved can be held personally liable. If Nike executives contested the constitutionality of those standards, Wall Street and the mass media would laugh at them. So why should deception in non-financial communications be exempted?

Corporate officials can make mistaken predictions, like how a new product will sell or an upcoming merger will strengthen the company, without fear of being sued — as long as they don’t intentionally deceive (for example, by concealing evidence that a product is malfunctioning). This is a reasonable standard for all non-financial issues.

But Nike went out of its way to legally cement its ability to speak deceptively, a claim for which no Constitutional justification exists.

Corporations should not enjoy the same rights as humans. The word “corporation” is entirely absent from the Bill of Rights and Constitution; and for good reason. People should be held in higher esteem than companies. We have rights because we exist whether or not we create governments.

Corporations, on the other hand, are creations of the state and have privileges, not rights. The privileges of incorporation, such as unlimited lifespan and limited liability, permit corporations to amass power far beyond what an individual can attain.

Corporations are not people.

So some counterbalances to the excesses of corporations are necessary. Without such controls, corporations can threaten the functioning of democracies, like dominating ballot initiatives. If the Supreme Court ruled corporations enjoy fully protected political rights, the already-weakened powers of democratic governments and their citizenries would be further eroded.

We should also limit corporate “freedom,” as corporations can and do use their privilege to harm people for profit. For years, tobacco company officials claimed, even in testimony before Congress, that smoking wasn’t a serious health risk. As it turned out, they were blatantly lying and as a result, were hammered with massive class-action suits.

In Kasky v Nike, Nike’s lawyers framed the debate as if the company was sued for misleading people about broader issues of economic globalization. But Kasky accused Nike of lying in verifiable statements about production practices.

Corporations need not be perfect, but they must be held accountable to standards of truth — especially because corporations are nothing more than legal entities created by (and regulated by) our governments. Businesses should earn the public trust by showing the same respect for everyone else as it does investors.

The Supreme Court had an opportunity to reject the extreme judicial activism Nike encouraged, as well as clarify the Bill of Rights protects human liberty and doesn’t shield corporations from public accountability. Instead, the Supreme Court punted this decision, sending the case back to a lower court.

It’s only a matter of time until the next corporation challenges the limits of free speech. Now, with a court increasingly filled with big-business allies, we should all worry.

Jeffrey Kaplan and Jeff Milchen are a volunteer and founder, respectively, with Reclaim Democracy!

Additional Resources

Citizens United is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

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By Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap

citizens-united-tip-of-the-iceberg

It’s been three years since the Supreme Court issued its outrageous decision in Citizens United vs. FEC, overturning the flimsy campaign finance protections afforded under McCain-Feingold law. The case opened the floodgates to billions of dollars perverting our elections, much of it completely unreported, and some amount even coming from foreign corporations and governments. The Court literally legalized bribery, and wealthy individuals and special interests took full advantage of it.

As shameful as that decision is, we must confront the sobering reality that it is only the tip of the iceberg. A small ruling elite (often succinctly described as the 1%) have stolen control of the country, and they are ruling over us. They use the façade of elections to legitimize the theft. And even when decent legislation is enacted, they use the Courts to overturn those laws. Citizens United vs. FEC is merely a deepening of the crisis of corporate rule.

At the crux of the crisis are two core legal doctrines. One is “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings. The other is “money equals free speech.”

An amendment to the US Constitution is the only lasting solution to this problem. The only amendment worth fighting for MUST address both doctrines. As a quick refresher, here is are some examples of we must abolish ALL corporate constitutional rights:

1st Amendment Free Speech rights. Corporations use these rights, meant to protect human beings from the power of the state, to influence elections through political “contributions” (more like “investments”); to advertise for guns, tobacco and other dangerous products over the objections of communities; to avoid having to label genetically modified foods or food laced with hormones.

