Another foolish woman who can't get enough of Big Daddy Pussy Grabber...

DianeR,

Our racist Pres?

https://qanon.pub/data/media/3a94131f09ffb21bc5d923fc58ca2acefcf0b1296b4829b91075c47697f1695e.jpg

and

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur#3.56/39.58/-94.58
back later!

Hillary says...

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights
by Thom Hartmann

Discover more about "Unequal Protection"

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A SUMMARY
When it was created, the American form of government was an experiment. Only once before in the 6000+ year history of western civilization had people tried an egalitarian form of government, and that experiment - in Athens almost 2400 years ago - died out when its people were conquered by Alexander the Great.

The crux of the experiment was the idea that people could govern themselves without kings, popes, wealthy feudal lords, or warlords.

Thus, government would be made of, by, and for the people and not for any particular special interest group other than the people.

In order for the experiment to work, it was necessary that humans be given unique and special rights and powers - the powers and rights of personhood, guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere in the Constitution. (It took us almost two hundred years to extend them to minorities and women, but the model/archetype/idea, at least, was in place.)

But then something bizarre happened.

In 1886 the court reporter of the U.S. Supreme Court claimed that the court had ruled that "corporations are persons" in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case. If you read the case itself, you find that in fact the court ruled no such thing. But the reporter wrote it up in the headnotes of the case - not a legal document, but only a commentary on the case - and subsequent generations of corporate attorneys claimed it was so. Over time, it became so.

The consequences of this were tremendous.

Corporations are legal fictions created with the sole purpose of being a vehicle for the aggregation of wealth. They can live forever. They can change identity in a day. They can cut off parts of themselves and from them grow new selves. They can own others of their own kind. They don't need fresh air or clean water and don't fear illness or death.

Yet now, because of this misinterpretation of an 1886 Supreme Court case, corporations have the rights of "persons."

Corporations now have free speech rights (even though they are not voters or citizens), and can work to influence political campaigns and write laws. They have privacy rights and can deny OSHA and EPA inspectors access to their properties. They have 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination and double jeopardy. They have 14th amendment rights to equal protection under the law and can thus prevent local communities from " discriminating " against them in favour of small, local businesses.

The result of this legal error has been the virtual takeover of our political and legal processes by corporations. But some humans are working to take back government and return us to the intentions of this nation's Founders. The movement is to deny corporate personhood and restore human rights to humans.

Obama says...

Trump's New American Dream...

Trump lied to the American people 6,420 times in 649 days!

SCOTUS gets Trumped again.

Beer Warning Alert!

Embrace Your Inner Kavanaugh.

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights
by Thom Hartmann

Discover more about "Unequal Protection"

Buy from Amazon

An excerpt from Unequal Protection: America's First Anti-Globalization Protest - The Boston Tea Party

I shall therefore conclude with a proposal that your watchmen be instructed, as they go on their rounds, to call out every night, half-past twelve, 'Beware of the East India Company.'
-Pamphlet signed by 'Rusticus,' 1773

Now that Bush administration Treasury Secretary and former Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill has publicly called for the complete elimination of all corporate income taxes (and the elimination of Social Security), many people are wondering if history is repeating itself in a way that may be particularly dangerous for democracy.

Conventional wisdom has it that the 1773 Tea Act - a tax law passed in London that led to the Boston Tea Party - was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by American colonists. In reality, however, the Tea Act gave the world's largest transnational corporation - The East India Company - full and unlimited access to the American tea trade, and exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the Company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea they were unable to sell and holding in inventory.

The primary purpose of the Tea Act was to increase the profitability of the East India Company to its stockholders (which included the King and the wealthy elite that kept him secure in power), and to help the Company drive its colonial small-business competitors out of business. Because the Company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on the tea it sold in the American colonies, it was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants and tea houses in every town in America.

This infuriated the independence-minded American colonists, who were wholly unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the world's largest multinational corporation, The East India Company. They resented their small businesses still having to pay the higher, pre-Tea Act taxes without having any say or vote in the matter. (Thus, the cry of 'no taxation without representation!') Even in the official British version of the history, the 1773 Tea Act was a 'legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America' with a goal of helping the East India Company quickly 'sell 17 million pounds of tea stored in England''

America's first entrepreneurs' protest
This economics-driven view of American History piqued my curiosity when I first discovered it. So when I came upon an original first edition of one of this nation's earliest history books, I made a sizeable investment to buy it to read the thoughts of somebody who had actually been alive and participated in the Boston Tea Party and subsequent American Revolution. I purchased from an antiquarian book seller an original copy of Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773, published in New York by S. S. Bliss in 1834.

Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next fifty years, this account (published 61 years later) is singularly rare and important, as it's the only actual first-person account of the event by a participant that exists, so far as I can find. And turning its brittle, age-colored pages and looking at printing on unevenly-sized sheets, typeset by hand and printed on a small hand press almost two hundred years ago, was both fascinating and exciting. Even more interesting was the perspective of the anonymous ('by a citizen of New York') author and of Hewes, whom the author extensively interviewed for the book.

Although Hewes' name is today largely lost in history, he was apparently well known in colonial times and during the 19th century. Esther Forbes' classic 1942 biography of Paul Revere, which depended heavily on Paul Revere's 'many volumes of papers' and numerous late 18th and early 19th century sources, mentions Hewes repeatedly throughout her book. For example, when young Paul Revere went off to join the British army in the spring of 1756, he took along with him Hewes. 'Paul Revere served in Richard Gridley's regiment,' Forbes writes, noting Revere's recollection that the army had certain requirements for its recruits. 'All must be able-bodied and between seventeen and forty-five, and must measure to a certain height. George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes could not go. He was too short, and in vain did he get a shoemaker to build up the inside of his shoes; but Paul Revere 'passed muster' and 'mounted the cockade.''

And when it came to the Boston Tea Party, Forbes notes, 'No one invited George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes, but no one could have kept him home.' She quotes him as to the size of the raiding party, noting 'Hewes says there were one hundred to a hundred and fifty 'indians'' that night.
Hewes apparently came to Boston through the good graces of America's first president. 'George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes fished nine weeks for the British fleet until he saw his chance [to escape] and took it,' writes Forbes. 'Landing in Lynn, he was immediately taken to [George] Washington at Cambridge. The General enjoyed the story of his escape - 'he didn't laugh to be sure but looked amazing good natured, you may depend.' He asked him to dine with him, and Hewes says that 'Madam Washington waited upon them at table at dinner-time and was remarkably social.' Hewes was one of the many Boston refugees who never went back there to live. Having served as a privateersman and soldier during the war, he settled outside of the state.'

And there, outside the state, was where Hewes lived into his old age, finally telling his story to those who would listen, including one who published the little book I found.

That frightful night
Reading Hewes' account, I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. With few exceptions, the Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company and the government that 'unfairly' represented, supported, and served the company while not representing or serving them, the residents.

Hewes noted that many American colonists either boycotted the purchase of tea, or were smuggling or purchasing smuggled tea to avoid supporting the East India Company's profits and the British taxes on tea, which, according to Hewes' account of 1773, 'rendered the smuggling of [tea] an object and was frequently practiced, and their resolutions against using it, although observed by many with little fidelity, had greatly diminished the importation into the colonies of this commodity. Meanwhile,' Hewes noted, 'an immense quantity of it was accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company in England. This company petitioned the king to suppress the duty of three pence per pound upon its introduction into America''

That petition was successful and produced the Tea Act of 1773: the result was a boom for the transnational East India Company corporation, and a big problem for the entrepreneurial American 'smugglers.'

As Hewes notes: 'The [East India] Company, however, received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America'' allowing it to wipe out its small competitors and take over the tea business in all of America. 'Hence,' he told his biographer, '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, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity, which by the aid of the public authority, might, as they supposed, easily be landed, and amassed in suitable magazines. Accordingly the Company sent its agents at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, six hundred chests of tea, and a proportionate number to Charleston, and other maritime cities of the American continent. The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course''

Interestingly, Hewes notes that it wasn't just American small businesses and citizens who objected to the new monopoly powers granted the East India Company by the English Parliament. The East India Company was also putting out of business many smaller tea exporters in England, who had been doing business with American family-owned retail stores for decades, and those companies began a protest in England that was simultaneous with the American protests against transnational corporate bullying and the East India Company's buying of influence with the British Parliament.

Hewes notes: 'Even in England individuals were not wanting, who fanned this fire; some from a desire to baffle the government, others from motives of private interest, says the historian of the event, and jealousy at the opportunity offered the East India Company, to make immense profits to their prejudice.

'These opposers [sic] of the measure in England [the Tea Act of 1773] wrote therefore to America, encouraging a strenuous resistance. They represented to the colonists that this would prove their last trial, and that if they should triumph now, their liberty was secured forever; but if they should yield, they must bow their necks to the yoke of slavery. The materials were so prepared and disposed that they could easily kindle.'

The battle between the small businessmen of America and the huge multinational East India Company actually began in Pennsylvania, according to Hewes. 'At Philadelphia,' he writes, 'those to whom the teas of the [East India] Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.

'At New-York, Captain Sears and McDougal, daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will [against the East India Company], between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty [who had all joined forces and in most cases were the same people]. Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed, and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.'

Resistance was organizing and growing and the Tea Act was the final straw. The citizens of the colonies were preparing to throw off one of the corporations that for almost two hundred years had determined nearly every aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They were planning to destroy the goods of the world's largest multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the guns of the government that supported it.

A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and signed by an enigmatic 'Rusticus.' One issue made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England's largest transnational corporation and its behavior around the world:

'Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. ' Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them

The pamphleteering worked

After turning back the Company's ships in Philadelphia and New York, Hewes writes, 'In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm.'

