10/25/11

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Common Reading
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld and Mark Peterson
Dancing the "Republican Two-Step" with Copyrights, Patents, and Corporations
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, by Lewis Hyde (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010).
Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, 1774-1861, by Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin (originally published 1947, revised edition, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969).
In this issue of "Common Reading," we bring you a conversation about an important aspect of our modern predicament, as seen through historical and anthropological lenses. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, an anthropologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Mark Peterson, a historian at UC-Berkeley and editor of this column, discuss two books, one new and one old, and their collective implications for our world, in which ever larger corporations, with unfathomably sophisticated tools, are engrossing and enclosing ever more of the collective wisdom and potential knowledge of our societies.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld:

Several years ago, in the mountains of Ecuador, I watched as burning tires melted doughnut-shaped ruts into the asphalt of the Pan American Highway. Bands of protestors stood by, steeling themselves for the arrival of soldiers. In March 2006, Andean natives had rallied to fight a free trade agreement between Ecuador and the United States. After ten days of stonewalling the activists' demands, the national government declared martial law. In the town of Peguche, leaders called for residents to radicalize the strike (fig. 1). On a side street near their main blockade, teenage boys jabbed sharpened re-bar between the cobbles, prying up fist sized rocks. Further up the road, women sat on a curb surrounded by empty mineral water bottles and plastic jugs of gasoline, tearing white sheets into long, even strips—wicks for their anarchical bombs. As the strike accelerated toward its climax, the national media focused with increasing anger on one question: what were native peoples so concerned about? The details of the treaty were arcane; the consequence for native careers seemed remote.
Many protestors admitted they did not know the details. What they feared, though, was that their subsistence crops, their medicinal plants, and their ecological knowledge all were at risk. U.S. companies empowered by the treaty struck native peoples as an imminent threat, poised to convert Andean talents in farming and healing into corporate property. A pamphlet circulated at the Peguche blockade, insisting that with the free trade agreement, "indigenous people and peasants will be obligated to mono-culture, to use seeds treated in the laboratories of the United States (transgenetic)." Protest banners proclaimed, "Corn, Wheat, Potatoes are our Life: Out with the Treaty" (fig. 2). Put simply, with stones, Molotov cocktails, steel bars, and blockades, Indians were arming themselves for war against corporations bearing U.S. copyright and patent laws.
book cover

book cover

The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society? In Common as Air, Lewis Hyde sketches how we got here. Since World War II industrial economies have remade themselves as "knowledge economies." Studios and laboratories have supplanted shop floors as the source of wealth. Monsanto, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney stake their future on the "know-how behind the goods" rather than material goods themselves. With the new technology of digital copying and the Internet, inventors can sell and resell the same idea infinitely and at little cost. And as the returns on capital multiply, the United States government has proved a willing ally in defending corporate ownership of ideas, aggressively exporting "knowledge laws" and forcing trading partners into compliance. The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society? After all, copyright law is rooted in the U.S. Constitution. Did the founders of the republic incline its citizens toward a commercial enclosure of knowledge and creativity?
In a wonderful exploration of this problem, Hyde tacks back and forth between political philosophies of James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, on one hand, and instructive moments of American creativity, on the other: Ben Franklin's electrical experiments, Bob Dylan's songsmithing, and Martin Luther King's sermon writing. Seeking a language that could stand as an alternative to "exclusive copyright," "private ownership," and "intellectual property," Hyde joins other writers who turn "to the old idea of 'the commons' as a way to approach the collective side of ownership." The commons discourse turns out to be archaic and arcane. Hyde tells of "estovers," "stinting," and "beating the bounds." The point, though, is not really to argue that the Founding Fathers conceived of science and invention as akin to harvesting in wild wood and shared fields. Rather, through his exploration of the commons, Hyde gains a set of heuristics—questions about communal duty, about the limits of exploitation, and about individual liberty—that guide his inquiry into early American writings on copyright and monopolies in commerce.
Hyde states somewhat drily that for America's revolutionaries, "intellectual property is ultimately a republican estate. It is the intangible equivalent of the tangible res publicae (roads, bridges, harbors) of the Republic itself." His meditation on the commons, though, reveals that estate as a dynamic composite of public duty, freedom, and uncharted lands. The commoners who gather in their perambulations to knock down encroaching fences, who hold themselves back from overgrazing their shared property, and who preserve the untamed wastes along with their plowed fields strike a balance between private affairs and a shared space of possibility.

Mark Peterson:

But isn't the commons, in both its tangible sense as shared material resources, as well as its metaphorical sense of intellectual or knowledge resources, something more than just "possibility?" Doesn't the traditional idea of the commons also have something to do with preserving a margin of security, or even a modest degree of comfort, in a hostile world? The firewood to be gleaned or the food to be gathered on the commons gave peasants comfort or warmth beyond what their own meager individual resources might yield, comfort they relied on as part of their due for the service they performed for their lord and their neighbors. Couldn't the same be said of the right to sing a traditional song, or to use a clever new tool for getting work done a bit faster? To enclose these through copyright or patent is to rob someone of real comfort and security, not just possibility.

RCM:

Yes, and the tangible value of these resources, intellectual or otherwise, comes through in Hyde's discussion of the equally tangible duties, burdens, and costs required to maintain the commons. Throughout much of the book, Hyde's central concern is the interdependence of private interests and civic obligation. He tracks the ways that eighteenth-century thinkers proposed a structure of law, and assumed a manner of comportment, "such that the public domain might inherit from the private." The "Republican Two-Step" he comes to call it, "first autonomy, then service." The model here is a life career in which one matures from a partial, individualized, private self to the full dignity of a public life. Hyde uses the life course of the young John Adams to show the meaning of this process. Upon the death of his father, Adams inherited a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, becoming for the first time a freeholder, a taxpayer, and a voter at town meetings. To Adams' initial dismay, the town elders also expected him to become a bridge builder, standing him to be elected as Braintree's surveyor of highways. Hyde writes that Adams' protests as to his ignorance about the bridges mattered little; "everyone had to take a turn at town offices." With property comes duty—not as an optional act of charity, but a requirement, intrinsic to the nature of property ownership within the community. And since the corporate towns of Massachusetts were the ultimate source of that property, the bodies that granted land in fee simple to the original inhabitants, then the town had every right to set the terms of property ownership.
This lesson would be generalized to knowledge and learning. If the drafters of the Constitution conceded the utility of granting monopoly privileges to authors and inventors, they saw this privilege as a limited one. With patents and copyrights come service; first private gain, then public use. Hyde quotes Jefferson: "certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual." Jefferson's certainty rested in part on a faith that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition." It also lay in the conviction that "citizens can never be truly self-governing until they have a lively public sphere, a free flow of knowledge, religious liberty, and so on." Citizens cannot passively await the appearance of a public sphere; they are duty-bound to create this cultural commons with their contributions.
All the talk of duty, service and obligation, though, risks misrepresenting the public sphere as only a burden, where virtue overshadows joy, morality tops creativity. Yet, as he builds his case, Hyde keeps his eye on all that is untamed, abundant, accidental, and random within a commons. It is these same qualities that set the potential for inventiveness in a knowledge commons. Hyde begins with Locke. The philosopher had observed that nature is a "wild common" lacking the improving hand of man (23). A vision of uncultivated "wastes" inspired dreams of plentitude; the commons appeared to Locke and others to be a primordial "commodious world." Contemporary anthropologists (and the ancient peasantry) might dispute Locke's vision of abundance on prosaic, ecological grounds. Typically, wastes remained uncultivated commons because the poverty of their soils and treacherousness of their slopes rewarded individual labor so meagerly. Humans traveled lightly on this land, passing by occasionally to harvest what they could, neglecting it at other times, and allowing the survival of wild plants and feral animals.

