Prometheus is the Titan god of ancient Greece characterized by forethought. He was credited with stealing fire from the most hoity-toity of the gods and then gifting it to humanity as a cornerstone for civilization. The United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision was published on April Fool’s Day. It rejected the chief cornerstone for our constitutionally grounded democratic republic in the Prometheus case, a case challenging a recent Federal Communications Commission decision ditching the ownership rules originally intended to elevate the public discourse.

By unanimously discounting the refiner’s fire of viewpoint diversity, the Court has once again brought attention to its lack of intellectual rigor; for it ignores the declaration of intent, the value proposition, the mission statement, and the cardinal precepts of The United States Constitution as they were so carefully delineated in the Preamble. That front matter is, arguably, the spirit of the law. The Court’s perception problem is really one of clear discernment by an increasingly honked-off public.

While Kavanaugh referred to Section 706(2)(A) of the Administrative Procedure Act, the APA, he was highly selective in the actual treatment of the way the court had arrived at its conclusion. The APA instructs courts reviewing regulation to invalidate any agency action found to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” The arbitrary-or- capricious test is used by judges when reviewing the factual basis for agency rule-making. Courts can overturn agency rules if they find the underlying rationale or factual assertions to be unreasonable.

In the Prometheus case, the hop-skippety-jump logic of the FCC, that was focused exclusively on gender and race diversity while ignoring the more general diversity of viewpoint factors, is clearly problematic. We are blessed with two eyes and two ears precisely because of the value of such diversity and the way it favors depth of perception. And, once we move beyond the excessively prominent head cases, there is value to considering the viewpoint of our fellow citizens as we move to form a more perfect union.

Kavanaugh wrote: “A court simply ensures that the agency has acted within a zone of reasonableness and, in particular, has reasonably considered the relevant issues and reasonably explained the decision.” The Supreme Court, throughout its history, has steadily contracted this “zone of reasonableness” in ways that run well afoul of constitutional imperatives with respect to our nation’s movement towards a more perfect union. As the framers worked meticulously to dovetail the “consent of the governed” phrasing contained within the Declaration of Independence, to that of a “We the People” initiative as reflected in the Preamble to the United States Constitution, the Justices have again “strained at gnats while swallowing camels.”

In other areas of law, consent must be properly informed. The incoherent reasoning of the Supreme Court in this case has shown its contempt for democracy and favored the prevarications of autocratic wannabes. We have seen the rise of a fictitious corporate personhood in tandem with the demise of the fairness doctrine. Our so-called independent judiciary has exhibited a high tolerance for dark money in its own nominations, confirmations, and accommodations. Is there any linkage between such covert bribery and the First Amendment hits our country has sustained through the more recent attacks attacks on net-neutrality and the ownership rules?

As we labor to make our democracy more authentic, to what extent will we tolerate deceptive practices by those occupying positions of honor and trust? When judges, masquerading as originalists and textualists, segment the constitution in such a way as to render it devoid of context, is that a deceptive practice? When legislators stand before cameras to convince the public that a bill contains something other than what it really spelled out, is that a deceptive practice? When executives selectively amplify, filter, and contextualize facts, is that a deceptive practice?

Judges operate in an arena where facts are facts and alternative facts are perjury. And yet, they seem to be entirely ok with political candidates that secure prestigious positions through perpetrating a fraud on the public. They appear to be equally sanguine when elected representatives actively deceive the electorate while holding office.

The Prometheus case is about preventing a concentration of media power within individual markets. The SCOTUS decision advances the kind of monopoly power that autocracies favor and democracies do not. As the justices work deliberately to distract us from noticing just how very far they have strayed from constitutional imperatives, their own systematized delusions, with respect to corporate personhood, proceed unabated.

What our country’s founders called “foreign potentates,” are often the ones in control of the so-called corporate persons. The addled Supremes have clearly demonstrated they lack the forethought long ago attributed to Prometheus. The court has, in effect and actual fact, converted what Marshall McLuhan once described as a “whirlpool of information” into a cesspool of disinformation.