He writes about the sentiment among the colonists who opposed the naked power and wealth of the East India Company and the British government that supported them: 'Why do we wait? they exclaimed; soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. Hundreds of years may roll away before the ministers can have perpetrated as many violations of our rights, as they have committed within a few years. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage, or be disgraced with our brethren of the other colonies, who have their eyes fixed upon us, and will be prompt in their succor if we show ourselves faithful and firm.

'This was the voice of the Bostonians in 1773. The factors who were to be the consignees of the tea, were urged to renounce their agency, but they refused and took refuge in the fortress. A guard was placed on Griffin's wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. It was agreed that a strict watch should be kept; that if any insult should be offered, the bell should be immediately rung; and some persons always ready to bear intelligence of what might happen, to the neighbouring towns, and to call in the assistance of the country people.'
'Rusticus' added his voice, the May 27, 1773 pamphlet saying: 'Resolve therefore, nobly resolve, and publish to the World your Resolutions, that no Man will receive the Tea, no Man will let his Stores, or suffer the Vessel that brings it to moor at his Wharf, and that if any Person assists at unloading, landing, or storing it, he shall ever after be deemed an Enemy to his Country, and never be employed by his Fellow Citizens.'

Colonial voices were getting louder and louder about their outrage at the giant corporation's behavior. A pamphlet titled The Alarm wrote on October 27, 1773, 'It hath now been proved to you, That the East India Company, obtained the monopoly of that trade by bribery, and corruption. That the power thus obtained they have prostituted to extortion, and other the most cruel and horrible purposes, the Sun ever beheld.'

The corporation challenges the people
And then, Hewes says, on a cold November evening, the first of the East India Company's ships of tax-free tea arrived.

'On the 28th of November, 1773,' Hewes writes, 'the ship Dartmouth with 112 chests arrived; and the next morning after, the following notice was widely circulated.

'Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbour. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o'clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.'

The reaction to the pamphlet - back then one part of what was truly a 'free press' in America - was emphatic. Hewes account was that, 'Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly which was on the 16th of December, 1773, was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present.'

Hewes continued: 'This notification brought together a vast concourse of the people of Boston and the neighbouring towns, at the time and place appointed. Then it was resolved that the tea should be returned to the place from whence it came in all events, and no duty paid thereon. The arrival of other cargoes of tea soon after, increased the agitation of the public mind, already wrought up to a degree of desperation, and ready to break out into acts of violence, on every trivial occasion of offence....

'Finding no measures were likely to be taken, either by the governor, or the commanders, or owners of the ships, to return their cargoes or prevent the landing of them, at 5 o'clock a vote was called for the dissolution of the meeting and obtained. But some of the more moderate and judicious members, fearing what might be the consequences, asked for a reconsideration of the vote, offering no other reason, than that they ought to do every thing in their power to send the tea back, according to their previous resolves. This, says the historian of that event, touched the pride of the assembly, and they agreed to remain together one hour.'

The people assembled in Boston at that moment faced the same issue that citizens who oppose combined corporate and co-opted government power all over the world confront today: should they take on a well-financed and heavily armed opponent, when such resistance could lead to their own imprisonment or death? Even worse, what if they should lose the struggle, leading to the imposition on them and their children an even more repressive regime to support the profits of the corporation?

There are corporate spies among us!
There was a debate late that afternoon in Boston, Hewes notes, but it was short because a man named Josiah Quiney pointed out that some of the people in the group worked directly or indirectly for the East India Company, or held loyalty to Britain, or both. Quiney suggested that if they took the first step of confronting the East India Company, it would inevitably mean they would have to take on the army of England. He pointed out they were really discussing the possibility of going to war against England to stop England from enforcing the East India Company's right to run its 'ministerial enterprise,' and that some who profited from that enterprise were right there in the room with them.

In Hewes' book, he wrote: 'In this conjuncture, Josiah Quiney, a man of great influence in the colony, of a vigorous and cultivated genius, and strenuously opposed to ministerial enterprises, wishing to apprise his fellow-citizens of the importance of the crisis, and direct their attention to probable results which might follow, after demanding silence said, 'This ardour and this impetuosity, which are manifested within these walls, are not those that are requisite to conduct us to the object we have in view; these may cool, may abate, may vanish like a flittering shade. Quite other spirits, quite other efforts are essential to our salvation. Greatly will he deceive himself, who shall think, that with cries, with exclamations, with popular resolutions, we can hope to triumph in the conflict, and vanquish our inveterate foes. Their malignity is implacable, their thirst for vengeance insatiable. They have their allies, their accomplices, even in the midst of us - even in the bosom of this innocent country; and who is ignorant of the power of those who have conspired our ruin? Who knows not their artifices? Imagine not therefore, that you can bring this controversy to a happy conclusion without the most strenuous, the most arduous, the most terrible conflict; consider attentively the difficulty of the enterprise, and the uncertainty of the issue. Reflict [sic] and ponder, even ponder well, before you embrace the measures, which are to involve this country in the most perilous enterprise the world has witnessed.''

Most Americans today believe that the colonists were only upset that they didn't have a legislature they'd elected that would pass the laws under which they were taxed: 'taxation without representation' was their rallying cry. And while that was true, Hewes points out, the needle in their side, the pinprick that was really driving their rage, was that England was passing tax laws solely for the benefit of the transnational East India Company corporation, and at the expense of the average American worker and America's small business owners.

Thus, 'Taxation without representation' also meant hitting the average person and small business with taxes, while letting the richest and most powerful corporation in the world off the hook for its taxes. It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors, plain and simple.

And the more the colonists resisted the predations of the East India Company and its British protectors, the more reactive and repressive the British government became, arresting American entrepreneurs as smugglers and defending the trade interests of the East India Company.

Among the reasons cited in the 1776 Declaration of Independence for separating America from Britain are: 'For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.' The British had used tax and anti-smuggling laws to make it nearly impossible for American small businesses to compete against the huge multinational East India Company, and the Tea Act of 1773 was the final straw.

Thus, the group assembled in Boston responded to Josiah Quiney's comment by calling for a vote. The next paragraph in Hewes' book says: 'The question was then immediately put whether the landing of the tea should be opposed and carried in the affirmative unanimously. Rotch [a local tea seller], to whom the cargo of tea had been consigned, was then requested to demand of the governor to permit to pass the castle [return the ships to England]. The latter answered haughtily, that for the honor of the laws, and from duty towards the king, he could not grant the permit, until the vessel was regularly cleared. A violent commotion immediately ensued; and it is related by one historian of that scene, that a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and that the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin's wharf.'

A first person account of the Tea Party
On what happened next, Hewes is quite specific in pointing out that not only were the protesters registering their anger and upset over domination by England and the Company, but they were willing to commit a million-dollar act of vandalism to make their point. Hewes says:

'It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin's wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea. When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.

'When we arrived at the wharf, there were three of our number who assumed an authority to direct our operations, to which we readily submitted. They divided us into three parties, for the purpose of boarding the three ships which contained the tea at the same time. The name of him who commanded the division to which I was assigned was Leonard Pitt. The names of the other commanders I never knew.

'We were immediately ordered by the respective commanders to board all the ships at the same time, which we promptly obeyed. The commander of the division to which I belonged, as soon as we were on board the ship appointed me boatswain, and ordered me to go to the captain and demand of him the keys to the hatches and a dozen candles. I made the demand accordingly, and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.

'We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water.

'In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.

'We then quietly retired to our several places of residence, without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates; nor do I recollect of our having had the knowledge of the name of a single individual concerned in that affair, except that of Leonard Pitt, the commander of my division, whom I have mentioned. There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.'

The participants were absolutely committed that none of the East India Company's tea would ever again be consumed on American shores. Hewes continues: 'During the time we were throwing the tea overboard, there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity to carry off small quantities of it for their family use. To effect that object, they would watch their opportunity to snatch up a handful from the deck, where it became plentifully scattered, and put it into their pockets.

'One Captain O'Connor, whom I well knew, came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward, by a rapid effort he made his escape. He had, however, to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf nine each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke.

'Another attempt was made to save a little tea from the ruins of the cargo by a tall, aged man who wore a large cocked hat and white wig, which was fashionable at that time. He had slightly slipped a little into his pocket, but being detected, they seized him and, taking his hat and wig from his head, threw them, together with the tea, of which they had emptied his pockets, into the water. In consideration of his advanced age, he was permitted to escape, with now and then a slight kick.

'The next morning, after we had cleared the ships of the tea, it was discovered that very considerable quantities of it were floating upon the surface of the water; and to prevent the possibility of any of its being saved for use, a number of small boats were manned by sailors and citizens, who rowed them into those parts of the harbor wherever the tea was visible, and by beating it with oars and paddles so thoroughly drenched it as to render its entire destruction inevitable.'

In all, the 342 chests of tea - over 90,000 pounds - thrown overboard that night were enough to make 24 million cups of tea and were valued by the East India Company at 9,659 Pounds Sterling or, in today's currency, just over a million U.S. dollars.

In response to the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament immediately passed the Boston Port Act stating that the port of Boston would be closed until the citizens of Boston reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they'd destroyed. The colonists refused. A year-and-a-half later, the colonists, still refusing to reimburse the corporation, again openly stated their defiance of the East India Company and Great Britain by taking on British troops in an armed conflict at Lexington and Concord (the shots heard 'round the world) on April 19, 1775.
That war - finally triggered by a transnational corporation and its government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive local marketplace - would last until 1783.

Jefferson considers 'freedom against monopolies' a basic right
Once the Revolutionary War was over, and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn't explicitly stipulate the 'natural rights' of the new nation's citizens, and didn't protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.

On December 20th, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said, bluntly, that it was deficient in several areas. 'I will now tell you what I do not like,' he wrote. 'First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.'

Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn't just be limited to America, Jefferson believed. 'Let me add,' he summarized, 'that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.'

In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Mr. A. Donald, on February 7th, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights: 'By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.'

Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people's government.

But Federalists including John Adams and Alexander Hamilton fought Jefferson and Madison, and when Congress finally passed the Bill of Rights it no longer contained a ban on corporations owning other corporations or monopolizing industries. In response to that, hundreds of states passed laws restricting and restraining corporations, which were the law of the land until the court reporter of the U.S. Supreme Court incorrectly placed in the headnotes of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case of 1886 that 'corporations are persons' and entitled to the same rights as humans under the Bill of Rights. In a dangerous (to democracy) and growing trend, corporations have since used that error to claim human rights for themselves.

This overt theft of human rights by corporate entities paved the way for the rise of new commercial monopolies, the era of the Robber Barons, and now to NAFTA and WTO world courts run largely by corporations to which not only people but entire nations must submit. This has led to the new Tea Parties of Seattle and Genoa, and a growing concern among people the world over that American democracy has been hijacked by corporate interests.

To reverse this trend, we must examine and then roll back the bizarre idea promulgated by corporations that they are 'persons' and should have full access to the Bill of Rights. Citizens across the world are working on campaigns to deny corporate personhood, hoping to restore governments to the control of 'we, the people' by and for whom they were created.

Santa says...

Gobshite speaks.

Some political realities never change...

Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right

by Al Franken

Goodreads: Al Franken, one of our savviest satirists (People), has been studying the rhetoric of the Right. He has listened to their cries of slander, bias, and even treason. He has examined the Bush administration's policies of squandering our surplus, ravaging the environment, and alienating the rest of the world. He's even watched Fox News. A lot.

And, in this fair and balanced report, Al bravely and candidly exposes them all for what they are: liars. Lying, lying liars. Al destroys the liberal media bias myth by doing what his targets seem incapable of: getting his facts straight. Using the Right's own words against them, he takes on the pundits, the politicians, and the issues, in the most talked about book of the year.

Timely, provocative, unfailingly honest, and always funny, Liessticks it to the most right-wing administration in memory, and to the right-wing media hacks who do its bidding.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23577.Lies_the_Lying_Liars_Who_Tell_Them

HotCoffee, I laugh at lilly white Irishman Robert Francis O'Rourke whose domestic servant gave him the nickname "Beto" when he was a kid is running against Ted Cruz in TX.

The guys wife is a billionaire. They have exact kind of wealth that communists like Hartmann want to confiscate their money and distribute it to "somebody". Very reminiscent of Bernie freeshit Sanders who can't decide which of his three homes to visit on the weekends.

Think,

I agree on the # of Nazis....If they are out there I haven't seen them.

I agree about the pantsuit queen too.

It was Hillary kissing Robert Byrd!

You three Trump butt lickers deserve the triple...

And since it's Sunday, to all the Trump despicable liars and filthy racists, Jesus says...

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights
by Thom Hartmann

Discover more about "Unequal Protection"

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Excerpt from Unequal Protection : The Theft of Human Rights

The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural person and the fictitious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act.

Man is the handiwork of God and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose; the corporation is the handiwork of man and created to carry out a money-making policy.

There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter. '

A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view.
-- William Jennings Bryan
address to the Ohio 1912 Constitutional Convention

Part of the American Revolution was about to be lost, a century after it had been fought.

At the time, probably only a very few of the people involved realized that what they were about to witness could be a counterrevolution that would change life in the United States and, ultimately, the world, over the course of the following century.

In 1886, the Supreme Court met in the U.S. Capitol building, in what is now called the Old Senate Chamber. It was May, and while the northeastern states were slowly recovering from the most devastating ice storm of the century just three months earlier, Washington DC was warm and abloom.

In the Supreme Court's chamber, a gold gilt eagle stretched its six-foot wingspan over his head as United States Chief Justice Morris Remick Waite glared down at the attorneys for the Southern Pacific Railroad and the county of Santa Clara, California. Waite was about to pronounce judgment in a case that had been argued over a year earlier at the end of January, 1885.

The Chief Justice had a square head with a wide slash of a mouth over a broom-like shock of bristly graying beard that shot out in every direction. A graduate of Yale University and formerly a lawyer out of Toledo, Ohio, Waite had specialized in defending railroads and large corporations. In 1846 Waite had run as a Whig for Congress from Ohio but lost, finally being elected as a Republican State Representative in 1849. After serving a single term, he'd gone back to litigation on behalf of the biggest and most wealthy clients he could find, this time joining the Geneva Arbitration case suing the British government for helping to outfit the Confederate Army with the warship the Alabama. He and his delegation won an astounding $15.5 million for the United States in 1871, bringing him national attention in what was often referred to as the Alabama Claims case.

In 1874, when Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died, President Ulysses S. Grant had real trouble selecting a replacement, in part because his administration was embroiled in a railroad bribery scandal. His first two choices withdrew; his third was so patently political it was certain to be rejected by the Senate; three others similarly failed to pass muster. On his seventh try, he nominated attorney Waite.

Waite had never before been a judge in any court, but he passed Senate confirmation, instantly becoming the most powerful judge in the most powerful court in the land. It was a position and power he relished and promoted, even turning down the 1876 Republican nomination for President to stay on the Court and to serve as a member of the Yale [University] Corporation.

Standing before Waite and the other Justices of the Supreme Court this spring day were three attorneys each for the railroad and the county.

The Chief Legal Advisor for the Southern Pacific Railroad was again S. W. Sanderson, a former judge, huge, aristocratic bear of a man, over six feet tall, with neatly combed gray hair and an elegantly trimmed white goatee. For over two decades, Sanderson had become a rich man litigating for the nation's largest railroads: artist Thomas Hill included a portentous and dignified Sanderson in his famous painting The Last Spike about the 1869 meeting of the rail lines of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah.

The lead lawyer for Santa Clara County, California was Delphin M. Delmas, a Democrat who later went into politics and by 1904 was known as 'the silver-tongued Orator of the West' when he was elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from California. While Waite and Sanderson had spent their lives serving the richest men in America, Delmas had always worked on behalf of local California governments and, later, as a criminal defense attorney. For example, he passionately and single-handedly argued before the California legislature for a law to protect the remaining redwood forests.

Fiercely defensive about the 'rights of natural persons,' Delmas was a fastidious, unimposing man, known to wear 'a frock coat, gray-striped trousers, a wing collar and an Ascot tie,' whose 'voice thrummed with emotion' and was nationally known as 'the master dramatist of America's courtrooms..' He had a substantial nose and a broad forehead only slightly covered in its center with a wispy bit of thinning hair. In the courtroom he was a brilliant dramatist, as the nation would learn in 1908 when he successfully defended Harry K. Thaw for murder in what was the most sensational case of the first half of the century, later made into the 1955 movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.

The case about to be decided in the Old Senate Chamber before Justice Waite's Supreme Court was about the way Santa Clara County had been taxing land and rights-of-way of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Claiming the taxation was improper, the railroad had refused for six years to pay taxes levied by Santa Clara County, and the case had ended up before the Supreme Court, with Delmas and Sanderson making the main arguments before the court.

Although the case on its face was a simple tax case, having nothing to do with due process or human rights or corporate personhood, the attorneys for the railroad nonetheless used much of their argument time to press the issue that the railroad was a 'person' and should be entitled to human rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The mystery of 1886 and Chief Justice Waite
In the decade leading up to this May day in 1886, the railroads had lost every Supreme Court case that they had brought seeking Fourteenth Amendment rights. I've searched dozens of histories of the time, representing a wide variety of viewpoints and opinions, but only two have made a serious attempt to answer the question of what happened that fateful day - and their theories clash.

No laws were passed by Congress granting that corporations should be treated the same under the constitution as living, breathing human beings, and none have been passed since then.

It was not a concept drawn from older English law.

No court decisions, state or federal, held that corporations were 'persons' instead of 'artificial persons.'

The Supreme Court did not rule, in this case or any case, on the issue of corporate personhood.

In fact, to this day there has been no Supreme Court ruling that could explain why a corporation - with its ability to continue operating forever, a legal agreement that can't be put in jail and doesn't need fresh water to drink or clean air to breathe - should be granted the same Constitutional rights our Founders explicitly fought for, died for, and granted to the very mortal human beings who are citizens of the United States, to protect them against the perils of imprisonment and suppression they'd experienced under a despot king.

But something happened in 1886, even though nobody to this day knows exactly what or why.

That year Sanderson decided to again sue a government agency that was trying to regulate his railroad's activity. This time he went after Santa Clara County, California. His claim, in part, was that because a railroad was a 'person' under the constitution, local governments couldn't 'discriminate' against it by having different laws and taxes in different places. In 1885, the case came before the Supreme Court.

In arguments before the court in January, 1885, Sanderson asserted that 'corporate persons' should be treated the same as 'natural (or human) persons.'

He said, 'I believe that the clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment] in relation to equal protection means the same thing as the plain and simple yet sublime words found in our Declaration of Independence, 'all men are created equal.' Not equal in physical or mental power, not equal in fortune or social position, but equal before the law.'

Sanderson's fellow lawyer for the railroads, George F. Edmunds, added his opinion that the Fourteenth Amendment leveled the field between artificial persons (corporations) and natural persons (humans) by a 'broad and catholic provision for universal security, resting upon citizenship as it regarded political rights, and resting upon humanity as it regarded private rights.'

But that wasn't actually what the case was about - that was just a minor point.

The railroad was being sued by the county for back taxes. The railroad claimed six different defenses. The specifics are not important, because the central concern is whether the court ruled on the Fourteenth Amendment issue. As will be shown below, the Supreme Court's decision clearly says it did not. But to put the railroad's complaint in perspective, consider this:

On property with a $30 million mortgage, the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000. (That's like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it ... and taking the case to the Supreme Court.)