Fig. 1. Residents from Peguche assemble at a blockade protesting a free trade agreement between the United States and Ecuador, March 2006. Courtesy of Rudi Colloredo-Mansfield.


Fig. 2 Protest banner proclaiming "Corn, Wheat, Potatoes are our Life: Out with the Treaty" that was used during free trade strike, March 2006. Courtesy of Rudi Colloredo-Mansfield

MP:

So, in an ecological sense, it may seem surprising that Massachusetts turned out to be one of the places in the Americas where "commons" practices, and a "commonwealth" form of government, took hold with great tenacity. Compared to Mexico, Peru or Hispaniola, where natural barriers of mountains, high desert and rainforest resisted farming and preserved wildness, New England's ecology easily sustained a comfortable human existence. But from an imperial point of view, the strength of commons and commonwealth in Massachusetts is no surprise at all. Peru, Mexico, and the Caribbean all yielded commodities of incredible value to Europeans—gold, silver, sugar—and so the various conquistadors seized and enclosed these territories as rapidly as they could. Massachusetts was a "wasteland" from this perspective, yielding almost nothing that England lacked. Oliver Cromwell called it "poor, cold, and useless." Yes, the indigenous peoples or English colonists could subsist comfortably enough in its temperate climate, but there was nothing there that any self-respecting imperialist really wanted to enclose. That's why, as late as 1630, it was still open to middling Puritan dissenters and their utopian dreams of a godly commonwealth.

RCM:

Although Hyde does not take up the ecology of the commons with this kind of specificity, he does have a sense for humans' complicity within it. The collective defense of the commons—the beating of the bounds, the destruction of encroachments, stinting—promoted its generative wildness by holding the extractive technologies of market and polity in check. The practice of the commons removed fences and undid covert investments. When strongly held, such habits make possible "the practice of the wild, one whose first condition is the simple freedom to wander out, unimpeded, beyond the usual understanding and utterance." Enter a living commons and have the chance to "contact with what lies outside our knowledge."
All this consideration of the "practice of the wild" may divert readers away from copyright, obligation, and the public domain, but Hyde circles back to these concerns when he takes up the topic of liberty and what it meant to men like Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and Noah Webster. Again, Hyde reflects on the freedoms afforded in an ancient England of commons and manorial estates. Here a model of liberated action could be found in the "fee simple," or "allodial," holdings, of those families fortunate enough to hold their estate without having to pay the vassal's duty to the lord, a model that English colonists readily translated to North America, where there were no lords to pay, or where the lords were far removed, an ocean away from the settlers. But if the fee simple estate promised independence, it did not end an expectation of service. Rather, for Puritan thinkers, allodial estates relocated duty to the "conscience of the autonomous citizen." Freedom becomes a social and moral condition, not a mere releasing of a person from bondage. Indeed, eighteenth-century writers equated individual liberty with licentiousness. It was "the freedom of beasts rather than that of human beings. Human liberty, on the other hand carried with it an obligation to serve the public sphere."
It is in this public condition, the free person's necessary engagement with public life, that Hyde locates a deeper source of intellectual and creative liberation. The first step lies in personal effacement. Inventors, writers, and scientists stand to gain by disidentifying with their ideas, restricting their own claims on them, and allowing them the liberty to circulate. As Franklin wrote in the midst of the Revolution, "I have never entered into any Controversy in defence of my philosophical Opinions; I leave them to take their Chance in the World." By stepping back from his or her creation, the public-minded citizen draws others into the debate. What might have been limited, private opinion instead becomes a public proposition about the world, a topic of shared conversation.
The second step toward freedom lies in joining others. Here Hyde jumps ahead to the twentieth century and engages the revolutionaries of the 1960s. As a teenager, for example, Bob Dylan immersed himself in the songs and lyrics of others, spending weeks listening repeatedly to records of Robert Johnson, copying his words on scraps of paper, listening to Woody Guthrie albums as if in a trance, playing Bob Nolan's "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" in his head constantly. Losing himself in the work of someone like Woody Guthrie, Dylan realized that he was "feeling more like myself than ever before." In a similar vein, the Reverend Martin Luther King assembled the "I Have a Dream Speech" from a host of thinkers: Gandhi's ideas of soul force, James Baldwin's and Malcolm X's metaphors of promissory notes turning to bad checks, Archibald Carey's refrain "Let freedom ring," which Carey used in his 1952 address to the Republican National Convention. Not only did the power of the public sphere shine in the lyrics of Dylan and the speeches of King; that sphere itself became transformed through these men. In Hyde's telling, the generative force of people such as Dylan and King grew from the way they were freed to travel in an ungated American cultural commons and the way they exercised their freedom in a form of public service, as dutiful members of a collective. Woody Guthrie's work, itself borrowed and remade from countless earlier sources, is more powerful today than it was in 1960 because Bob Dylan also borrowed from it and shared it, making it something new yet again.
This conjuncture of service, freedom, knowledge, and the public sphere is what makes the lesson of eighteenth-century American revolutionaries matter for twenty-first-century Andean rebels. Assembled at the barricades in 2006, highland Kichwa people were not just fighting free trade laws. The activists, leaders, pamphleteers, and bomb makers were seeking to open a new Indian future in the contemporary world. If part of the struggle was political, aiming for increasing autonomy, another part of it was cultural, aiming to enhance their creative power. One of the most pernicious marks of colonization is the consignment of Andean knowledge to the realm of the local, the traditional, and ultimately the past. Indeed, domination entails the persistent interference with the knowledge-making of the colonized. The Stamp Act that forced residents of the North American colonies to pay more for a college degree than those in Britain is but one small example of the way in which power inheres in barring subjects from interaction and intellectual engagement, in forcing upon them a parochial isolation.
Andean leaders are well aware of this. In the course of the modern indigenous movement, they have established a university, created a scholarly journal, and built Websites. They are pushing for an Indian public sphere, for the growth and application of native knowledge. In Common As Air, Hyde spells out both the requisites and rewards entailed in making a durable cultural commons a reality.