4th Amendment Search and Seizure rights. Corporations have used these rights to avoid subpoenas for unlawful trade and price fixing, and to prevent citizens, communities and regulatory agencies from stopping corporate pollution and other assaults on people and communities.

5th Amendment Takings, Double Jeopardy and Due Process corporate rights. Corporations must be compensated for property value lost (e.g. future profits) when regulations are established to protect homeowners or communities. Corporations cannot be retried after a judgment of acquittal in court. The granting of property to a corporation by a public official cannot be unilaterally revoked by a subsequent public official or Act of Congress.

14th Amendment Due Process and Equal Protection corporate rights. These rights, originally enacted to guarantee equal protection for African Americans, were gradually extended to corporations by the courts. Corporations have used these rights to build chain stores and erect cell towers against the will of communities; oppose tax and other public policies supporting local businesses over multinational corporations; and resist democratic efforts to prevent corporate mergers and revoke corporate charters through citizen initiatives.

Commerce Clause-related corporate rights. Corporations have used this section of the Constitution (Art 1, Sec 8) to ship toxic waste from one state to another over the “health, safety, and welfare” objections of communities – claiming the waste isn’t actually “waste” but “commerce.”

Contracts Clause-related corporate rights. The Supreme Court ruled in Dartmouth vs. Woodward (1819) that a corporation is as a party in a private contract based on the Contracts Clause (Art 1, Sec 10) rather than being a creature of public law. Even though the state creates a corporation when it issues a charter, that state is not sovereign over the charter, merely a party to the contract. Thus, corporations became “private contracts” with the state and, therefore, shielded from many forms of control by We the People.

Since the problem of corporate constitutional rights is multidimensional, the solution must be comprehensive.

One hundred and sixty years ago, those who believed the section of the Constitution (Art 4, Sec 2) defining people as property (slavery) was fundamentally immoral didn’t call for ending one or two dimensions of slavery. They didn’t organize to establish legislation through Congress, or a Slavery Protection Agency, nor ask slaveholders to sign a voluntary code of conduct to treat slaves a little less harshly. They called for abolition of the institution of slavery.

And today, the Move To Amend coalition suggests that we should not limit our vision and actions. Yes corporate money in elections is a problem. So let’s make sure our solution actually gets to the root causes.

Let’s set out to amend the constitution in a way that abolishes all rights wrongly granted to the corporate form over the last two centuries. Let’s put an end to the institution of corporate constitutional rights itself.

Nothing less is worth the considerable time and learning, grit and energy, required to amend the Constitution.

Why not make the result worth the effort?

Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap serves on the Executive Committee Move to Amend. She is Field Organizing Coordinator for the campaign.

photo courtesy dnkemontoh

What is Citizens United? | An Introduction

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What is Citizens United? The short answer is it’s two different but related things: a Political Action Committee (PAC) in Washington, D.C., and a Supreme Court case about election spending in which the aforementioned PAC was the plaintiff. Both lie at the center of a debate over the role corporations play in society. Read on for the long answer.

US Supreme Court Justices - Portrait
The Justices who decided the Citizens United Supreme Court case.
 
It’s a Political Action Committee
The logo for the non-profit group Citizens United
Citizens United’s Logo

Citizens United, the PAC, was founded in 1988 by Floyd Brown, a longtime Washington political consultant, with major funding from the Koch brothers (industrialists who own “the second largest privately owned company in the United States”). The group promotes corporate interests, socially conservative causes and candidates who advance their goals, which it says are “…limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security.” It gained fame in 2009 for suing the Federal Election Commission, leading to a controversial Supreme Court case (now also commonly known as Citizens United) eliminating some restrictions on how corporations can spend money in elections.

It’s a Supreme Court Case

In the 2008 election season, Citizens United the PAC sought to broadcast TV ads for a video-on-demand film criticizing presidential candidate Hilary Rodham Clinton, but doing so would violate the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (known also as the McCain–Feingold Act), which barred corporations and unions from paying for media that mentioned any candidate in periods immediately preceding elections.