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Net-neutrality is the most important First Amendment issue of our time. It is the principle that all information, moving throughout the internet, should be unfiltered, unimpeded, and equally accessible to consumers. Broadband providers are specifically prohibited from blocking or degrading content. This includes sites and services that compete against their own services.

California enacted a law in 2017, that reinforced this principle after Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Ajit Pai, a former in-house Verizon attorney, rolled back federal net-neutrality regulations. The Trump Justice Department immediately sued California to overturn its law. Broadband providers, through their trade groups, followed with a request for a preliminary injunction to stop the California law while the lawsuit wound its way through the courts.

On Feb. 23rd in 2021, Judge John Mendez of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California denied the motion for a preliminary injunction. The group of internet service providers had also brought suit in 2018 to stop the state law from going into effect. The judge’s ruling cleared the way for California to enforce its net neutrality law, thereby ensuring equal access to internet content.

The trade groups suing the state said in a joint statement that they were reviewing the court decision and deliberating next steps. But they argued against state laws that create a patchwork of regulations for broadband providers.” They said “a state-by-state approach to internet regulation will confuse consumers and deter innovation, just as the importance of broadband for all has never been more apparent.”

The enactment of the California law is a move that is sure to be followed by other states in the absence of unambiguous federal regulations that will insure the free flow of information without a dollar skew. Washington, Vermont and Oregon are among a handful of states that enacted similar laws after the federal rollback of the rules.

California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, said in a statement: “We applaud the court for affirming that California has the power to protect access to the internet.” He went on to say: “The ability of an internet service provider to block, slow down or speed up content based on a user’s ability to pay for service degrades the very idea of a competitive marketplace and the open transfer of information at the core of our increasingly digital and connected world.”

The Biden administration has made statements supporting the reinstatement of federal net neutrality rules. One month into the new administration, the Justice Department dropped its lawsuit against California’s law. The telecommunications industry’s request for a preliminary injunction was the last hurdle before that law could go into effect.

The California state senator who wrote the legislation, called the decision a victory. “The internet is at the heart of modern life. We all should be able to decide for ourselves where we go on the internet and how we access information. We cannot allow big corporations to make those decisions for us,” said Senator Scott Wiener.

Acting F.C.C. chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, had fiercely opposed the agency’s decision in 2017 to scrap net neutrality regulations. Although she has not announced plans to reinstate federal rules, she is focused upon a mandate by Congress to bridge the digital divide for broadband access to low-income Americans. Shortly after the February 23rd court decision, the Acting Chairwoman tweeted: “Tonight a court in California decided that the state law can go into effect. This is big news for #openinternet policy.”

It bears repeating that states and municipalities have additional options to combat the industry’s assault on the First Amendment. The incumbent telecommunications companies have long lines that the upstarts do not. That mature infrastructure gives AT&T, together with the baby Bells, an unfair advantage if the long lines, stretched along railroad rights-of-way, are not regulated in accordance with common carrier statutes, as they were when what became the Bell System first gained access.

The extent to which municipalities also make public utility easements available to Internet Service Providers is clearly relevant in the context of Net-Neutrality. The Internet was created and funded to serve the public interest. First for defense, then for research, and eventually opening it up for commerce along with personal use. The Internet is a critical part of our nation’s communications infrastructure. The short-sighted gamesmanship of self-serving ISPs and politicians can have an adverse consequence related to the three flows of commerce and our country’s overall competitiveness.

One would hope that the courts will ultimately recognize the critical importance of net-neutrality but, if they don’t, any filtering, blocking, or impeding of content should be swiftly met with the state and local governments giving a more service motivated class of competitors superior access to the public utility easements and rights-of way.