MP:

But lest we underestimate what Hyde and the Andean protestors are up against, consider a still more recent set of events. On August 15, 2011, Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12,500,000,000, at a price that was 63 percent higher per share than the going rate on the stock market. Why? Not because Google wants to become a manufacturer of cell phones. It's all about the patents.
Google's major corporate competitors in the business of capturing and shaping the world's time and attention, Apple and Microsoft, recently acquired thousands of patents for the technological devices and know-how most useful in this cunning art. Not to be left standing out in the dwindling technological open fields, Google jumped into the enclosure game with its pricey purchase, buying Motorola's 17,000 patents in order to rake in and fence off as much of the knowledge domain as possible. If Andean leaders in their new universities are going to put something of value on their Websites, Google is going to know about it, and figure out some way to extract advertising money from the process of directing anyone's attention toward it.
When early American leaders, in imitation of English precedents, wrote patent and copyright powers into the United States Constitution, they presumably did not envision the possibility of a "person" who might acquire 17,000 patents in a single stroke with a mountain of money, a "person" whose lifespan might be perpetual, or a "person" with no real social relationships or public responsibilities. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution speaks of "Authors and Inventors," not corporations, as the potential beneficiaries when it grants Congress the express power to pass laws that will secure "for limited Times … the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." But the Constitution nowhere recognizes or makes any specific provisions for the existence of corporations, which are the creations of legislatures in the individual states.
In an ordinary human life span of three score years and ten, a citizen of the republic (a John Adams or a Benjamin Franklin) might be expected to have an intrinsic sense of when the moment arrives for step one—individual accumulation—to cease, or at least slow down, and step two—public service—to commence or accelerate, in the performance of Hyde's "Republican Two-Step." But if a corporate "person" can live forever, with no responsibilities to the public and no social liabilities, and can find no limit to its accumulative capacities and desires, then why should it ever feel the need to move from step one to step two?
By toggling back and forth between the eighteenth century and nowadays, Lewis Hyde's Common as Air skips across the era in which corporate personhood took on its modern form, and thus underplays an essential element of this larger story. To fill in this gap, let me turn to an older work, Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin's classic study, Commonwealth (1947), written in a different era but for purposes strikingly similar to those of Lewis Hyde.
The Handlins, like Hyde, wanted to know how we got here. Their project was sponsored by the Committee on Research in Economic History, a New Deal-era endeavor to explore the historical relationship between government and economy. As the Handlins described it in the preface to their revised edition, "the guiding question when the research began was an assessment of the extent to which laissez faire was important in the American economy before 1860." At the time they began their project, it was widely assumed that prior to the New Deal, government had played little part in the American economy.
What the Handlins found was strikingly different. By studying the role of the state in economic affairs in Massachusetts, they came to the initial conclusion that "laissez faire" was not even a relevant term in the commonwealth's early history. The directing hand of the General Court was so prevalent, and so unquestioned, in countless aspects of economic life as to make "discussion of the development of economic policy in terms of laissez faire hardly meaningful… The hundreds of laws regulating the flow of water to mills, setting the time for the taking of alewives or providing for the inspection of potash were a challenge. What was their meaning? Why did men enact them? What function did they serve?" To answer these questions, the Handlins investigated the history of corporations, the economic institution of the early republic most closely associated with public policy.
This is precisely the point where the Handlins' subject coincides with Lewis Hyde's. For, like patent and copyright law, the corporation in the early republic was initially designed to perform an intricate dance, a variation of the Republican Two-Step. If patents and copyrights were meant to benefit individuals immediately and the public in the long run, the case with corporations would be roughly the opposite. The public would immediately benefit from the legislature's creation of corporations, because corporations would take on useful tasks that lay beyond the means of any individual to perform, and which the state lacked the resources to manage on its own.
To offset the risks of such large ventures, the commonwealth could grant special privileges to corporations, such as unlimited duration, monopoly privileges, and the right to sell shares with limited liability to investors. The net result would be a public good—a reliable bridge across the Charles River, for instance—at minimal cost to the citizens at large. Eventually, the corporate undertakers and their investors might profit from the venture, but only if it actually provided the intended public good.

RCM:

Of course, to this day in the United States, do-gooders of all stripes form corporations, albeit non-profit ones, to carry their cause forward. The corporation in the U.S. in fact seems to take on a bewildering number of forms, from a small-town youth soccer program to an international software company. Yet for all the differences, each seems to share a fundamental quality: that of being a private initiative that stands apart from and perhaps in opposition to the state. Was a close alliance between the state and corporation in pursuit of the public good a historical anomaly, a particular innovation of the colonists?

MP:

Well, the corporation as a tool to advance the state's interests had a long history before American colonization. But the likelihood that the chartered corporation would be the form through which the commonwealth of Massachusetts expressed its economic will was perhaps enhanced by the fact that Massachusetts was created as a chartered corporation by King Charles I in 1629. And the widely varied functions and purposes for corporations (though perhaps not youth soccer clubs) predated the colonization projects as well. The pre-modern state created corporations to promote a wide variety of public interests; international trading companies (the East India Company being perhaps the most famous), educational institutions (Harvard College was granted a corporate charter by Massachusetts in 1650), and civic corporations, designed to conduct the complex tasks of ruling urban spaces like the City of London, or, on a far smaller scale, the individual townships that made up the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
There was essentially no limit on the functions that a corporation could be created to perform—it could trade for spices, teach algebra, govern a colony, send missionaries to distant lands, or promote musical knowledge—so long as the state saw a public good that justified the creation of this privileged entity. Nor was there a uniform set of privileges that accompanied corporate status. The East India Company's charter allowed it to raise its own army and navy to protect its interests. Not so for Harvard College. Ideally, the corporation would be granted powers and privileges appropriate for the public good it was meant to serve. At the time of Massachusetts' independence, the corporation's history offered many variants and many purposes, of which the "business" corporation was but one version.
By fighting an expensive war for independence, the individual states and the United States as a collective were left with a crushing burden of debt. The impoverished states had little spare fiscal power to promote economic development directly, through taxation and public spending. Therefore, the chartered corporation seemed like an ideal solution, a way to develop transportation infrastructure (turnpikes, bridges, canals) or to encourage manufacturing without spending non-existent state funds. If the public benefitted from a corporation's activities, then granting the corporation certain privileges, such as a regulated monopoly on bridge tolls, seemed a small price to pay.
But the story the Handlins tell in Commonwealth is, like Hyde's story in Common as Air, a tale of unintended consequences. The Handlins explain how the institution of the chartered corporation in Massachusetts was transformed between 1774 and 1860, under the pressure of the egalitarian forces of a democratic republic, and in the context of underlying conflict between commercial interests and the concept of the public good. The story is a complicated one, and Commonwealth often makes for difficult reading—it lacks the luminous clarity that Hyde, the poet, offers in Common as Air. But there are two key issues around which the Handlins' story turns, and both of them are directly relevant to Hyde's story as well.
First, limited liability. For many of the purposes that corporate entities were created to fulfill, individual members of corporations found themselves performing tasks that they would not have undertaken as private individuals. For example, when the Massachusetts towns conducted their business, the individual town officers, chosen by their fellow citizens, were not personally liable for damages. If a bridge that John Adams was charged to build within Braintree collapsed and a farmer lost a wagonload of hay, Adams would not pay for the loss. If there were damages to be paid, the town as a whole shouldered the blame. Without such protection, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to convince private individuals to take up the burden of serving the corporate body politic. For obvious reasons, this privilege also spilled over to the participants in business corporations chartered to perform a public good. If the same farmer's horse went lame crossing a bridge built between two towns by a chartered corporation, then the corporation as a whole, not the individual directors, investors, or employees, shared the blame—individual liability for acts of the corporate body was limited in the corporate charter.
The question grew more complex when considering the extent of the financial liability of the members to the corporation. For the civic corporation of the town, there was ultimately no limit on the town's ability to assess its citizens to pay the town's debts. If a town, that is, a citizens' corporate collective, decided to build bridges, and if the ultimate cost of the bridges turned out to be twice what the town expected, the citizens could be assessed as much as necessary to pay the extra costs—there was nowhere else to turn, after all. Ideally, this collective financial liability of the body as a whole provided a check on what the townspeople as a corporate entity would take on (and, in its nightmare worst-case-scenario, this speaks to the situation that countries like Iceland, and the various members of the European Union, have been facing in the past few years).
But what about a business corporation? If a bridge cost twice as much to build as expected, who was liable for the corporation's debts? Could a bridge corporation assess (or tax) its members or investors to an unlimited degree in order to pay off its debts, the way that towns could? The Handlins describe a series of decisions from the early nineteenth century in which the Massachusetts courts said, essentially, no. Although investors were, like townspeople, members of a corporate body, their liability for its obligations was limited. Why? Because without this added privilege of limited liability, it would prove impossible for corporations to gain investors and share the risks, to raise the funds necessary to carry out their tasks. In that case, the public purposes sought by the state in chartering the corporation would go unfulfilled.