Citizens United challenged the law, suing the Federal Election Commission (which sets campaign finance laws and election rules), and the case made its way through lower courts until an appeal was granted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Justices declared unconstitutional the government restriction on “independent” political spending by corporations and unions, and determined the anti-Clinton broadcast should have been allowed. The decision overturned century-old precedent allowing the government to regulate such spending. As a result, Citizens United has greatly affected the way corporations and unions can spend on elections (more on that below).

The Court majority (Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas) argued:
  1. barring independent political spending amounts to squelching free speech protected by the First Amendment.
  2. the First Amendment protects not just a person’s right to speak, but the act of speech itself, regardless of the speaker. Therefore the First Amendment protects the speech of corporations and unions, whether we consider them people or not.
  3. although government has the authority to prevent corruption or “the appearance of corruption,” it has no place in determining whether large political expenditures are either of those things, so it may not impose spending limits on that basis.
  4. the public has the right to hear all available information, and spending limits prevent information from reaching the public.
The Court minority (Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor) argued:
  1. the First Amendment protects only individual speech.
  2. government may prevent corruption, and campaign spending can be corrupt when it buys influence over legislators. Therefore government may impose spending limits on corporations and unions.
  3. government may prevent the appearance of corruption, which undermines public confidence in democracy. Limits on corporate and union political spending are an expression of that authority.
  4. the public has the right to hear all available information, and when corporations spend money individuals can’t match, messages from corporations drown out messages from others, and that information fails to reach the public.
Initial Public Response

The decision was controversial and set off a ferocious debate which continues to this day.

  1. Some celebrated the decision, claiming it advanced free speech and allowed any company to compete on equal footing with media organizations that already “freely disseminate their opinions about candidates using corporate treasury funds.”
  2. Some were neutral, arguing the decision would only boost the volume of political ads, which wouldn’t affect public discourse or governance for better or worse.
  3. Others were critical. For example, President Barack Obama said the decision, “Gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington — while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.”
Effects of Citizens United

An explosion in independent political spending ensued in the decision’s aftermath, as this chart from the Center for Responsive Politics illustrates.

Spending was on the rise even before Citizens United, but the post-decision increase was dramatic. The 2012 presidential election was the first following Citizens United, with more than twice the political spending as any previous election. Independent political spending of the kind Citizens United allows accounted for all of that increase.

Is this new determining the winners of elections? Yes, after a decade of data, research shows that the candidate who has more money, wins more often.

What’s Reclaim Democracy’s Position?

We oppose the Court’s Citizens United ruling, for the following reasons:

  1. Given the strong restrictions our country’s founders imposed on corporate activities, they clearly didn’t intend for corporations to enjoy constitutional protections.
  2. The government has the authority to prevent corruption or the appearance of it, but the Citizens United majority opinion says the government has no right to decide whether independent political spending drives those things. We argue government can’t prevent corruption without the ability to identify the causes. This isn’t just a theoretical problem, because evidence suggests both government-corporate relations appear corrupt to the electorate, and those relations are in fact corrupt.
  3. The majority’s claim that spending limits prevent full information  from reaching the public ignores reality. We’re bombarded by information. We register only a fraction of it, and money (spent on advertising and promotions) strongly determines what ends up in that fraction. When wealthy groups can spend whatever they want, they can make sure their messaging drowns out other voices and limits the information reaching the public.
  4. The Court had to overturn one of its own decisions to decide Citizens United as it did. The Court normally honors a custom called Stare Decisis, which means it tries not to overturn its own decisions if it can avoid doing so, by deciding a case on narrower grounds. In this case, the path was clear: the Court could have ruled the McCain-Feingold law doesn’t apply to video-on-demand, a decision which would have aligned better with previous decisions. The Justices went far beyond what Citizens United’s own lawyers asked for!