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As federal, state, and local governments take a new look at what companies should have access to public easements and utility rights of way, they really should consider all the angles. Especially since common carrier, public utility, or natural monopoly status may actually be in flux. One factor to consider might be the array of cases where a part of our essential communications infrastructure, specifically Internet Service Providers (ISPs), have sued municipalities that wanted to deliver their own Internet services. Two of the biggest ISPs, the ones that orchestrated an attack on net-neutrality, and thereby the First Amendment, should re-commit to serving the public interest as common carriers.

They should obtain this re-classification in an above board manner. Not by means of the usual political sophistries, that only serve to make our “elected representatives” even less representative. In the meantime, they should not enjoy a presumption of unfettered access to public utility easements or rights of way without the common carrier classification.

American enterprises have historically benefitted from the commons. And those private enterprises, enjoying superior access rights to spaces secured through eminent domain, have obligations to insure they are serving the public interest. The bad actors among them would convert and monopolize the commons, intentionally ignoring the ways their gamesmanship works to the detriment of everyone else.

It may be through taking the concept of “natural monopoly” to illogical extremes. It may be through fouling the air and the water, offloading the cost of any real consequences to future generations. Or, it may be through the privatization of things originally built by the taxpayers or through their forbearance. The one thing that certain malign actors, within business, have in common is the extent to which they privatize gains while socializing expenses and losses. Consider these examples:

• The taxpayer invests tremendous amounts of money to insure vital research is conducted in the public interest. Then we watch helplessly as essential medicines, that have been in the public domain for decades, are deliberately made scarce so that certain manufacturers are unjustly enriched by gouging people who are in desperate need.

• The taxpayer funded the development of software that would allow them to file their taxes directly with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Then, companies that reverse engineer the software and want to be paid for providing those same services, covertly bribe politicians to prevent the funding public from using the web interface they already bought.

• The taxpayer funded the systems used by the National Weather Service (NWS) to develop forecasts and convey that information to the public. Then, companies that effectively duplicate the service work to prevent the NWS from disclosing it directly to the public. Consider how you might be affected if the one minute advanced tornado warning is free while the five minute one is only available to paying customers.

• A city makes a wide range of special accommodations available, including favorable tax treatment, so that a baseball franchise can build a stadium. Then, when the players go on strike, the same city is denied any role in the negotiations even though the value of their investment is diminished and the city is impacted financially by the work stoppage.

• A charitable hospital system is built, over the course of a century, while avoiding taxes on the income, the supplies, the land, and for use of the locality’s infrastructure. Then, when the institution is privatized, just how does the taxpayer get compensated for their forbearance, for the extra taxes we all paid because the hospital was built-out without paying any?

Of particular interest in the Net-Neutrality context is the extent to which municipalities make public utility easements available to Internet Service Providers. The Internet was created and funded to serve the public interest. First for defense, then for research, and eventually opening it up for commerce along with personal use. Now, as the individual ISPs become increasingly self-serving, they sue these same municipalities for any attempt to provide their Internet services directly to the public.

There is, at the time of this briefing, a legislative initiative that on its face proposes, and I quote: “to improve public access to Wi- Fi.” This is misleading, for the actual bill contains the following phrasing:“to prohibit a state or a political subdivision thereof from providing or offering for sale to the public retail or wholesale broadband Internet access service.”

While at least one major ISP has deliberately slowed the deployment of fiber infrastructure, the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee installed a fiber optic network in 2010. It is now celebrated as one of the best Wi-Fi services in the entire United States. UniNetworks.org lists 63 cities, across the country, with similar publicly owned fiber networks. Those cities have, at their disposal, a wide variety of options in the legal toolkit to defend their publicly owned network from the ravages of unbridled privatization. The principles clearly articulated, as the Internet was first created and funded by taxpayers, remain relevant today.

One would think those who feel they’ve been “taxed enough already,” would want a decent return on the taxpayer funded investments they already made.

The first railroad chartered in the United States was the Baltimore and Ohio. Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, turned the first spadeful of earth on July 4, 1828. On May 10, 1869, the last golden spike was driven into the newly completed transcontinental railroad built by the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific.