RCM:

It is striking that a public purpose still guided rule-making at this point for business corporations. As you mentioned earlier, the modern U.S. business corporation provokes so much anxiety in a place like Ecuador because it seems to have enormous privileges but no responsibilities save returning profits to investors. How were corporations able to so simplify their objectives and divest themselves of civic duties?

MP:

The limited liability decisions proved to be the beginning of a separation between the civic corporation and the business corporation. The purpose of this distinction still appeared to be the promotion of the public good, to facilitate the commonwealth's desire that business corporations would have the tools they needed to take on large and useful projects. But with this subtle change, the law of the commonwealth elevated the individual financial interests of investors in the business corporation, giving them an importance comparable to the public good in a way that was very different from the civic corporation.
The second critical change in the nature of corporations also seemed to stem from the desire to promote the public good. This was the rise of general incorporation laws, a process in which the monopoly privileges of chartered business corporations were gradually undermined. In the old monarchical regime, privilege was not a problem. That world was hierarchical, and all persons were decidedly not equal before the law. The crown had the power to reward those who performed notable public services for the kingdom with special honors and privileges. But in the newly formed American republics, privilege was a problem, and the privileged status of the traditional chartered corporation, a child of the old order, would inevitably be challenged in the new. Here, the famous Charles River Bridge case, ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1837, offers the clearest example of this transformation.

Fig. 3 "View of the Bridge over the Charles River," engraving attributed to Samuel Hill by Stauffer, No. 1398, 9.4 x 17.1 cm. Engraved for the Massachusetts Magazine, September 1789, vol. 1, No. IX (Boston, 1789). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. For many decades in the colonial period, the Massachusetts General Court had authorized a ferry to carry passengers back and forth across the narrow stretch of the Charles River separating Boston from Charlestown. The proceeds from this ferry had gone to Harvard College as part of the state's support for that chartered corporate body's promotion of learning and knowledge. But in the postwar recovery of the 1780s, as the two neighboring cities rebuilt from the war's destruction, it was clear that a ferry could no longer handle the growing volume of traffic. The General Court chartered the Charles River Bridge Company (CRB) in 1785, offering its directors and investors a special set of privileges in return for building this useful public amenity. On condition that it continue payments to Harvard College for the lost ferry revenue, the corporation was entitled to keep all the profits from the bridge tolls for a period of forty years, after which ownership of the bridge would be turned over to the Commonwealth as public property, and bridge travel would be free and open to all. In fact, these provisions made the CRB charter granted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts extraordinarily similar to the terms of early patent law created by the U.S. Congress—a temporary monopoly on the proceeds of the "invention," followed eventually by permanent public benefit, Hyde's Republican Two-Step in a nutshell (fig. 3).
Several years later, the General Court awarded a charter to a similar bridge company, farther up the river, connecting Boston to Cambridge. When the CRB proprietors complained that this new bridge would cut into their accustomed revenues, the state responded by extending the CRB's entitlement to the profits, from 40 years to 70 years, well beyond the likely lifespan of the original proprietors. In the meantime, the CRB proved to be a wild success. A share of stock in the bridge, valued at $333 when issued in 1785, had risen to over $2000 by the 1820s. In the company's growing desire to protect its investors' profits (and to defer the public its free travel), we see the practical consequences of the limited liability cases and their elevation of investor interests at the expense of the public good, an exact parallel to the way Congress in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has granted repeated extensions of the length of copyright and patent benefits to their owners.
It was precisely in response to this affront to the good of the commonwealth that the privileges of the CRB were challenged. In 1823, a competing group of investors petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to allow them to build a bridge immediately adjacent to the Charles River Bridge. Eventually, the legislature granted this group, the Warren Bridge Company, a charter which mandated that they turn their bridge over to the public within six years, as soon as the tolls, which were to be fixed at the same rate as the Charles River Bridge tolls, had paid for the costs of construction, plus five percent interest to the investors, (compared with the 600% return that the CRB had already yielded to its shareholders over forty years). A brand new and soon to be free bridge, immediately adjacent to the older toll bridge, would (and eventually did) undercut the CRB and its storied profits, so the CRB sued the state for breach of contract. Although its charter did not say as much, the CRB claimed that monopoly control over the route from Boston to Charlestown was an implicit right in their charter, and that to promote the building of an adjacent bridge therefore violated the privileges to which the CRB investors were still entitled for decades to come.
After a long and complex legal fight, the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided the case against the CRB. In writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney overruled the sanctity of property and contract arguments, the so-called "vested property rights," of the CRB, and instead based the decision on yet another definition of the public good. Not only did the CRB's monopolistic and, for all practical purposes, perpetual control over a popular travel route clearly undercut a vital public interest, preventing potentially better, safer, or faster means of travel from developing, but the very fact of privileging one group, the CRB proprietors, at the expense of all other entrepreneurial citizens who might perform the task equally well, meant that the state was effectively creating a commercial aristocracy, a corporate person possessing rights and privileges denied to all others. The Charles River Bridge case thus paved the way for general incorporation laws, where the corporate form—including the limited liability privileges established in earlier decisions—became available to any business group that wanted to use it.
With Taney's decision and the subsequent rise of general incorporations laws, the original logic behind the monarchical state's creation of corporate personhood melted away in the face of demands for equal treatment of all "persons" in republican society. What remained from the corporation's original purpose was a set of privileges, whose purpose now was nothing more than to advance and protect the business interests of entrepreneurs and their investors. By the end of the Handlins' story in 1860, the second step of the Republican Two-Step, the corporation's responsibility to serve a well-defined public interest, has vanished completely.
So now we see more of the story of how we got where we are today. Two intertwined legal institutions, corporations and intellectual property rights, both founded in a monarchical world of privilege, both adopted as temporary and limited privileges to promote the general public good, have each evolved in ways that have diminished the duty to the public, while retaining and expanding on the privileges. We might see these changes as simply the result of greed, the desire among individuals or corporations to see their property and privileges as nothing but commodities, forgetting the role of the state in their initial creation. But at the same time, we can see the changes as natural outcomes in a democratic and egalitarian society, especially with regard to corporations, where the idea of granting privileges to some at the permanent expense of others, as in the Charles River Bridge case, seems anathema to the freedom and opportunity we wish to foster.