One of the railroad's defenses was that when the state assessed the value of the railroad's property, it accidentally included the value of the fences along the right-of-way. The county, not the state, should have assessed the fences. So the railroad withheld all its taxes.

Yes, this is an exceedingly picayune distinction. All the tax was still due to Santa Clara County; the railroad didn't dispute that. But they said the wrong assessor assessed the fences - a tiny fraction of the whole amount - so they refused to pay any of the tax, and they fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And as it happens, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed:
...the entire assessment is a nullity, upon the ground that the state board of equalization included ... property [the fences] which it was without jurisdiction to assess for taxation...

The Court rejected the county's appeal, and that was the end of it. Except for one thing.

One of the railroad's six defenses involved the Fourteenth Amendment. As it happens, since the case was decided based on the fence issue, the railroad didn't need those extra defenses, and none of them was ever decided by the court. But one of them - related to the Fourteenth Amendment - still crept into the written record, even though the Court specifically did not rule on it.

Here's how the matter unfolded. First the railroad's defense.

The treatment that the railroad claimed was unfair
In the Fourteenth Amendment part of their defense, the railroad said:

That the provisions of the constitution and laws of California ... are in violation of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, in so far as they require the assessment of their property at its full money value, without making deduction, as in the case of railroads [that are only] operated in one county, and of other corporations, and of natural persons, for the value of the mortgages ...(Emphasis added)

The italic portions say, in essence, 'The state is taxing us railroads on the whole value of our property, instead of deducting our mortgage the way people do. That's not fair. Nobody else gets taxed that way.'

The implication, of course, is that the state has no right to decide that corporations get different tax rates than humans. And the railroad was using the former slaves' Equal Protection clause (the Fourteenth Amendment) as its shield.

The legal difference between 'artificial' and 'natural persons'
In the Supreme Court, cases are typically decided a year after arguments are presented, allowing the Justices time to research and prepare their written decisions. So it happened that on January 26th, 1885 (a year before the 1886 decision was handed down), Delphin M. Delmas, the attorney for Santa Clara County, made his case before the Supreme Court in exquisitely persuasive language:

The defendant claims [that the state's taxation policy]'violates that portion of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. ' In defending the provisions of our Constitution, permit me, in the first place, to reply to this attack made upon it, which, if tenable, would place the organic law of California in a position ridiculous to the extreme. ' If this be so, it is safe to say that there is hardly a State in this Union whose revenue system is not in danger of overthrow. '

The shield behind which [the Southern Pacific Railroad] attacks the Constitution and laws of California is the Fourteenth Amendment. It argues that the amendment guarantees to every person within the jurisdiction of the State the equal protection of the laws; that a corporation is a person; that, therefore, it must receive the same protection as that accorded to all other persons in like circumstances. '

To my mind, the fallacy, if I may be permitted so to term it, of the argument lies in the assumption that corporations are entitled to be governed by the laws that are applicable to natural persons. That, it is said, results from the fact that corporations are [artificial] persons, and that the last clause of the Fourteenth Amendment refers to all persons without distinction.

The defendant has been at pains to show that corporations are persons, and that being such they are entitled to the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. ' The question is, Does that amendment place corporations on a footing of equality with individuals?

Blackstone says, 'Persons are divided by the law into either natural persons or artificial. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us; artificial are such as are created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, which are called corporations or bodies politic.'

This definition suggests at once that it would seem unnecessary to dwell upon, that though a corporation is a person, it is not the same kind of person as a human being, and need not of necessity - nay, in the very nature of things, cannot - enjoy all the rights of such or be governed by the same laws. When the law says, 'Any person being of sound mind and of the age of discretion may make a will,' or 'any person having arrived at the age of majority may marry,' I presume the most ardent advocate of equality of protection would hardly contend that corporations must enjoy the right of testamentary disposition or of contracting matrimony.

The equality between persons spoken of in the Fourteenth Amendment obviously means equality between persons of the same nature or class, and not quality between persons whose very natures are absolutely dissimilar - equality between human beings, if the rights of natural persons are involved; equality between corporations of the same class, if the rights of artificial persons are involved. The whole history of the Fourteenth Amendment demonstrates beyond dispute that its whole scope and object was to establish equality between men - an attainable result - and not to establish equality between natural and artificial beings - an impossible result.

The evolution of the Fourteenth Amendment began with the first Civil Rights Bill, which provided that -

''All persons born in the United States'are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States and such citizens of every race and color'shall have the same right in every state and territory in the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sue, hold, and enjoy real and personal property, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by WHITE citizens.'

That this law was intended to establish equality between men in their individual capacity, and had no reference to equality between men and corporations, is too plain for argument. The law took the rights of a white citizen as the standard of measurement, and simply commanded that the rights of all other citizens, whatever their race or color, should be equal to his. '

At this point, Delmas cut right to the heart of the issue. Sanderson had before made his claim of the 'secret committee' of Congress that helped write the fourteenth amendment and meant for it to equalize corporate persons and human persons. Delmas, if his performance before the Supreme Court was consistent with his later well-documented performances in criminal courtrooms, would have been trembling in righteous indignation as he said:

Could Congress have by any possibility meant to confer upon artificial persons the same rights in the respects enumerated as were enjoyed by white citizens? Could it, for instance, have meant that a corporation should have the same right to 'give evidence' as a white citizen? And as to contracts, may not the state, which creates corporations, impose certain limitations upon their right or power to make contracts? ' Under this leveling statute was it intended to abolish the right of a state to impose terms and limits upon its own creatures? '

It is certain that this law has never been so understood or interpreted by any State. And if it is now so to be interpreted, what, I ask, is to become of the vast mass of legislation in all the States by which taxes, licenses, and exactions are demanded from corporations where none whatever is demanded from white citizens? '

'As of the broad meaning and generous scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, I yield my fullest assent. Standing in this presence, I would not attempt to dwarf the proportions of that historic provision by seeking to restrict its beneficent operation to a particular class or race. No. The law is as broad as humanity itself.

Wherever man is found within the confines of this Union, whatever his race, religion, or color, be he Caucasian, African, or Mongolian, be he Christian, infidel, or idolater, be he white, black, or copper-colored, he may take shelter under this great law as under a shield against individual oppression in any form, individual injustice in any shape. It is a protection to all men because they are men, members of the same great family, children of the same omnipotent Creator.

In its comprehensive words I find written by the hand of a nation of sixty millions in the firmament of imperishable law the sentiment uttered more than a hundred years ago by the philosopher of Geneva, and re-echoed in this country by the authors of the Declaration of the Thirteen Colonies, proclaim to the world the equality of man.

And realizing the dream of the poet, the philosopher, and the philanthropist, it may be that this great statute is destined to usher in the dawn of that era when national antipathies and animosities shall be appeased, national boundaries and barriers obliterated, and, under a system of universal justice, man shall be allowed to claim from man, in all climes and in all countries, equal protection, equal security, and equal rights.

What, then, must a State of this Union do in order to bear its share in carrying out the behests of this great commandment, that all men shall be equal - shall receive the equal protection of the laws? The State must see to it that no man, no class, no order of men are granted privileges, immunities, distinctions that are denied upon the same terms to others; that no rank or superiority is accessible to one which is not upon equal conditions within the reach of all; that no badge of invidious discrimination or humiliating inferiority is affixed to any, the humblest member of the commonwealth.

The State must see to it that the avenues leading to happiness are left equally open to all; that whatever pursuit is lawful for one is lawful equally for all; that whatever hopes aspirations, ambitions are licit for the most exalted shall be equally licit for the most humble; that into whatever paths leading to profit, place, or honor one man may venture to tread, all may upon an equal footing venture.

To attain and accomplish all these ends in all the states is, I conceive, in some degree, the object of the Fourteenth Amendment. Its mission was to raise the humble, the down-trodden, and the oppressed to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plane of humanity - to make man the equal of man; but not to make the creature of the State - the bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation - the equal of the creature of God. '

Therefore, I venture to repeat that the Fourteenth Amendment does not command equality between human beings and corporations; that the state need not subject corporations to the same laws which govern natural persons; that it may, without infringing the rule of equality, confer upon corporations rights, privileges, and immunities which are not enjoyed by natural persons; that it may, for the same reasons, impose burdens upon a corporation, in the shape of taxation or otherwise, which are not imposed upon natural persons'

I have now done. I am conscious of having occupied no inconsiderable portion of the time allotted by the court for the argument - not longer, I hope, however, than the importance of the questions at issue warrants. In saying this I am not unmindful of the propensity of counsel to magnify their causes. Self-complacency is ever ready to whisper exaggerated notions of the magnitude of our undertakings. Yet I cannot but think that the controversy now debated before your Honors is one of no ordinary importance. It is important to the people of California, not only on account of the very large amount [of tax money] at state, but more, for that it involves the validity of their laws and Constitution. It is important to the many States'menaced by the same attack. It is important to every State of this Union whose sovereign attribute of taxation is here challenged.

A year and five months passed, while the Supreme Court debated the issues in private. And then came the afternoon of May 10, 1886, the fateful moment for the fateful words of the Supreme Court, upon which hung much of the future of the United States and, later, much of the world.

Chief Justice Waite re-writes the Constitution (or does he?)
According to the record left us, here's what seems to have happened.

For reasons that were never recorded, moments before the Supreme Court was to render its decision in the now infamous Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case, Chief Justice Waite turned his attention to Delmas and the other attorneys present.

As railroad attorney Sanderson and his two colleagues watched, Waite told Delmas and his two colleagues that: 'The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are of the opinion that it does.'

He then turned to Justice Harlan who delivered the court's opinion in the case.