During this period, on May 24, 1844, Alfred Vail was stationed at the Mount Clare railroad depot in Baltimore, Maryland. He decoded the famous telegraph message “What hath God Wrought?” It was sent by Samuel Morse from the Supreme Court chamber of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

During the Civil War, telegraphy played a strategic role giving Commanders the ability to communicate with their troops almost instantly. After the war, telegraph wires were strung across our vast continent along the same lines used by the railroads. When congress declared railroad companies to be common carriers in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, telegraph lines were an integral part of railroad operations. As other telecommunications services evolved, their infrastructure was effectively grandfathered into the rights of way used by the railroads.

A common carrier had been previously defined as any business entity whose main commercial activity is transporting things on behalf of people. For example one requirement has been that common carriers, in the shipping industry, would charge the same price to transport one pound of gold, one pound of fertilizer, or one pound of printed material. Moving different products that weighed the same, and packaged in the same size container, would cost the same amount of money to ship.

In accordance with the General Railroad Right-of-Way Act of 1875, the federal government granted railroad companies rights of way across the United States. By connecting the coasts over thousands of miles, rights of way served to promote the country’s economic development and westward expansion. A right of way is a type of easement granted or reserved over the land for transportation purposes, such as a highway, public footpath, rail transport, canal, oil and gas pipelines, electrical transmission lines, and message communications lines.

Rights-of-Way, commonly referred to as ROWs, are granted to serve the public good and the overall competitiveness of our country’s enterprises. In the case of the ROWs granted to the railroads, when the line is further developed or abandoned, two questions that loom large involve ancillary uses of any Right-of-Way held by the railroads.

The railroads, as common carriers, have routinely sold access to their ROWs and retained those proceeds rather than pass them to either the land owner or to the public treasury. This gives rise to certain controversies the courts must resolve, especially in light of the fact that a select few Internet Services Providers (ISPs) have fought long and hard to the effect that they are no longer classified as common carriers.

On March 10, 2014, the Supreme Court, in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust et al. v. United States, held in an 8-1 decision that the right of way for an abandoned rail line goes to the party that owns the land underneath. This decision, concerning just one type of change in circumstances, may have applications or implications with respect to others, such as when a Right-of-Way user is no longer classified as a common carrier. Here are two possibilities:

• First, a conversion whereby the railroad sells access to the ROW, without compensation to the land owner, may expose the railroad or the government to a takings claim under the Fifth Amendment. This would be more likely in the case of non-common carriers due to their implicitly diminished public benefit value. Should this thinking prove meritorious, any use of the ROW, not specifically related to the control of the railroad itself, should inure to the benefit of the original property owner or, in the alternative, the public treasury.

• Second, when the communications companies are no longer common carriers, they no longer merit special access to any of the ROWs and easements that are set aside for a public benefit. Placing this question before federal, state, and local governments could and should expose the ISPs to an endless array of challenges to both their natural monopoly and their public utility status. If they are not common carriers, how does this affect their eligibility for pole attachments or other access to utility Rights of Way. And, with so many ISPs in competition for that business, why should a few large incumbents enjoy superior rights over those of any startup.

In the second example, the ISPs would undoubtably argue that the public does receive a benefit from their commercial operations. Any competent advocate for the public might stipulate there is a public benefit now ancillary to the ISPs newly defined commercial operations. To be sure, there is a public benefit for most commercial operations, such as when the pocket-picking organ grinder’s monkey brings a smile to the faces of children.

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From an early age we were taught that one of the unique values for our country is “Freedom of the Press.” Of course, from the time of this country’s inception, until very recently, freedom of the press was only available for the privileged few that own a press. The traditional understanding of what constitutes “editorializing” was, in ages past, based upon what appeared on the opinion page.

Today we understand that every decision by a publisher is an editorial decision.. Whether a story runs above the fold, at the beginning of a newscast, or if it runs at all is based upon the opinion of someone. To those of us who thrive within a world of competing ideas, this is entirely ok as we can always engage in channel surfing.