RCM AND MP:

Where does this leave the Andean demonstrators in the face of U.S.-Ecuador trade agreements? Where does it leave us all, in the face of Google and its 17,000 new patents? Might an answer lie in carrying forward the logic of Common as Air and rethinking the Republican Two-Step?
For all those who no longer believe in the ability of the state, the citizens' collective, to identify a public good beyond the interests of any given person, i.e. for "libertarians" (in U.S. terminology) or "liberals" (as the rest of the world uses the term) who see nothing but the market's invisible hand as the only justifiable good, we ask this: if you can see no coherent way for the state to identify and enforce Step Two—service to the public - then why should the state continue to grant Step One—special privileges to "persons" of any kind? The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote science and useful arts through patent and copyright protection, but Congress does not have to exercise that power, which is a vestige of a monarchical world, and can change the terms of those protections. State law creates the privileges that corporations often use in ways that cause demonstrable harm, but state laws can change these institutions as well. However, we suspect that those who clamor for "free markets" do not actually have the courage of their convictions necessary to give up the privileges. Having lost sight of the civic responsibilities of the Republican Two-Step, they have become equally blind to the service that the state now offers them in the extension of copyrights and corporate liability protection. At times it takes the black smoke of a street protest to remind us just how hardened and lopsided government-backed privileges have become in the United States.
For all those who continue to believe in the commonwealth ideal, that our government can identify measures of public well-being beyond the private interests of individuals (the camp in which we place ourselves), we urge that an active case be made to promote a better understanding of this history in the effort to restore Step Two of the Republican Two-Step. Yes, the privileges of corporations, copyright, and patent may be vestiges of an abandoned monarchical world. But they are also deeply entrenched in our world, probably impossible to eradicate entirely. Our only alternative is to fight for what makes the privileges of corporation and copyright worth preserving. We can once again extend the state's power, our collective power as citizens, to insist that private property and public responsibility be inextricably linked, and that privilege always be made to benefit the public, and we can create ways to equalize the power of those, like Andean Indians, overwhelmed by the limitless privileges of others. Otherwise, we as citizens of the republic, who created these privileges through our constitutions and laws for the sake of the public good, will stand impotent in the face of the monsters these creations have become.
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In the Belly of the Murdoch Beast I always feel a little better when I go home to Los Angeles. My hometown takes a lot of flak about its Tinseltown image and how "fake" the people are supposed to be. But I can assure you that the working folks of my hometown are as real as the 99-percenters anywhere else in the country. Last week, more than a hundred of my fellow "real" Angelenos took their concerns about the corporate media and their power to corrupt our democracy right into the lap of one of their most notorious figures: News Corp. potentate Rupert Murdoch.
Dave Saldana, SavetheNews.org
News Corp. Shareholders Vote Heavily Against Rupert Murdoch's Sons In a challenge to Rupert Murdoch's family-succession plans, more than one-third of the votes cast by News Corp. shareholders opposed returning the media mogul's two sons, James and Lachlan, to the board.
Dawn C. Chmielewski and Meg James, Los Angeles Times
Rupert Murdoch Maintains Control of News Corp. Despite criticism, Rupert Murdoch isn't adapting his management style. At 80 years old, he continues to control his media empire with a tight grip. After all, his company, News Corp., although publicly traded, features a dual class-share structure that allows Murdoch to effectively control director elections and other matters that are subject to shareholder vote, even though he does not own a majority of the company's outstanding shares.
Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Forbes
AT&T's T-Mobile Purchase Unlikely to Pass, CWA Chief Tells Focus Deutsche Telekom AG's $39 billion sale of T-Mobile USA to AT&T is unlikely to receive U.S. court approval at a February hearing, Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen told Focus. While U.S. federal courts have in the past overruled the Justice Department, the chances it will happen this time are about 20 percent, Cohen said, according to the German magazine.
Sheenagh Matthews, Bloomberg News
Judge Says No to Sprint Request for AT&T Documents Sprint Nextel lost a bid to get access to masses of AT&T documents that it had hoped to use in its lawsuit aimed at stopping AT&T's $39 billion acquisition of discount rival T-Mobile.
Diane Bartz, Reuters
Sprint Must Wear Its 'Customer Hat' to Stay in AT&T Case Sprint's lawsuit to stop the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile went before a federal judge. One antitrust expert explains why Sprint may be on a legal limb and what it must do to avoid having the case tossed out of court.
Jeff Roberts, paidContent
Rural Phone Carriers Fear FCC Plan Will Drive Up Local Rates A coalition of rural telecom carriers sounded the alarm on proposed federal regulatory reforms aimed at expanding broadband Internet service.
Dave Dreeszen, Sioux City Journal
FCC to Vote on Broadband Funding An FCC vote on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation is set for Oct. 27 and rural telecom providers are hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.
Gabe Licht, Daily Reporter
Spectrum Feud Lands Before Supercommittee The grudge match between TV broadcasters and the wireless sector is entering its most intense round yet, forcing supercommittee members to choose sides now that the deficit-reduction panel is eyeing auctions of the nation's airwaves as a surefire way to raise billions.
Kim Hart, Politico
The 'Media Circus' of Occupy Wall Street Coverage Big news: The establishment media are finally picking up on the Occupy Wall Street story. In fact, Occupy Wall Street coverage increased to nine percent of the overall news hole from Oct. 10–16 -- up from two percent two weeks prior. Increased airtime and column inches, however, don't necessarily equal quality reporting.
Megan Tady, SavetheNews.org
The Case of the Disappearing Local TV Journalist While meeting with journalism students in Boulder, Colo., this month, Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron played a collage of videos wherein the same newscasters delivered the same local news with only one significant difference -- the station names at the bottom of the screen. Aaron said this is an example of "covert consolidation" -- a trend quietly sweeping newsrooms in small towns and major cities that has cost journalists' jobs, degraded their working conditions and gutted the quality and quantity of local news available to the public.
Kari Lydersen, In These Times
How People Use Tablets and What it Means for the Future of News Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad, 11 percent of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology.
Pew Research Center
NPR's Michele Norris Stepping Away from Hosting Duties Michele Norris, an All Things Considered co-host since December 2002, is stepping away from that post until after the 2012 presidential campaign because her husband has taken a senior position with President Obama's re-election effort.
Mark Memmott, NPR
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Defend Occupy Wall Street!
Take action!
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Dear Figrd Reader,
Despite clear evidence of fraud, not a single banker has gone to jail for crimes that led to the financial meltdown.1 But over 1,000 protesters have been arrested in the inspiring Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City.
Thousands marched in New York City and across the country this week in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. But we must ensure that now the October 5 marches are over, the police do not resume their campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at breaking up the Wall Street protests just as they begin to gain traction and build momentum.
The very existence of Occupy Wall Street could be endangered by strongarm NYPD tactics aimed at intimidating protesters and ending their three-week stand against the big Wall Street banks.
At 8pm Wednesday night, the nightsticks came out once again and a high-ranking police "white shirt" was caught on video using his baton to beat protesters. A local television news crew that was caught up in the violence was both beaten and pepper sprayed. And a police officer was caught on video saying he hoped his nightstick would get a "workout."2
Many of the rank and file "blue shirts" of the NYPD have shown great poise, respect, and even moments of solidarity with the protesters. After all, they are members of the 99 percent of Americans who have been victimized by Wall Street.
However, NYPD leadership has used brutal techniques to break up the protests. In an incident last week, a police officer attacked nonviolent protesters with pepper spray. There are multiple videos of the attack on four women protesters who did nothing to provoke the officer's action. The New York Times reported that the officer in question "looked as if he were spraying cockroaches."3
The officer involved in that attack was not a rank and file cop. He was a deputy inspector with supervisory responsibilities for the police action. What's more, he has a history of violating the civil rights of protesters and is currently facing legal action for accusations of wrongful arrest and civil rights violations at the 2004 Republican National Convention demonstrations.4
There have been other incidents of police abuse. But documented attacks on protesters by high-ranking NYPD officers demonstrate that these incidents aren't simply the collateral damage of a tense and confusing situation. The police are roughing up protesters in an attempt to break up the Occupy Wall Street protest.
We have heard from our friends on the ground that the most important thing people can do who cannot come down and support the protests in person is to ensure that the Mayor and the Police Commissioner do not drive them out of the park which is serving as the base for Occupy Wall Street protests.
It's important that the Mayor and Police Commissioner know that the eyes of people across the country are on them, and that we consider it an attack on democracy and not just an individual protester when the NYPD systematically uses intimidation and violence with the intent of suppressing the ongoing protests.
Becky Bond, Political Director
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ATTN: ASSIGNMENT DESK
                 PHOTO DESK