In the written record of the case, the court recorder noted: 'The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'

This written statement, that corporations were 'persons' rather than 'artificial persons,' with an equal footing under the Bill of Rights as humans, was not a formal ruling of the court, but was reportedly a simple statement by its Chief Justice, recorded by the court recorder.

There was no Supreme Court decision to the effect that corporations are equal to natural persons and not artificial persons.

There were no opinions issued to that effect, and therefore no dissenting opinions on this immensely important constitutional issue.

There was no public debate of the issue among the justices, and no discussion in open court.

The written record, as excerpted above, simply assumed corporate personhood without any explanation why. The only explanation provided was the court recorder's reference to something he says Waite said, which essentially says, 'that's just our opinion' without providing legal argument.

In these two sentences (according to the conventional wisdom), Waite weakened the kind of democratic republic the original authors of the Constitution had envisioned, and set the stage for the future worldwide damage of our environmental, governmental, and cultural commons. The plutocracy that had arisen with the East India Company in 1600, and been fought back by America's Founders, had gained a tool that was to allow them, in the coming decades, to once again gain control of most of North America, and then the world. Ironically, of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court in the years between his proclamation and 1910, only 19 dealt with African Americans: 288 were suits brought by corporations seeking the rights of natural persons.

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black pointed out, fifty years later, 'I do not believe the word 'person' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations. ' Neither the history nor the language of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection.'

Sixty years later, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas made the same point, writing that, 'There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view [that corporations are legally 'persons'].'

There was no change in legislation, and President Grover Cleveland had not issued a proclamation that corporations should be considered the same as natural persons. The U.S. Constitution does not even contain the word 'corporation,' and has never been amended to contain it, because the Founders wanted corporations to be regulated as close to home as possible, by the states, so they could be kept on a short leash - presumably so nothing like the East India Company would ever again arise to threaten the entrepreneurs of America.

But as a result of this case, for the past hundred-plus years corporate lawyers and politicians have claimed that Chief Justice Waite turned the law on its side and reinvented America's social hierarchy.

'But wait a minute,' many legal scholars have said over the years. Why would Waite say, before arguments about corporations being persons, that the court had already decided the issue - and then allow Delmas and Sanderson to argue the point anyway?

Or, alternately, why would he say such a thing after arguments were already made? By all accounts he was rational and a capable Justice, so it wouldn't make sense that he'd do that.

What really happened?

Several theories have been advanced. But first, let's look at what the Supreme Court decision actually said in the 1886 Santa Clara case.

What the Court actually said about personhood
The Supreme Court generally tries to stay out of a fight. If a case can be thrown out, or decided on simpler grounds, there's no need to complicate things by issuing a new decision. And in this case, the Court's decision specifically mentioned this: (Emphasis added)

These questions [regarding the Constitutional amendment] belong to a class which this court should not decide unless their determination is essential to the disposal of the case …

It continued, saying that the question of 'unless it's essential to the case' depended on how strong the other defenses were:

Whether the present cases require a decision of them depends upon the soundness of another proposition, upon which the court ..., in view of its conclusions upon other issues, did not deem it necessary to pass.

In other words, because of other issues (who should assess the fences), the Court wasn't even going to consider whether to rule on the Fourteenth Amendment corporate personhood issue.

The decision then identifies the fence issue, and concludes that there's nothing left to decide:
. . . If these positions are tenable, there will be no occasion to consider the grave questions of constitutional law upon which the case was determined ....As the judgment can be sustained upon this ground, it is not necessary to consider any other questions raised by the pleadings …

So what actually happened? Why have people said, for all these years, that in 1886 the Waite court in the Santa Clara case decided that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment?

It turns out that the court said no such thing, and it can't be found in the ruling.

It was in the headnotes!
This apparent contradiction - lawyers and corporations and authors and courts saying for over a hundred years that the Supreme Court had decided corporations are person, when the opinion itself does not say that and in fact explicitly says it didn't rule on constitutional issues - sent me to the law library in the Vermont Supreme Court building. Librarian Paul Donovan found for me Volume 118 of United States Reports: Cases adjudged in The Supreme Court at October Term 1885 and October Term 1886 published in New York in 1886 by Banks & Brothers Publishers, and written by J. C. Bancroft Davis, the Supreme Court's Reporter.

What I found in the book, however, were two pages of text that are missing from the online and official version. They were not part of the decision. They weren't even written by the Supreme Court justices, but were a quick summary-of-the-case commentary by Court Reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis. He wrote commentaries like these for each case, 'adding value' to the published book, from which he earned a royalty.

And there it was, in the notes. The very first sentence of Davis's note reads: 'The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'
That sentence was followed by three paragraphs of small print that summarized the California tax issues of the case. In fact, the notes by Davis, further down, say, 'The main - and almost only - questions discussed by counsel in the elaborate arguments related to the constitutionality of the taxes. This court, in its opinion passed by these questions (italics added), and decided the cases on the questions whether under the constitution and laws of California, the fences on the line of the railroads should have been valued and assessed, if at all, by the local officers, or by the State Board of Equalization''

In other words, the first sentence of 'The defendant Corporations are persons'' has nothing to do with the case and wasn't the issue that the Supreme Court decided on.

Two paragraphs later, Davis notes, perhaps in an attempt to explain why he'd started his notes with that emphatic statement, that: 'One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that 'Corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.' Before argument Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: 'The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.''

A half-page later, the notes ended and the actual decision, delivered by Justice Harlan, begins - which, as noted earlier, explicitly says that the Supreme Court is not, in this case, ruling on the constitutional question of corporate personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment or any other Amendment.

I paid my seventy cents for copies of the pages from the fragile and cracking 1886 book, and walked down the street to the office of attorney Jim Ritvo, a friend and wise counselor. I showed him what I'd found and said, 'What does this mean?'

He looked it over and said, 'It's just headnotes.'

'Headnotes? What are headnotes?'

He smiled and leaned back in his chair. 'Lawyers are trained to beware of headnotes because they're not written by judges or justices, but are usually put in by a commentator or by the book's publisher.'

'Are they legal? I mean, are they the law or anything like that?'

'Headnotes don't have the value of the formal decision,' Jim said. 'They're not law. They're just a comment, by somebody who doesn't have the power to make or determine or decide law.'

'In other words, these headnotes by court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis, which say that Waite said corporations are persons, are meaningless?'

Jim nodded his head. 'Legally, yes. They're meaningless. They're not the decision or a part of the decision.'

'But they contradict what the decision itself says,' I said, probably sounding a bit hysterical.

'In that case,' Jim said, 'you've found one of those mistakes that so often creep into law books.'

'But other cases have been based on the headnotes' commentary in this case.'

'A mistake compounding a mistake,' Jim said. 'But ask a lawyer who knows this kind of law. It's not my area of specialty.'

So I called Deborah Markowitz, Vermont's Secretary of State and one very bright attorney, and described what I'd found. She pointed out that even if the decision had been wrongly cited down through the years, it's now 'part of our law, even if there was a mistake.'

I said that I understood that (it was dawning on me by then), and that I was hoping to have some remedies for that mistake in my book, but just out of curiosity, 'What is the legal status of headnotes?'

She said, 'Headnotes are not precedential,' confirming what Jim Ritvo had told me. They are not the precedent. They are not the law. They're just a comment, with no legal status.

So how did it come that Court Reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote that corporations are persons in his headnotes? And why have a hundred years of American - and, now, worldwide - law been based on them?

Here are the main theories that have been advanced regarding what happened:

The Republican conspiracy theory that empowered FDR
In the early 1930s, the stock market had collapsed and the world was beginning a long and dark slide into the Great Depression and eventually to World War II. Millions were out of work in the United States, and the questions on many people's mind were, 'Why did this happen? Who is responsible?'

The teetering towers of wealth created by American industrialists during the late 1800s and early 1900s were largely thought to have contributed to or caused the stock market crash and ensuing Depression. In less than a hundred years, corporations had gone from being an obscure legal fiction used to establish colleges and trading companies, to standing as the single most powerful force in American politics.

Many working people felt that corporations had seized control of the political agenda, capturing Senators, Congressmen, the Supreme Court, and even recent Presidents in the magnetic force of their great wealth. Proof of this takeover could be found in the Supreme Court decisions of the 1908-1914 era, when the Supreme Court, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum wage laws, workmen's compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws - every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses.

Unions and union members were the victims of violence from private corporate armies and had been declared 'criminal conspiracies' by both business leaders and politicians. It seemed that corporations had staged a coup, seizing the lives of American workers - the majority of voters - as well as the elected officials who were supposed to represent them. And this was in direct contradiction of the spirit expressed by the founders of the country.

It was in this milieu that an American history book first published in 1927, but largely ignored, suddenly became a hot topic. In The Rise of American Civilization, Columbia history professor Charles Beard and woman's suffrage movement activist Mary Beard suggested that the rise of corporations on the American landscape was the result of a grand conspiracy that reached from the boardrooms of the nation's railroads all the way to the Supreme Court.

They fingered two Republicans: former Senator (and railroad lawyer) Roscoe Conkling; and former Congressman (and railroad lawyer) John A. Bingham. The theory, in short form, was that Conkling, when he was part of the Senate committee that wrote the Fourteenth Amendment back in 1868, had intentionally inserted the word 'person' instead of the correct legal phrase 'natural person' to describe who would get the protections of the Amendment. Bingham similarly worked in the House of Representatives to get the language passed.

Once that time bomb was put into place, Conkling and Bingham left elective office to join in litigating on behalf of the railroads, with the goal of exploding their carefully worded amendment in the face of the Supreme Court.

Thus 'Republican lawmakers,' the Beards said, conspired in advance to give full human constitutional rights to corporate legal fictions. 'By a few words skillfully chosen,' they wrote, 'every act of every state and local government which touched adversely the rights of [corporate] persons and property was made subject to review and liable to annulment by the Supreme Court at Washington.'