In contrast, those intellectually dishonest folks, the ones that only want to hear opinions aligning with their own, have become a problem within the context of our participatory democracy. The “Consent of the Governed” as advanced through the Declaration of Independence, presupposes an informed consent. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights put forth by the United Nations in Article 21 states that “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government”.

The December 2019 survey by Netcraft revealed there are about 1.3 billion active websites across over 243 million unique Internet Domain names. The number of WordPress installations on web servers is estimated, by several survey organizations, to be around 455 million. This clearly dwarfs the number of printing presses manufactured over the entire span of human history.

The advent of the Internet gave us tremendous hope for finally making freedom of the press truly real. Those hopes were dashed recently, by very real enemies of First Amendment integrity, in part, through their coordinated attacks on net-neutrality. Our nation has, as a result, reverted to a condition of severe vulnerability. Now, certain news can be advanced or retarded, at will, by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating primarily as common carriers, traditional conduits in the telecommunications space.

On October 1, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled the FCC had authority to reclassify internet service providers as “information services” under Title I of the Telecommunications Act, rather than as “common carriers” that can be more heavily regulated.

The hop-skippety-jump logic used by the Court to differentiate, between “information services” and “common carriers,” attempted to contrast the two categories by citing the function of Domain Name Services (DNS) as somehow unique to the information services. One would have to wonder if the judges ever dialed 411 or even used a phone book. While DNS may sound like mystic art to someone other than a technology worker, it is simply a list that correlates names with numerical addresses. Just how this is different, from the directory that shows your name along side your phone number, was apparently too technical a consideration for certain highly disciplined jurists sitting as a court of appeals.

Special interest groups also bring a dollar skew, into the nominations, confirmations and accommodations for judges as well as the public discourse. Issues affecting everyone are often crowded out or eclipsed as legislators are enabled and financially bolstered by overpaid, underwhelming CEOs. This occurs even as they characterize themselves as constitutional conservatives.

They masquerade as originalists and textualists as they disregard the declaration of intent, the mission statement, the value proposition, the cardinal precepts, and the constitutional imperatives as they were so carefully delineated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution. The Framers of our constitutionally grounded democratic republic did not intend for unrepresentative elected officials to treat the United States Constitution as little more than a buffet from which they can pick and choose.

Professional journalists and politicians have also facilitated the development of polarized news sources. They have, at times, belittled the contributions of individual bloggers that, while they may lack a certain journalistic discipline, bring much greater diversity to the public discourse. So-called advocacy journalism has also entered the fray. It is, of course, not true journalism any more than agenda science is true science.

To address the problems associated with a misinformed citizenry, unable to exercise “informed consent” as they consult suspect historical accounts, concerned historians are now working to leverage the consensus and immutability features of blockchain, the same technology undergirding crypto-currencies. In this way they hope to protect future generations from revisionist history.

While egomaniacal leaders actively engage in squelching diversity of opinion, we should closely examine the actual business practices of those tele-communications companies that were once, but are no longer classified as common carriers. While the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the attempted murder of Alexi Navalny are high profile cases in point, there are also sinister forces at work within the United States, to thwart the collective will of We the People.

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Sir Francis Galton introduced the term “eugenics,” meaning well-born, in 1883. His emphasis was on encouraging healthy and capable people, of above-average intelligence, to bear more children, with the idea of building an “improved” human race. The eugenics ideologies that are typically associated with the first half of the twentieth century are much older though they persist, even today. Now they are simply manifest in a different way.

While an individual may reasonably consider what their children might look like upon choosing a mate, a couple would likely be ostracized for using abortion for purposes of selecting a child based upon, say, hair color. In May of 2019, a Supreme Court opinion described abortion as a potential “tool of eugenic manipulation.” The opining Justice was referring to an Indiana abortion law that bans abortion motivated solely by the race, sex or disability of the fetus. He used the history of the eugenics movement to explain why “the use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical.”