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                            Contact: Pat Alviso  562-833-8035
October 8, 2011                                                          Col Ann Wright (Ret.) 808-741-1141
                                                                                                  
Email: jeff.mfso@earthlink.net

Military personnel, their families and veterans to ask President Obama, “Where’s Our Beer Summit?” Sunday, October 9th, noon

WHAT:  Where’s our beer summit?  President Obama met with Sgt James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in August 2009. Military families and veterans who oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan want to have their “beer summit” and talk with Obama. Do we not count? After ten years of war in Afghanistan and eight years of war in Iraq, veterans, military families and military personnel want to know why US forces are still in both countries and have a beer to discuss this with President Obama. Currently the American public is overwhelmingly in favor of troops leaving both countries, especially in light of our economic crisis where funds for veterans’ care are needed because of the continuing casualties and families are devastated by long-term care for their wounded. “We want some answers, and President Obama is the commander-in-chief; he owes answers to those who sacrifice much everyday and have sacrificed in the past for this country. Col Ann Wright (Ret.) says, “It’s high time that President Obama met with military families, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and veterans from other wars who don’t agree with his polices on war and their effects on veterans and families.”

WHO: Military Personnel, Military Families Speak Out, and Veterans

WHEN: Sunday, Oct 9, 2011; March starts at 11:30 AM, arrive White House at 12:00 noon

WHERE: Veterans and Military families will march from Freedom Plaza to Lafayette Park, and then to the front of the White House.
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10/24/11