Beyond the legal objections, unlimited political spending by corporations and unions causes several problems:

  1. It prevents a “meritocracy of ideas.” Unlimited political spending allows ideas to dominate not by merit, but by their supporters’ ability to broadcast them.
  2. It has influence far beyond the ads it pays for. The more money a politician needs to compete for office, the more she must court the wealthy, leaving less time to govern and less contact with average citizens. Another consequence is that legislators’ lives get tied up with wealthy supporters in ways that have led to widespread corruption in both parties.
  3. The kind of unlimited political spending Citizens United allows (mostly on attack ads) creates a crude, counterproductive form of political dialogue, which breeds unthinking partisanship and oversimplified discussion via sound bytes. We need to create a culture in which thoughtful political discussion can flourish, but the unregulated flood of money that Citizens United unleashed makes it harder to do so.
  4. It gives large corporations anti-competitive advantages over small businesses.

We believe citizens and their elected representatives must have the right to limit the influence of money on candidates and elections in order to protect the integrity of elections and government. This includes the ability to implement public financing systems that match private spending.

The Big Picture

Citizens United isn’t an isolated problem. It’s a symptom of a bigger, longstanding threat: for decades the largest corporations have been building power over our political process — power that comes at the expense of citizens.

One of the main instruments of this influence is the legal concept of “corporate personhood,” wherein corporations receive the same Constitutional protections as individuals. Corporations use these protections to claim the “right” to lie to the public, for example, or to influence elections in various ways. Corporations have lobbied for and received these protections for decades, despite our country’s founders intending no such thing.

An important note: Citizens United isn’t technically an extension of corporate personhood. The Court majority didn’t say corporations have free speech rights because they’re people, but instead stated non-persons have free speech rights. If your toaster could talk, it would have those rights too.

Citizens United gave this toaster first amendment rights

The case clarified, however, that a Constitutional Amendment is the only way to strip corporations of “constitutional rights.” Moreover, many kinds of electoral reform, such as public campaign financing that truly levels the playing field, are legal impossibilities without first amending the Constitution (as a subsequent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance vividly demonstrates). For these reasons, there’s now a rapidly growing grassroots movement afoot to do so.

At the head of this Movement is Move to Amend, a broad national coalition with more than 150 chapters nationwide and nearly 250,000 endorsers (Reclaim Democracy is a co-founder).  More than 600 cities and towns have passed resolutions or ordinances calling to end corporate personhood or have serious efforts underway.

Even more impressive, 10 states now have passed measures in opposition to Citizens United. Most recently, Colorado and Montana voters did so in early November 2012. Montana’s measure opposed not just Citizens United but also the Supreme Court’s creations of corporate personhood and “money=speech” (Buckley v Valeo), and passed by an overwhelming 75%-25% margin. See here for more on these successes.

Get Involved

If ever a time existed to get involved in the effort to revoke illegitimate corporate power, that time is now. We have the precious resource of real momentum, and the best way to protect that resource is through more participation. If you agree that corporations wield illegitimate power that we the people must take back, start or join a chapter of Move to Amend.

We also encourage you to help us keep broadening public awareness, reshaping public debate and providing more resources like this by donating to Reclaim Democracy. Your gift is 100% tax deductible.

Other Groups Working to Revoke Illegitimate Corporate Power
More Reading

Supreme Court photo courtesy nyfma
Citizens United logo courtesy OpenSecrets
Political expenditures chart courtesy OpenSecrets

By Nick Bentley
Organizer, Reclaim Democracy

Surprise! Citizens United Legal Reasoning Doesn’t Rely on Corporate Personhood

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By Nick Bentley
Published November 11, 2012

For anyone who opposes excessive corporate influence over government, these are encouraging days: there’s now a widespread groundswell of support across the country to overturn Citizens United and deprive corporations of their improper status as “people”.

However, we’ve noticed a misconception spreading that Citizens United is an extension of corporate personhood. It’s not.