Societies have long engaged in what is sometimes termed positive eugenics, the improvement of the human race by better breeding. Plato suggested applying the principles of selective breeding to humans around 400 BC. He went on to suggest selective mating to produce a guardian class. Negative eugenics also emerged long ago when, in Sparta, every child was inspected by the council of elders to determine if the child was fit to live. In Rome, Table IV within the Laws of the Twelve Tables required that: “A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed.”

North American colonists practiced race warfare through the gifting of blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox to the Ottawa tribe’s Chief Pontiac. In his 1922 book Race Decadence, William Samuel Sadler, addressing problems within a given race, argued that alcoholism, feeblemindedness, insanity, and delinquency” were hereditary traits and that those who possessed them were breeding at a much faster rate than “superior human beings.” By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined.

Early in the CoVid 19 pandemic, one Antioch planning commission member wrote on his Facebook page that “the World has been introduced to a new phrase “Herd Immunity.” He wrote “In my opinion we need to adopt a Herd Mentality. A herd gathers its ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet their natural course in nature.” He went on to add, the “homeless and other people who just defile themselves by either choice or mental issues” should also be allowed to perish. This, he said, “would fix what is a significant burden on our society and resources.”

The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by that of 1930s California. National Socialist racial hygiene, the German variation on eugenics, was at the center of Nazi ideology. It’s prominence rose sharply as wealthy Nazi supporters started heavily investing in it under Adolf Hitler’s leadership.

Now, in 2020, a wealthy and largely hidden network of ideologues, advances eugenics in a highly effective ways that also support plausible deniability. This same oligarchy uses a variety of sophistries to engineer poverty, to complicate access to healthcare for people that are in many other ways marginalized due to their age, their race, their ethnicity, or their economic status.

The oligarchy is cloaked in a thin veneer of religiosity as it surrounds itself with excessively prominent, integrity challenged, mammon serving evangelicals. No matter how injudicious the judicial act, how reckless the executive behavior, how negligent the legislative inaction, it all maps back to the depraved heart indifference and unmitigated selfishness of these, the most condescending.

It has been said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We have seen them campaign in bigotry as moral depravity flows. Such groups cannot win without cheating, and therefore focus much attention on rewriting the rules of the game. Wielding disproportionate political influence to mislead, spam, purge, suppress, intimidate, gerrymander, and otherwise corrupt elections is not new to the game. The exploitation of crisis events, that was once associated with a small group of war-profiteering industrialists, now appears to be in vogue to benefit career politicians together with their donor owners personally, and on a global scale.

As the United States surpassed the grim milestone of a half million pandemic related deaths, we should all recall the former guy’s early efforts to minimize the severity of the outbreak. Vanity Fair quoted one public health expert who said a member of the Corona Virus Task Force offered the view: Because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. Beto O’ Rourke later said the Texas GOP is a ‘death cult’ that wants you to do the dying.

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On February 13th 2021, a pathetic minority of United States Senators landed decisively somewhere between wishy and washy on the question of autocracy versus democracy. As they were feigning reverence for the Constitution of the United States, they inadvertently highlighted the most fundamental problem facing the USA. It is a problem that has plagued civilization from the time of its inception and, from the looks of things, it’s not going away anytime soon.

When a democratic republic tolerates a reckless indifference to the truth by people occupying positions of honor and trust, it is hardly authentic. When we value government of, by, and for the people does it make sense to retain elected representatives who routinely engage in barratry, deceptive practices? Would an honest person take an oath as a juror and, while the trial proceeds, act as co-counsel for one side in the controversy? Would a judiciary willfully convert a whirlpool of information into a cesspool of disinformation through its lack of forethought and intellectual rigor? Would a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shrink from his constitutional obligation to preside over an impeachment trial?

In the United States elected and appointed officials often get a pass for integrity deficits. Then, when these same officials are called upon to pass judgement upon the behavior of others, and when in so doing they would be effectively implicating themselves by rendering an honest verdict, such a judgement is rendered meaningless. Why should we be surprised when such a long history of Supreme Court case law has effectively immunized the most dishonest political operatives from any consequence for deceiving and vexing the electorate.