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 11:41 PM PDT
By Sell on News, a macro equities analyst. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
It is a measure of how un-self critical modern economics has been, that the Marxists are starting to appear to be making the most sense of the current crises. The supine acceptance that “the market is always right” — a truism only to traders and vested interests — means that there has been precious little understanding developed about how markets can go wrong. Or what is wrong, as well as right, with markets and the modern practices of capitalism. An article in the London Review of Books came to my attention recently by Benjamin Kunkel that shows how Marxist analysis is actually looking quite pertinent to the current mess.
In particular, it highlights the imbalance between capital and labour, a perennial obsession of the Marxists, of course:
The full cash value of today’s product can therefore be realised only with the assistance of money advanced against commodity values yet to be produced. ‘The surplus value created at one point requires the creation of surplus value at another point,’ as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. How are these points, separated in space and time, to be linked? In a word, through the credit system, which involves ‘the creation of what Marx calls “fictitious capital” – money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity’. Money values backed by tomorrow’s as yet unproduced goods and services, to be exchanged against those already produced today: this is credit or bank money, an anticipation of future value without which the creation of present value stalls. Realisation (or the transformation of surplus value into its money equivalent, as profit) thus depends on the ‘fictitious’.
There has certainly been an excess of “fictitious” capital created over the last two decades, far more than Marx, or anyone else, could have anticipated. Money made out of the money made out of money. $600 trillion of derivatives. High frequency trading insanity with trades reduced to micro-seconds. As Adam Curtis observes in his excellent documentary “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, the heart of the insanity has been the belief that systems run by machines are inherently more stable than systems with humans at the centre. This has greatly skewed the system towards the egregious self interests of capital, as against labour. Curtis lays much of this greed at the feet of Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan.
Now before I get a knock on the door from grey suited men asking me “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” I should explain that I regard Marxism as wicked, directly responsible for some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. I have many other objections to it, which I will come to later. There is, however, a difference between Marxism and what Marx wrote. And there is a difference between Marx’s critique of capitalism, which has some prescience and relevance, and Marx’s political prescriptions and revolutionary impulses, which were riddled with contradictions and, in practice, wholly pernicious.
The value of applying what Marx wrote is an identification of an imbalance between capital and labour:
So, as The Limits to Capital implies without quite stating, the special allure and danger of an elaborate credit system lie in its relationship to class society. If more capital has been accumulated than can be realised as a profit through exchange, owing perhaps to ‘the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses’ that Marx at one point declared ‘the ultimate reason for all real crises’, this condition can be temporarily concealed, and its consequences postponed, by the confection of fictitious values in excess of any real values on the verge of production. In this way, growth and profitability in the financial system can substitute for the impaired growth and profitability of the class-ridden system of actual production. By adding over-financialisation, as it were, to his model of overaccumulation, Harvey means to show how an initial contradiction between production and realisation later ‘becomes, via the agency of the credit system, an outright antagonism’ between the financial system of fictitious values and its monetary base, founded on commodity values. This antagonism then ‘forms the rock on which accumulation ultimately founders’. In social terms, this will take the form of a contest between creditors and debtors over who is to suffer more devaluation.
This is basically what is wrong in the developed world. There needs to be a balance between wages and investment returns for the system to function well. Henry Ford paid his workers well not because he was a generous man, but because then they could buy Fords. Globalisation has, of course, undone this compact, and although it has led to some productivity improvements, it is also having the effect of gutting the middle classes in the developed world. In Europe it is seen in the shape of unemployment, in America, the same as well as in the shape of rising poverty and the evaporation of the middle class.
Now, one does not have to be a Marxist to arrive at these conclusions. But Marxism (as opposed to what Marx wrote) resulted in the demonisation of markets, a perfectly normal human activity that goes back 3,000 years, give or take a century. In response, capitalism (whatever that is exactly) felt the need to overstate the value of markets, producing the kind of market worship we now see. Each position is absurd. Marxism has largely collapsed from its own contradictions. Capitalism is on the way to doing the same because when market worship is applied to financial systems, it produces the kind of endless regresses we are now seeing.
Kunkel does point out that some more mainstream analysts have noticed the problem:
Paul Krugman, discussing Roubini’s book in the New York Review of Books, agreed with him that what Ben Bernanke called the ‘global savings glut’ lay at the heart of the crisis, behind the proximate follies of deregulation, mortgage-securitisation, excessive leverage and so on. Originating in the current account surpluses of net-exporting countries such as Germany, Japan and China, this great tide of money flooded markets in the US and Western Europe, and floated property and asset values unsustainably. Why was so much capital so badly misallocated? In the LRB of 22 April 2010, Joseph Stiglitz observed that the savings glut ‘could equally well be described as an “investment dearth”’, reflecting a scarcity of attractive investment opportunities. Stiglitz suggests that global warming mitigation or poverty reduction offers new ‘opportunities for investments with high social returns’.
The neo-Keynesians’ ‘savings glut’ can readily be seen as a case of what a more radical tradition calls overaccumulated capital. But it is the broader and more systematic Marxist perspective that ultimately and properly contains Keynesianism within it, and a crude Marxist catechism may be in order. Where does an excess of savings come from? From unpaid labour – for example, that of Chinese or German workers. And why would such funds inflate asset bubbles rather than create useful investment? Because capital pursues not ‘high social returns’, but high private returns. And why should these have proved difficult to achieve, except by financial shell-games? Keynesians complain of an insufficiency of aggregate demand, restraining investment. The Marxist will simply add that this bespeaks inadequate wages, in the index of a class struggle going the way of owners rather than workers.
One of Marx’s advantages is that his notion of labour value at least puts humans at the centre of a human system. Which is better than putting “Machines of Loving Grace” at the centre of the system, which is the habit in much neoclassical thinking. But of course investors are human as well. And removing markets, as was done in the Soviet and Chinese horrors, is to remove basic humanity.
One key is to re-establish the interests of labour, probably in some collective form. That is the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement. For some reason, greed for executives and investment bankers, is simply pursuit of the right “incentives”, whereas comparatively modest wage claims is a tyrannous lurch into socialism, to be resisted at all costs. It is hard not to see this as some kind of contemporary class war; certainly it is disgusting hypocrisy. And it is destroying the middle classes in developed economies, which will have dangerous political consequences.
What is becoming clear is that new limits have to be placed on capitalism and some aspects of markets:
The classical economists long ago foresaw that an economy defined by constant expansion would one day give way to what John Stuart Mill called the ‘stationary state’. The idea has gained a new currency in Marxist writing of recent years, and in its contemporary version tends to locate the limits to growth in the depletion of natural resources or in the exhaustion of productivity gains as the share of manufacturing in the world economy shrinks and that of services expands. Of course, peak oil or soil exhaustion might easily coincide with faltering productivity. Harvey doesn’t spell out why growth must have a stop, and the outlines of an ecologically stable and politically democratic future socialism remain as blurry in his later work as they do almost everywhere else. At the moment Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it. But the first achievement is at least due wider recognition, which with the next crisis, or subsequent spasm of the present one, it may begin to receive.
I do not agree with Kunkel that Marxism may come into its own. To me, it is just the flip side of the same appalling coin. Marxism has its roots in German idealism (Hegel) which I think we safely blame for fascism as well. Its horrors were no accident.
Both Marxism and capitalist theory are deeply materialistic; which inevitably rules out the human (matter cannot explain humanness, it is just matter). So no surprise that each propose some kind of tide of history argument as being inevitable (deregulation and “free” markets in the case of capitalism).
Both are quasi scientific, and so at once intellectually hollow and subject to the kind of scientific materialism that easily leads to letting machines rule over people. Both use unfalsifiable arguments; typically circular arguments in the case of capitalist economic theory, and dialectics in the case of Marxism that result in contradictions like the claim that there is only the bourgeois and proletariat (a claim that defeats itself as soon as anything changes, given that there are only two possibilities).
A nice matching set of intellectual barbarisms, in other words. Maybe in the current crisis conditions, we might start to get some intellectual grown ups emerging. At the very least, there needs to be close attention given to the balance of labour and capital, and limits must be set on fictitious capital. Another enemy is tiredness, intellectual exhaustion, as GK Chesterton observed:
Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted.
I was talking to a finance academic recently who said it was virtually impossible to get anything published academically that questioned the assumptions of the system; only mathematical analyses based on the the accepted assumptions ever see the light of day. A similar monochrome uniformity is evident in the economics mainstream. It is intellectual despotism, and it arises out of exhaustion.
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10/20/11