It’s true that Citizens United strengthened First Amendment protections for corporations. But the basis for that protection isn’t corporate personhood. Rather, the court’s decision rests on two other assumptions:

  1. That money equals speech; and
  2. That non-persons have the right to speech.

That second point is the kicker. If corporate personhood ended tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect Citizens United at all, because non-persons have speech rights now too. If your underpants could talk, they would be protected by the First Amendment.

How do we know this? First, look at some relevant text in the majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy:

Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to… distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content.

In other words: the identity of the speaker is irrelevant. Justice Scalia drives this point home in his concurrence:

The Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals—and the dissent offers no evidence about the original meaning of the text to support any such exclusion. We are therefore simply left with the question whether the speech at issue in this case is “speech” covered by the First Amendment.

Justice Scalia stresses that the First Amendment doesn’t exclude “any category of speaker,” The First Amendment protects anything that speaks, whether it’s legally a person or not.

This is a key point for those of us who hope to reign in excessive corporate influence through a constitutional amendment. It’s not enough to merely revoke corporate personhood. To overturn Citizens United, we also have to overturn the two assumptions listed above.

Luckily it’s not difficult get the language right. Both Reclaim Democracy and Move to Amend have proposed amendments which would do so. For example, rather than simply establish that “Corporations are not people,” Reclaim Democracy’s amendment specifies that “the U.S. Constitution protects only the rights of living human beings.”

It’s a small difference in language with big implications. Let’s make sure that all who advocate for an amendment understand the distinction.

Resources

Citizens United pig courtesy WWYD
Underpants photo courtesy Enrique_L.

State Initiatives to Revoke Corporate Personhood and Overturn Buckley v. Valeo Win Big

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Published November 6, 2012
By Reclaim Democracy staff

One state went red and the other blue in the presidential election, but citizens of Montana and Colorado agreed by vast margins that we need to amend the U.S. Constitution to revoke the overwhelming power of money over elections.

In Montana, early returns showed a whopping 75 percent of voters supporting Initiative 166, which directs Montana’s congressional delegation to help pass an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would revoke corporate personhood. In addition to overruling multiple instances of pro-corporate activism by the U.S. Supreme Court justices, such an Amendment would allow reinstatement of Montana’s Corrupt Practices Act, struck down by a federal court just months ago after it protected the integrity of state elections for 100 years.

In Colorado, Amendment 65 had won overwhelmingly with 73 percent of votes as of this writing. The measure instructs Colorado’s congressional delegates and state legislature to support an Amendment that allows Congress and the states to limit campaign contributions and spending (presumably overruling Buckley v Valeo).

While Reclaim Democracy supported the measure, we share concerns ably expressed by Stephen Justino of Colorado Move to Amend in this op-ed, saying Amendment 65 should have confronted corporate personhood directly. It’s dubious whether the current Supreme Court justices would interpret an Amendment enabling states to regulate campaign spending as applying to “independent expenditure.s ” Notably, the claim that independent expenditures are non-corrupting — the basis of Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United v FEC — was shown to be fictional by revelations here in Montana (Reclaim Democracy’s home base) this week. Both initiatives were funded by their respective state Common Cause chapters and enjoyed support from a wide range of citizen groups.

In addition to calling for an Amendment to revoke corporate personhood, Montana’s I-166 adds “the people of Montana regard money as property, not speech.” Many state constitutions demand amendments address only one issue, preventing a single ballot measure calling for both revoking corporate personhood and “money = speech.” However we urge any such effort combine both messages, even if two parallel initiatives are required.

Notably, in Montana’s most hotly contested races, the candidate supporting a ban on corporate electioneering won. Among them was Steve Bullock, who aggressively defended the Corrupt Practices Act all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court as the state’s Attorney General this year. Bullock, a Democrat, won the race for Governor.

Both the Colorado and Montana measures are symbolic since their “instruction” to legislators cannot be legally binding. Nevertheless, we think their overwhelming popularity will build further momentum created by more than 100 communities passing local anti-corporate personhood measures in recent years. They’re the next logical progression in building a Democracy Movement to educate and organize citizens to reclaim democracy from corporate corruption. Congratulations to all who worked on these measures for their resounding victories!