To admit personal complicity, to admit hostility towards authentic democracy, and to admit just how unprincipled one is while simultaneously working to deceive one’s own constituency is more than can be expected from a prevaricating politician. Not serving the highest and best interests of an elected representative’s constituency should be enough to disqualify one from high office and yet, such unrepresentative politicians enjoy squatter’s rights to their form fitting seats.

While campaign finance, through dark money, has long been seen as having a distorting influence upon representative democracy, it persists. While corporations wield outsized influence that renders the “one man, one vote” principle meaningless, recent decisions by some corporations have highlighted the ability of such companies to disrupt the system of political patronage.

If a corporation can, by withholding campaign contributions from those politicians who actively deceive the public concerning election results, that corporation’s clients can also stop doing business with any company that contributes to the campaigns of politicians that lie about other things.

One popular meme on social media reads: “Universal healthcare is such a complex beast that only 32 of the world’s 33 developed nations have been able to make it work.” Why is our developed nation unable to make universal healthcare available to its citizens? Could it be the BS artistry and all the dark money? Could it be due to the House or Senate decorum that prohibits the questioning of a colleague’s motives and why one may be entirely subservient not to their constituency, but to the money brokers?

The U.S. electorate is not bound by such “decorum,” and one thing that became abundantly clear during the 2020 election cycle was the extent to which this country’s various forms of voter suppression had just one purpose. It was to make sure the Constitutional Convention formula, that would insure a black man or woman could never count as more that three-fifths of a person, would remain in force.

The racist riot of January 6th, 2021 happened because the gamesmanship that involved gerrymandering, the purging of voter rolls, the closing of polling places in marginalized neighborhoods, the voter intimidation, the vandalizing of the Post Office, the unmeritorious legal challenges to a great number of ballots, and the highly selective pandemic response didn’t work for the gaggle of bigots that assembled on the national mall that day.

The forty three Senators that voted against disqualifying an anti-democracy demagogue, from ever holding office again, have no plausible deniability with respect to their racism. They are unfit to hold any position of honor and trust. Any business that contributes to their campaigns for re-election, should be subjected to the most robust technologically advanced boycott in the history of boycotts.

It is not enough for elected representatives to pay lip service to constitutional imperatives. It is not enough for Supreme Court Justices to masquerade as originalists and textualists while ignoring the Declaration of Intent, the Mission Statement, the Value Proposition; the Cardinal Precepts as they were so carefully articulated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution. It is not enough to display the words “Equal Justice Under Law” above the doors to the Supreme Court building. Either make it real or take it down, because right now its only effect is to perpetrate a fraud upon the citizens of the United States and the rest of the world.

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Intentional Consumerism is, first and foremost, about expressing consumer preferences that are informed by the behaviors of those with whom we do business. It is how we vote every day with every dollar we spend. It is how we move towards a promising future, with each and every transaction. It emphasizes free trade together with fair trade. It demonstrates the power of a more proactive variation with respect to the doctrine Buyer Beware.

There is real potential in such an exercise of ethical consumerism, sometimes called consumer sovereignty; from the super- charged data driven boycott, to the casual expression of preferences. Intentional Consumerism is, to some extent, rooted in the indignation of thinking men and women.

How long have you been on hold? Does the company that wants your business pay its CEO what a thousand customer service workers make? Is the company providing your mobile phone service an enemy of net-neutrality and thereby the First Amendment? Is the nearby store limiting employee compensation to poverty wages? Does a politician, taking campaign contributions from big finance, have your best interests at heart? Should the person behind a corporate policy, that could be foreseen as having the effect of sickening, injuring or killing people, somehow be immune from criminal liability?