Oddly, this conspiracy theory was widely accepted because the supposed conspirators themselves had said, very publicly, 'We did it!'

Earlier, in an 1882 case pitting the railroads against San Mateo County, Conkling testified (as a paid witness for the railroads) that he'd slipped the 'person' language into the amendment to ensure that corporations would one day receive the same civil rights Congress was giving to freed slaves. Bingham made similar assertions when appropriate during his turns as a paid witness for the railroads. As a result of these assertions, through the late years of the 1800s both were the well-off darlings of the railroads, basking in the light of their successful appropriation of human rights for corporations.

When the Beards' book was widely read in the early 1930s, it gave names and faces to the villains who had turned control of America over to what were then called the 'Robber Barons' of industry.

Conkling, Bingham, and Justice Waite were all dead by the time of the Great Depression, and all judged guilty by the American public of pulling off the biggest con in the history of the new republic.

The firestorm of indignation that swept the country helped set the stage for Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, using legislative means and packing the Supreme Court to turn back the corporate takeover - at least in part - and returning to average working citizens some of the rights and benefits they felt had been stolen from them in 1886.

It was widely accepted that Conkling and Bingham had pulled off this trick successfully, purposefully saying 'person' instead of 'natural person' or 'citizen' when they helped write the Fourteenth Amendment, and corporate personhood was a fait accompli. It was done, and couldn't be undone. The Supreme Court, confronted with the reality of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, had been forced to recognize that corporations were persons under the US Constitution because of the precedent of the 1886 Santa Clara case.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge apparently ratified the coup on January 8, 1915, when he unwittingly promulgated Conkling's myth in a speech to the Senate about the 1882 San Mateo case cited above.

'In the case of San Mateo County against Southern Pacific Railroad,' Lodge said, 'Mr. Conkling introduced in his arguments excerpts from the Journal [of the Senate committee writing the Fourteenth Amendment], then unprinted, to show that the fourteenth amendment did not apply solely to Negroes, but applied to persons, real and artificial of any kind. It was owing to this, undoubtedly, that the [Supreme] Court extended it to corporations.'

The journal Lodge referenced is the secret journal that never existed.

Nonetheless, it was a done deal, conventional wisdom suggested, and the Supreme Court had been forced to acknowledge the reality of corporate personhood - or, some suggested, had gone along with it because Waite and the other justices were corrupt stooges of the railroads but wielded the majority vote. In either case, it had been the intent of at least some of the legislators (Conkling and Bingham) who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment that corporations should have the constitutional rights of natural persons.

Or maybe not?

The Republican conspiracy theory collapses
In the 1960s, author, attorney, and legal historian Howard Jay Graham came across a previously unexamined treasure in the personal papers of Chief Justice Waite, which had been gathering dust among the J. C. Bancroft Davis Papers on file with the Library of Congress.

In Waite's private correspondences with Davis (his former Recorder of the Court's Decisions), Graham made a startling discovery: the entire thing had been a mistake.

What had vexed legal authorities for nearly eighty years was why Waite would say 'The Court does not wish to hear argument'' when the arguments were already finished. Further, why wasn't there any discussion of this explosive new doctrine of corporate personhood in the Court's ruling or in dissents? It was as if they said it, and then forgot they'd mentioned it. And complicating the situation further, if the Court had arrived at a huge Constitutional decision with sweeping implications, why did the decision say it was based on a technicality about fences?

It just didn't seem to add up.

Looking over Waite's personal papers, Graham found a note from J. C. Bancroft Davis, the Supreme Court's Reporter, to Waite. At one point in the arguments, Waite had apparently told Sanderson to get beyond his arguments that corporations are persons and get to the point of the Santa Clara County tax case. Court reporter Davis, apparently seeking to clarify that, wrote to Waite:

In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of opinion that it does.

Please let me know whether I correctly caught your words and oblige.

Waite wrote back:

I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision. (Emphasis added.)

Graham notes in an article first published in the Vanderbilt Law Review that Waite explicitly pointed out to court reporter Davis that the constitutional question of corporate personhood was not included in their decision.

According to Graham, Waite was instead saying 'something to the effect of, 'The Court does not wish to hear further argument on whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to these corporations. That point was elaborately covered in 1882 [in the San Mateo case], and has been re-covered in your briefs. We all presently are clear enough there. Our doubts run rather to the substance [of the case ... the fence issue]. Assume accordingly, as we do, that your clients are persons under the Equal Protection Clause. Take the cases on from there, clarifying the California statutes, the application thereof, and the merits.''

In my opinion, Waite was saying something to the effect of, 'Every judge and lawyer knows that corporations are persons of the artificial sort - corporations have historically been referred to as 'artificial persons,' and so to the extent that the Fourteenth Amendment covers them it does so on a corporation-to-corporation basis. But we didn't rule on the railroad's claim that corporations should have rights equal to human persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, so I leave it up to you if you're going to mention the debates or not.'

Another legal scholar and author, C. Peter Magrath, was going through Waite's papers at the same time as Graham for the biography he published in 1963 titled Morrison R. Waite: Triumph of Character. In his book, he notes the above exchange and then says, 'In other words, to the Reporter fell the decision which enshrined the declaration in the United States Reports. Had Davis left it out, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pac. R. Co. would have been lost to history among thousands of uninteresting tax cases.'

It was all, at the very best, a mistake by a court reporter. There never was a decision on corporate personhood.

'So here at last,' writes Graham, ''now for then,' is that long-delayed birth certificate, the reason this seemingly momentous step never was justified by formal opinion.' He adds, in a wry note for a legal scholar, 'Think, in this instance too, what the United States might have been spared had events taken a slightly different turn.'

Graham's conspiracy theory
In Everyman's Constitution, Howard Jay Graham suggests that if there was an error made on the part of the court Reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis - as the record seems to show was clear - it was probably the result of efforts by Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field.

Field was very much an outsider on the court, and despised by Waite. As Graham notes, 'Field had repeatedly embarrassed Waite and the Court by close association with the Southern Pacific proprietors and by zeal and bias in their behalf. He had thought nothing of pressuring Waite for assignment of opinions in various railroad cases, of placing his friends as counsel for the road in upcoming cases, of hinting at times he and they should take, even of passing on to such counsel in the undecided San Mateo case 'certain memoranda which had been handed me by two of the Judges.''

Field had presidential ambitions, and was relying on the railroads to back him. He'd publicly announced on several occasions that if he were elected President he'd enlarge the size of the Supreme Court to 22 so he could pack it with 'able and conservative men.'

Field also thought poorly of Waite, calling him upon his appointment 'His Accidency' and 'that experiment' of Ulysses Grant. Waite didn't have the social graces of Fields, who was often described as a 'popinjay,' and even though he'd been a lawyer for the railroads and others, the record appears to show that Waite did his best to be a truly impartial Chief Justice during his tenure, eventually literally working himself to death.
But Field was a grandstander, who served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals of California at the same time he was a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was often his 'corporations are a person' decisions in California cases that led them to reappear before the U.S. Supreme Court - no accident on Field's part - including the San Mateo case in 1882 and the Santa Clara County case in 1886.

And when the justices did not decide (contrary to what Court Reporter Davis published months after the decision) that constitutional issues were involved in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, Justice Field was incensed. In his concurring opinion to the Santa Clara case, even though he's agreeing with the finding that fence posts should have a different tax rate than railroad land, he's clearly upset that the issue of corporate personhood was not addressed or answered in the case. He wrote:

[The court had failed in] its duty to decide the important constitution questions involved, and particularly the one which was so fully considered in the Circuit Court [where Field was also the judge], and elaborately argued here, that in the assessment, upon which the taxes claimed were levied, an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made'and to that extent depriving it [the railroad 'person'] of the equal protection of the laws. At the present day nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations' [a] vast portion of the wealth 'is in their hands. It is, therefore, of the greatest interest to them whether their property is subject to the same rules of assessment and taxation as like property of natural persons'whether the State'may prescribe rules for the valuation of property for taxation which will vary according as it is held by individuals or by corporations. The question is of transcendent importance, and it will come here and continue to come until it is authoritatively decided in harmony with the great constitutional amendment (Fourteenth) which insures to every person, whatever his position or association, the equal protection of the laws; and that necessarily implies freedom from the imposition of unequal burdens under the same conditions.

In Everyman's Constitution, Graham documents scores of additional attempts by Supreme Court Justice Field to influence or even suborn the legal process to the benefit of his open patrons, the railroad corporations. Field's personal letters, revealed nearly a century after his death, show that his motivations, in addition to wealth and fame, were Presidential aspirations - he wrote about his hopes that in 1880 and 1884 the railroads would finance his rise to the Presidency, which may explain his zeal to please his potential financiers in 1882 in the San Mateo case and the 1886 Santa Clara case.

So, this conspiracy theory goes, after the case was decided - without reference to corporations being persons and without anybody on the court except Field agreeing with Sanderson's railroad arguments that they were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment - Justice Field took it upon himself to make sure the court's record was slightly revised: it wouldn't be published until J.C. Bancroft Davis submitted his manuscript of the Court's proceedings (titled 'United States Reports') to his publisher, Banks & Brothers in New York, in 1887, and not released until Waite's death in 1888 or later.

After all, Waite's comments to reporter Davis were a bit ambiguous - although he was explicit that no constitutional issue had been decided. Nonetheless, Recorder Davis, with his instruction from Waite that Davis, himself, should 'determine whether anything need be said'in the report,' may well have even welcomed the input of Field. And since Field, acting as the judge of the Ninth Circuit in California, had already and repeatedly ruled that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, it doesn't take much imagination to guess what Field would have suggested Court Recorder Davis include in the transcript, perhaps even offering the language, curiously matching his own language in previous lower court cases.