Why is Montana at the forefront of this struggle? See Roots of Rebellion: Why Montana is the Only State to Reject Citizens United.

Addendum

We emphasize that it’s not just Montana and Colorado. More than 400 cities and towns have passed resolutions or ordinances measures calling to end corporate personhood or have serious efforts underway. The votes typically are won by huge margins. Many of the efforts were coordinated through Move to Amend, a broad national coalition with more than 150 chapters nationwide and nearly 250,000 endorsers. Some examples:

  • In Eau Claire, WI 71 percent of voters favored a measure stating, “Should the US Constitution be amended to establish that regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting freedom of speech, by stating that only human beings, not corporations, unions, or PACs, are entitled to constitutional rights?”
  • In conservative Pueblo, Colorado, where the city newspaper came out against the measure, residents still voted 65% in favor of a Move to Amend resolution, placed on the ballot by County Commissioners.
  • Move to Amend volunteers in Massachusetts collected signatures to place the constitutional amendment question before one third of the population of their state, and “MA Democracy Amendment Question” passed by 79% overall.
  • Voters in Mendocino County, CA  approved a “stand with the Move to Amend campaign” by a 73% margin. Resolutions also passed in several towns in Illinois and Ohio and Oregon, all by similar landslide margins.
  •  Common Cause also put forward several measures calling , at least, to overturn Citizens United [note: such a reversal would fall far short of revoking corporate personhood–it would return us to the 2010 status quo] and to grant Congress authority to regulate campaign spending.  Approval was 80% in San Francisco, 72% in Richmond, CA, and 74% in Chicago.

There’s little doubt that a movement is gathering force, not just to overturn Citizens United, but to reverse the precedent of corporations enjoying “constitutional rights.” Notably, Montana’s initiative was the first of its kind we’ve seen covered by the Wall St. Journal. A majority of Americans want to limit undue corporate influence and have for some time. Yesterday’s results indicate we’re increasingly ready to put those beliefs into action.

You can read the full text of the Montana or Colorado (pdf) initiatives and see the language of Reclaim Democracy’s Proposed Constitutional Amendments.

For background, see our comprehensive introduction to Citizens United.

photo courtesy truthout.org

Black Friday Now Black Thursday, But Don’t Expect the Best Bargains on Either

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The competition for Black Friday "deals" is getting ridiculousInstead of spending time with their families on Thanksgiving this year, employees for Walmart, Target and other chains get to give thanks by selling consumerism to people who think they’re getting great deals (often they aren’t–more below). Yes, more big box chains now are opening their doors for “Black Friday” sales on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, which means employees of retail chains now must work on one of the only three days they traditionally haven’t had to work. Employees who don’t want to join risk drifting into part-timer purgatory or worse.

The corporate media and chain marketing campaigns again are doing their best to whip up a frenzy over supposedly great deals while encouraging people to sacrifice family time. But before rushing through dessert to ditch grandma and the kids, consider research commissioned recently by the Wall Street Journal. The headline with which it reported the results tells the story succinctly: The Myth of the Black Friday Deal (applies equally to Black Thursday). As you may surmise, you’re just as likely to save money on most items at other times in the year.

Of course, the corporate push to replace a day traditionally dedicated to family with consumerism is predictable, but here’s one ray of hope: chain employees and disgusted citizens are starting to fight back, a group of Walmart employees is planning to strike – almost unheard of in the U.S – and Target employees are protesting.

If you’d like to help defeat  the latest corporate encroachment, consider these actions:

But if you happen to participate in this madness, pause for a moment when handing over your cash and look for a moment at one of those bills. Just take a glance at George Washington’s face, or Honest Abe’s. What do you suppose those guys would think of our collective madness? We’re lucky dollar bills can’t cry.

Photo courtesy David Blackwell