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This week, when asked about why no Wall Street executives have gone to jail for crashing our economy, President Obama said Wall Street behavior "wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was just immoral."
Wasn't illegal?!
It's well established that Wall Street banks resorted to forgeries and phony paperwork to kick families out of their homes. And J.P. Morgan admitted to illegally foreclosing on active duty servicemembers. But federal prosecutors are dropping the ball.
It's time for the 99% of us to speak out loudly -- and tell our political leaders: Wall Street bankers who broke the law must occupy jail. Let's make this message go viral over the weekend.
Click here to sign a "Bankers who broke the law must occupy jail" statement -- and then pass it on (including on Facebook).
If it grows big enough, we will inform the media about the progress of this statement on Monday -- so the growing outrage at bank illegality gets widespread news coverage.
If our voices grow louder and louder, it will encourage state Attorney Generals to keep pushing forward their early investigations, and push the Obama Justice Department to finally take criminal investigations of Wall Street seriously.
Sign the "Bankers who broke the law must occupy jail" statement today -- then pass it on.
As the simmering rage against Wall Street comes to a full boil all across America, it's simply unacceptable for politicians to keep giving excuses.
It's not controversial to say "Wall Street bankers broke the law." It's a fact. And we need political leaders to finally say it.
Jailing bankers who broke the law is essential for moving forward as a country -- sign our statement here, and then pass it on.
Let's see how much momentum we can get over the weekend.
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
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AFL-CIO update alert
 We need phone calls right now. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is ready to throw hundreds of thousands of workers under the bus by voting for three rotten trade agreements. The Korea deal alone will displace 159,000 American jobs in the first seven years.(1)

Can you call your representative and urge him or her to vote NO on the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade agreements? Hurry—the vote is today.

Call 1-800-718-1008 now. Urge your representative to stop all three unfair trade deals.

Our politicians know what’s right. But despite the outrage coming from working people across the political spectrum—and the AFL-CIO’s best efforts—it looks like these deals are going to pass and be signed into law by President Obama. Unless we put up unprecedented resistance today.

It’s critically important for your representative to hear from you—now. He or she needs to know that you oppose all three trade deals, and that displacing hundreds of thousands of American jobs to pad the pockets of corporations is not acceptable.

Act now. The vote is today. Call 1-800-718-1008 and tell Congress to stop these three unfair trade agreements.

Even if you’ve e-mailed, called or visited your member of Congress about these trade agreements before, now is the day to contact your representative again.

As AFL-CIO Legislative Director Bill Samuel recently said:
What workers actually have experienced from new trade agreements is completely unacceptable. They have caused a devastation of our manufacturing sector, more outsourcing of service-sector jobs and a growing trade deficit that leaves us more and more in debt to the rest of the world.
This devastation could have been avoided in the past—if previous Congresses and presidents had prioritized America’s workers over Wall Street profits. But sadly, it seems our current leaders have not learned that lesson. Instead, they’re repeating the same mistake—even as outrage against Wall Street continues to grow across the nation.

Call 1-800-718-1008 now. Urge your representative to vote NO on the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade agreements.

These trade deals don't benefit America's workers. And an increasing number of people understand that. Only 17 percent of Americans polled think so-called free trade agreements have benefited the United States. And even 61 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters think these agreements have hurt America.(2)

Politicians who support these agreements are claiming they will help with our jobs crisis—which is a talking point straight from Wall Street lobbyists—and it’s wrong. The Korea deal alone will cost 159,000 net American jobs.

America’s workers know the reality of these trade agreements better than corporate lobbyists and Wall Street financiers—and no matter what lawmakers do, they need to hear from us before they vote. Please call 1-800-718-1008 right now.
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On Friday, we went to Occupy Wall Street and thanked protestors for inspiring our national campaign against Bank of America -- now joined by over 60,000 Americans! (See video here.)
After taking billions in bailouts, Bank of America continued to represent the worst of Wall Street greed -- illegally foreclosing on people's homes. This month, the greed continued with a new $60-per-year fee for using debit cards on things like groceries.
Join 60,000 Americans and tell Congress to pass Rep. Brad Miller's bill making it easier to "move your money" away from bad banks.
Click here to see us thank Occupy Wall Street -- and then sign the petition holding Bank of America accountable!
The Huffington Post reported on our campaign:
Rep. Brad Miller, a Democrat from Bank of America's home state of North Carolina, attended a general assembly meeting of Occupy Raleigh, the local offshoot of the national protest movement against Wall Street greed and abuse.
When he returned to Washington, he announced the introduction of a bill that aims to make it easier for millions of consumers to take part in their own personal marches -- away from big banks. 
...the nearly 800,000-member advocacy group Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) launched a national campaign to win support for Miller's legislation, calling on people to sign a petition and contact their member of Congress. 
Let's get from 60,000 to 100,000 Americans strong on this campaign! Click here to sign the "move your money" petition holding Bank of America accountable!
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
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Please sign this petition to major news outlets in Ohio demanding that they pull this unacceptable ad from the air immediately.
As Marlene Quinn wrote in a message to We Are Ohio activists:
“I think it’s dishonest and downright deceitful that they would use footage of me to try to play tricks and fool voters. It’s insulting to the brave firefighters that saved the lives of my grandson and my great-granddaughter Zoey.
“I’m outraged. They did not ask my permission. I feel violated. I want to stop Senate Bill 5. Everyone should vote No on Issue 2.”
“Dishonest and downright deceitful”—we can all agree with Marlene that this sad, desperate attempt to trick voters and misuse Marlene’s words cannot be allowed to continue.

See Marlene’s true feelings here as she explains why she is voting NO on Issue 2. We cannot stand by and allow this injustice to stand. Let’s sign this petition to stand up for Marlene and get these ads removed from the air, and stand firm against Issue 2 at the ballot box on Tuesday, Nov. 8.
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Tonight I went to Occupy Wall Street to deliver the signatures of more than 240,000 people—including you—who signed our emergency petition asking Mayor Bloomberg not to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park tomorrow.
We held a huge press conference at the park with dozens of news outlets, and then hundreds people marched up Broadway to City Hall to deliver the petition.
When they found out Mayor Bloomberg was busy dining with the 1% a few blocks away at the ultra-luxurious Cipriani, the march continued to the doors of the restaurant.
It was a strong show of nationwide solidarity, numerous local elected officials joined our march to oppose Bloomberg's decision, and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell even featured the petition tonight. As of right now, however, Bloomberg's order to clear Zuccotti Park still stands and we won't know until tomorrow morning what he's going to do.
But regardless of Mayor Bloomberg's actions, the most important thing any of us can do is to make sure this movement keeps growing by supporting a local Occupy event in our town.
Here's a great map listing of tons of Occupy events all over the country that our friends at DailyKos put together:  
As we wait to see what happens in New York tomorrow, I hope you'll find the event closest to you and go there to show your solidarity.
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Map created with BatchGeo
Below, you will find an extensive list of links to local Occupy Wall Street solidarity groups in the United States and Canada. Please, find a group near you and sign up. Unless otherwise noted, all of these links take you to Facebook pages, so you must be logged into Facebook in order to join them.
If your town is not listed, or if you would rather not use Facebook, you can also connect to local Occupy Wall Street events through Meetup.com.
If you wish to tell others about this page, just say "go to OccupyWallStreetEvents.com." That URL redirects to this page.
United States
Canada

Originally posted to Chris Bowers on Tue Oct 04, 2011 at 09:35 AM PDT.

Also republished by Daily Kos Labor, Occupy Wall Street, and Daily Kos.

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