Graham and McGrath, two of the preeminent scholars of the twentieth century (Graham on this issue, and McGrath also Waite's biographer), both agree that this is the most likely scenario. At the suggestion of Justice Field, almost certainly unknown to Waite, 'a few sentences' were inserted into Davis's final written record 'to clarify' the decision. It wasn't until a year or more later, when Waite was fatally ill, that the lawyers for the railroads safely announced they had seized control of vital rights in the United States Constitution.

The Hartmann theory
Court recorders had a very different role in the 19th Century than court reporters do today.

It wasn't until 1913 that the Stenograph machine was invented to automate the work of court reporters. Prior to that time, notes were kept in a variety of shorthand forms, both institutionalized and informal. Thus, the memory of the reporter, and his (in the 19th century nearly all were men) understanding of the case before him, was essentially to a clear and informed record being made for posterity.

Being a recorder for the Supreme Court was also not simply a stenographic or recording position. It was a job of high status and high pay. Although the Chief Justice in 1886 earned $10,500 a year, and the Associate Justices earned $10,000 per year, the Recorder of the Court could expect an income over $12,000 per year, between his salary and his royalties from publishing the United States Reports. And the status of the job was substantial, as Magrath notes: 'In those days the reportership was a coveted position, attracting men of public stature who associated as equals with the justices''

Prior to his appointment to the Court, John Chandler Bancroft Davis was a politically active and ambitious man. A Harvard educated attorney, Davis held a number of public service and political appointment jobs ranging from Asst. Secretary of State for two Presidents to Minister of Germany to Court of Claims Judge.

This was no ordinary court reporter, in the sense of today's professionals who do their jobs with clarity and precision but completely uninvolved in the cases or with the parties involved. He was a political animal, well educated and traveled, and well connected to the levers of power in his world, which in the 1880s were principally the railroads.

In 1875, while Minister to Germany, Davis even took the time to visit Karl Marx, transcribing in their conversations one of what was considered one of the era's clearest commentaries about Marx. But Davis also left out part of what Marx said - Davis apparently viewed himself as both reporter and editor. In late 1878, a second reporter tracked down Marx and asked about Davis' omission. Here's an excerpt from that second article, as it appeared in the January 9, 1879 issue of The Chicago Tribune:

During my visit to Dr. Marx, I alluded to the platform given by J.C. Bancroft Davis in his official report of 1877 as the clearest and most concise exposition of socialism that I had seen. He said it was taken from the report of the socialist reunion at Gotha, Germany, in May, 1875. The translation was incorrect, he said, and he [Maarx] volunteered correction, which I append as he dictated...'

Marx then proceeds to give this second reporter an entire Twelfth Clause about state aid and credit for industrial societies, and suggests that Davis had cooperated with Marx in producing a skewed record in recognition of the times and place where the discussion was held.

I own twelve books written by Davis, which give an insight into the status and role he held as Recorder for the Court. In his Mr. Sumner, the Alabama Claims and Their Settlement, published by Douglas Taylor in New York in 1878, my frayed, disintegrating copy is filled with Davis's personal thoughts and insights on a testimony before Congress. The book, first published as an article in The New York Herald by Davis, says such things as, 'Like Mr. Sumner's speech in April 1869, this remarkable document would have shut the door to all settlement, had it been listened to. To a suggestion that we should negotiate for the settlement of our disputed boundary and of the fisheries, it proposed to answer that we would negotiate only on condition that Great Britain would first abandon the whole subject of the proposed negotiation. I well remember Mr. Fish's astonishment when he received this document.'

He summarizes with extensive commentary such as, 'I add to the foregoing narrative that Mr. Motley's friends were (perhaps not unnaturally) indignant at his removal, and joined him in attributing it to Mr. Sumner's course toward the St. Domingo Treaty'' He indirectly references his own time as Envoy to Germany when he writes, 'They apparently forgot that the more brilliant, the more distinguished, and the more attractive in social life an envoy is, the more dangerous he may be to his country when he breaks loose from his instructions and communicates socially to the world and officially...'

As you can see, Davis was fond of flowery writing, and thought well of himself.

And then I realized what I was reading. It related to the famous 1871 Geneva Arbitration Case, led by attorney Morrison Remick Waite, which won over $15 million for the US Government from England for their help of the Confederate army during the Civil War. Going to another book by Davis that I'd purchased while researching this book, published in 1903 and titled A Chapter in Diplomatic History, I discovered that Davis had been quite active in the Geneva Arbitration Case.

During the negotiations with England, he writes, 'I answered that I was very sorry at the position of things, but that the difficulty was not of our making; that I would carry his message to Lord Tenterden, but could hold out little hope that he would adopt the suggestion; and that, in my opinion, the Arbitrators should take up the indirect claims and pass upon them while this motion was pending.

'That evening I saw Lord Tenterden,' Davis continues, 'and told him what had taken place between me and Mr. Adams and the Brazilian arbitrator' About midnight he came to me to say that he had told Sir Roundell Palmer what had passed between him and me, and that Sir Roundell had made a minute of some points which would have to be borne in mind, should the Arbitrators do as suggested. He was not at liberty to communicate these points to me officially; but, if I chose to write them down from his dictation, he would state them. I wrote them down from his dictation, and, early the next morning, convened a meeting of the counsel and laid the whole matter before them.'

That Davis was playing more than just the role of a stenographer in this case was indisputable. And the case?

It was, again, the Alabama Claims or Geneva Settlement case, which had made Morrison Remick Waite's career. Checking the University of Virginia's law school, I found the following notes on the Geneva Arbitration case: 'The United States' case was argued by former Assistant Secretary of State Bancroft Davis, along with lawyers Caleb Cushing, William M. Evarts, and Morrison R. Waite, under the direction of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and Secretary of Treasury George Boutwell' (italics added).

Waite and Davis had worked side-by-side on one of the most famous cases in American history (at the time), both in Geneva, Switzerland, and before the United States Congress. And all this a full 15 years before Davis was to put his pen to his understanding of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case when it came before the Supreme Court which Waite was now Chief Justice of and for which Davis was the head Recorder.

Searching for traces of Davis on the Internet, I found an autograph for sale - it was a letter by President Ulysses Grant, signed by Grant, and also signed by Grant's Acting Secretary of State - J. C. Bancroft Davis.

And looking through the records of the City of Newburgh, New York, where Davis once lived, the Orange County New York Directory of 1878-9 lists the following note about one of that city's distinguished citizens:

'The Newburgh and New York Railroad Company was organized December 14th, 1864, the road was completed September 1st, 1869. J.C. Bancroft Davis was elected President of the Board of Directors'[on] August 1st, 1868.'

Given his distinguished background, and his having worked with James Taylor and Jay Cooke of the railroads in late 1860s, it's hard to imagine that Davis would insert 'corporations are persons' into the record of a Supreme Court proceeding without understanding full well its importance and consequences, even if he was encouraged to do so by Justice Field.

So here is the fourth and final possibility: John Chandler Bancroft Davis undertook to rewrite that part of the United States Constitution himself, for reasons that to this day are still unknown, but probably not inconsistent with his own personal political worldview and affiliation with the railroads, and that he did it with the encouragement of Fields.

Waite was so ill that he missed the entire session of 1885 Court, was very weak and sick in 1886 and 1887, and died in March of 1888: in all probability he never knew what Davis had written in his name.

Regardless how it happened - whether it was a simple error by Davis, or Davis was bending to pressure from Fields, or if Davis simply took it upon himself to use the voice of the Supreme Court to modify the United States Constitution - the fact is that an amendment to the Constitution which had been written by and passed in Congress, voted on and ratified by the states, and signed into law by the president, was radically altered in1886 from the intent of its post-Civil War authors.

And the hand on the pen that did it was that of J. C. Bancroft Davis.

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The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/2/18

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HotCoffee, it IS Bloody Mary Sunday including pickle and olives.

Here is one you will not see in any of the liberal news or hear about on any leftie/socialist talking radio bobbleheads.

"South Carolina mom-of-three Ashley Jones jumped into action Thursday morning after she heard a man banging on her door.

"Surveillance footage shows a man knocking loudly on Jones’ door, while a woman paces behind him. Jones said she grabbed her gun and called 911 before looking out the window to see what the commotion was about.

I yelled, 'I have a gun, I will shoot you, get away from my house,'” Jones told FOX Carolina.

The man then kicked in her door, at which point Jones shot him."

One more funny just for the heck of it.

'No evidence' to back Kavanaugh accusers' claims, Senate panel's report on FBI probe finds

Loved the leftie/socialists crying over this. Maybe they have figured out Kavanaugh will have a very long memory.

Time to start shaking up the ZingZang Bloody Mary mix and opening the stuffed olives.

Later,

Óinseach, the master of inconsequential insinuation, transparent deflection, and sophomoric obfuscation, who supports a deranged racist, sexist, religious bigot, homophobe, war monger, Wall Street patsy, Putin poodle, serial liar, vindictive child, and all around facking eejit, by whom the world's sane people are utterly disgusted.

Thom Hartmann quotes - from Goodreads (Fair Use)

“Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it”
― Thom Hartmann

“Master Stanley used to tell me that what I was doing was nowhere near as important as the place within myself from where I was doing it. For example, a person could be teaching others out of a selfless motive, or out of a desire for power or glory: the former had a positive impact on the world, whereas the latter had a negative impact, even though the same identical teaching may have been imparted. “It’s the spirit that’s important,” he would say. “It’s even more important than the act. Going to work in a gas station and providing for your family out of love is more important than creating a mighty religious work out of a desire for glory or power.” ― Thom Hartmann, The Prophet's Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

“And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going "out to nature" to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late

“Many people today think that the Tea Act—which led to the Boston Tea Party—was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by the American colonists. That's where the whole "Taxation Without Representation" meme came from.

Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade and to exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea that it was unable to sell and holding in inventory.

In other words, the Tea Act was the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“It’s ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves “democratic socialist” in their organization—Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden—actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses.”
― Thom Hartmann, Rebooting the American Dream

“Both Jefferson and Adams were wary of priests in all forms, as they both knew theocracies are enemies of democracy. Jefferson pointed out that the Indians shared their wariness:”
― Thom Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy

“The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“An important book for understanding the history of our economic boom & bust cycles. It's an eye-opening account of how we are repeating the mistakes of the 1760's, 1850's, and 1920's. The author is a brilliant writer and is so good at explaining even the most complex subjects in a compelling & easy to understand way. The next crash will be painful but it's important to understand what is being done to us, and how we can learn from history and take action.”
― Thom Hartmann

“June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Bankers’ ” noted, “The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths.”107”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“the Occupy Movement flared up and began setting up tents in public parks all around the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Seattle. But it actually happened exactly eighty years earlier, when the nation was drowning in President Hoover’s Great Depression, and not President Bush’s Great Recession. These settlements weren’t called “occupations” at the time, they were called “Hoovervilles.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“There is more carbon in the atmosphere trapping heat and moisture than ever before in the 165,000 years of human history.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, “persons” and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it’s perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It“His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Corporations haven’t limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment—passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution—protects their right “against discrimination” by a local community that doesn’t want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“I hold it to be impracticable”4 to try to define it or any right narrowly in a Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn’t say that corporations are people. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written with that idea; corporations aren’t mentioned anywhere in the document or its Amendments. For America’s first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, “No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans.” In fact, the Founders were quite clear (as you can see from Hamilton’s debate earlier) that only humans inherently have rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it’s in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit “new” rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“since 1886, the Bill of Rights has been explicitly applied to corporations. Perhaps most astoundingly, no branch of the U.S. government ever formally enacted corporate personhood “rights”: • The public never voted on it. • It was never enacted into law by any legislature. • It was never even stated by a decision after arguments before the Supreme Court.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“for one hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact conclude that “corporations are persons.” But this book will show that the Court never stated this: it was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, a commentary called a headnote.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child“We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we’re releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated].”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we’re causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.

Which is exactly what happened.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“The clause that grants all “persons” equal protection under the law, in context, seems to apply pretty clearly only to human beings “born or naturalized” in the United States of America. But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head,”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“in previous decades a chemical company took to the Supreme Court a case asserting its Fourth Amendment “right to privacy” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s snooping into its illegal chemical discharges.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“If this trend continues, it’s probably just a matter of time before a corporation (maybe one of the many mercenary forces that emerged out of George W. Bush’s Iraq War?) claims the Second Amendment right to bear arms anywhere, anytime, and your credit card company’s bill collector shows up at your home with a sidearm.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Humans are born with human rights. Those human rights are inherent—”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights“nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn’t even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They’re explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights“Breaking Big Money's Grip on America is "a brilliant analysis of where we are and where we need to go. Read this book.”
― Thom Hartmann

“The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].”They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it.And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing?The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states.Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional.President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional.The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people—representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy—the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich,” Moyers”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy.

After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich....

As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.”
― Thom Hartmann, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

“As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites. The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy. After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich.... the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.” ― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined and as independent as myself, who, not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield up their opinions to mine. Mutual concessions is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”*” ― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights “There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.”
― Thom Hartmann, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

“generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can’t do to you. [It] says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“The Constitution doesn’t give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, “natural rights” that are held “The year Reagan was sworn into office, 1981, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. ... Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods.This has resulted in an enormous trade imbalance, one that has grown from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion deficit by 2012.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“It’s estimated that the Arctic, within seven years and maybe as soon as 2015, will have its first ice-free summer in the last 700,000 years (keep in mind that humans have only been on this planet for 165,000 years). Earlier projections predicted ice-free summers as far out in the future as 2080.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“natural persons.” The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

“Dickens knew there were vast reserves of methane hydrate trapped frozen in sea-beds all around the world and wondered what would happen if a lot of that frozen methane on the sea floor had melted from a solid into a gas, and bubbled up from the ocean’s depths? Would it be enough to account for the “signature” of carbon-12 that geologists were finding in the rocks associated with the Permian Mass Extinction? So he went back to the lab and melted frozen methane in water warm enough. The results were dramatic. The gas not only dissolved into the water, but it also rose up out of the water and into the air. Dickens published a paper in 1999 suggesting that a 5 degree Celsius increase in ocean temperatures would have been adequate to melt enough methane hydrate crystals to create the Permian carbon-12 signature. And such a massive release of methane, itself a greenhouse gas vastly more potent than CO2, would also trigger a catastrophic, swift warming of the planet.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don’t even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“Most Americans — 78% to be exact — drive fewer than 40 miles per day. Which means that for more than three-quarters of us, we really don’t need gasoline at all. Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don’t even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped.Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him.

Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.”
― Thom Hartmann

“as the consequences of global warming further manifest themselves, political will for a hard cap will undoubtedly build, just like it did with sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain in the 1980s. It’s rarely discussed in the press, but President George Herbert Walker Bush successfully pushed through a cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide which radically reduced acid rain.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinctionhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1433.Thom_Hartmann?page=1

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The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/2/18

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Trump Creates The Most Amazing Jobs Report In American History

• November 3, 2018
• by David Blackmon
• 3 Comments

Today’s Campaign Update(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Sitting here on a Saturday morning wondering when Oprah and Barack are going to go up to Michigan to campaign on behalf of the single most-qualified candidate for the U.S. senate running anywhere in this election. That would be John James, a black man, who is running against the execrable Debbie Stabenow, a white woman.

Ok, silly me – James is a Republican, so he doesn’t qualify as being “black” in the world of Oprah and Barack.

Speaking of America’s Biggest Mistake… – A day after the Oprah campaigned on behalf of Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, Barack Hussein Obama was down in the Sunshine State doing the same thing before an audience of dozens of Floridians.

As is Obama’s habit whenever campaigning in the South, he spent his entire speech trying like hell to sound like a southern black guy. Take a listen to the fake accent here:

https://dbdailyupdate.com/index.php/2018/11/03/trump-creates-the-most-am...

Just unbelievable, shameful pandering. But that’s our Barack!

A human dumpster fire walks into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “What’ll it be, Alec Baldwin?” – Washed-up actor and horrible father Alec Baldwin was taken to jail in New York City yesterday. Again. How many times is this? Not sure. But he always gets off, presumably because of white privilege, or something.

Anyway, he got into a dispute with a guy over a parking spot, because, hey, we all know how tough it is to find parking in Manhattan, thanks to reruns of Seinfeld. The C-list actor had had a relative holding the spot for him as he prepared to back into it, but the victim pulled into the spot first. Baldwin, being the demented hot-head that he truly is, jumped out of his car and punched the guy as he was feeding the parking meter.

Hilarity ensued. No doubt the writers at Saturday Night Live have already come up with an extremely not-funny skit about it for tonight’s show, with Baldwin playing himself. Because that’s how our depraved entertainment industry works.

Just wait until we find out Christine Ford never met Brett Kavanaugh, either. – Judy Munro-Leighton, one of the women who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of being a rapist last month, has recanted her story and admitted she never even met the man. Guess she’s pissed that she didn’t get her own million-dollar GoFundMe account from the Democrats who planned the whole smear operation.

For her troubles, she does get her own personal criminal referral authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, so she’s got that going for her. This was the third such referral Grassley has sent over to the Department of Justice in the last 10 days, and no one should think for a minute that he is done here. Every one of the women who accused Kavanaugh was lying, and if we ever get a real attorney general into office, they might all end up serving time in federal prisons.

Speaking of news the fake New York Times and CNN will ignore… – We had possibly the single most stunning jobs report in American history on Friday. Yes, the 250,000 new jobs was amazing; yes, the 3.7% rate of unemployment is fantastic; yes, the 3.1 real wage growth is terrific, the strongest in more than a decade. A new record 156,562,000 Americans employed? Almost unbelievable. Black unemployment? An all-time low. Hispanic unemployment? An all-time low. Female employment? An all-time high.

But the most amazing part of this amazing report? Not one, single, solitary industry in the United States of America suffered a net loss in jobs. Not one. Retail jobs? Up. Manufacturing jobs? Up. Mining jobs? Up. Industrial jobs? Up. On and on it went, throughout every single segment of the most diverse and massive economy in the history of civilization.

Barack Obama was happy to destroy U.S. manufacturing jobs and ship them overseas, telling Americans that they were old-style jobs that were never coming back. The Trump economy just created more than 1,000 new manufacturing jobs every DAY during October. Every DAY. This happened during a time in which all the “experts” predicted the Trump trade dispute with China would result in a net loss in manufacturing jobs. Oops. So much for “experts.”

Back in December, I wrote that the biggest economic problem our country would face in 2018 would be finding enough people to fill all the jobs that would result from the passage of the Trump tax cuts. Today, after this incredible jobs report, employers have more job openings than we have qualified applicants looking to fill them. I’m 62 years old – this has never happened in my lifetime.

Enjoy it while you can – next time we elect a Democrat to the presidency, it’ll all come to a crashing end.

That is all.

Update: Just found some stunning numbers I wanted to share with my readers, courtesy of GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel:

If President Obama actually wants to keep score:

In 8 years, Obama had a net loss of 192,000 manufacturing and 111,500 mining jobs.

In less than 2 years, @realDonaldTrump has created 416,000 manufacturing and 112,700 mining jobs.

Don't let Democrats stop this progress!

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) November 2, 2018

Vote Republican on Tuesday. This is the easiest decision we have ever had.

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