When an integrity challenged official doesn’t enforce anti-trust regulations, it may mean consumers should exercise their right to avoid patronizing those businesses that also cheat by ignoring such guidelines, by skirting the regulations, or by flaunting their lawlessness disregard. To what extent does a business, vying for your patronage, offload expenses and potential liabilities to the taxpayer and future generations? Rather than letting bad actors calibrate our thinking through relentless messaging, you and I, as educated consumers, are certainly under no obligation to support such unconscionable practices. In fact, we shouldn’t.

Ultimately, the only way to serve the national security interests of the United States in the long run is through the proliferation of authentic democracies worldwide. This authenticity must begin at home by bringing intentional consumerism to bear in curbing the wildly disproportionate corporate influence. If the business community is serious about balancing the interests of all stakeholders, it will keep pace with evolution and transition to a new corporate model whereby the influence of self-centered speculators is diminished and true augmentation is achieved through increased employee ownership and a benevolent corporate culture.

What if the consent of the governed were expressed through our preferences within the open arenas of commerce? What if the authoritarian powerhouses had no place to peddle their wares thus breaking the stranglehold the oligarchy has on our country? There are numerous obstacles to building a benevolent corporate culture. There are also ways to power past the often detrimental influence of the shareholder rights movement. For now, suffice it to say, if you are an entrepreneur that is service as well as profit motivated, there are options for building a company culture that fulfills both requirements. If your state does not proactively provide for the formation of benefit corporations, then seriously consider incorporating elsewhere.

Consumers also have tremendous power to effect this type of change. We may engage in traditional boycotts or simply act in accordance with a preference. How we direct our spending is at the heart of intentional consumerism. All leverage depends largely on where we decide to place the fulcrum. Is the frictionless buying experience most important to us? For example, do we value the one-click path of least resistance over the support of a local business? What about the human interaction?

We can effect lasting change simply by asking: “Is this business employee owned?” We need to understand that deep discounts and high dividends are not brought about through the generosity of a company. They are most often provided at the expense of over-tasked employees that are trying to make ends meet on poverty wages. We should always be mindful of this dynamic. Always ask yourself: “Does the company culture placate the few or benefit a larger humanity?”

An Employee Owned Benefit Corporation (EOBC) is one in which the employees and retirees hold a supermajority interest of at least two-thirds, thus limiting the holdings and influence of outside investors to a maximum of one third. The employees and retirees have the exclusive right to express their collective preference, with respect to local, national, and global priorities, by committing at least ten percent of their company’s profits for a clearly articulated public benefit.

They function corporately to support, rather than exploit the commonwealth. They pay their fair share into the public treasury. They build authentic community through their dedication to enhancing a quality of mind that reflects a science (the domain of facts), a philosophy (the domain of meanings), and a religion (the domain of values) that is truly commensurate with the spiritual, intellectual, and societal development of a greater humanity.

We, as consumers, can make it happen. We can use our purchasing power to put our enterprises on the right path. It will take concerted effort, alternative networks, and skillful coordination. It will take Intentional Consumerism.

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Andrew Jackson, with his forced march of the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears is no darling of humanitarians. He did, however, get one thing right. Upon closing the Second Bank of the United States, he correctly accused the bankers of having privatized gains while socializing losses. He recognized, two hundred years ago, what many of our most revered economists fail to acknowledge today. Many of our nation’s largest enterprises are leveraging the worst aspects of both capitalism and socialism.

There is a big, big difference between the entrepreneurial business person that can create something of value from almost nothing, and the custodial CEO, who’s chief talent is sticking it to taxpayers in parasitic fashion. There is a stark contrast, between the custodial management that persuades constituents and investors to expect every indulgence, as opposed to those highly disciplined entrepreneurial leaders who exude a spiritual idealism, one that has the awesome power to take an enterprise and even a nation from one level of attainment to the next.

True leaders steadfastly refuse to discount the value of motivational factors. No one of quality wants to work for a company that fails to exemplify a higher calling. Those companies that make gobs of money without making meaningful contributions to the public treasury, while using the infrastructure that is mostly financed by individual taxpayers, are properly defined as freeloaders. The companies that pay wages so low they make public charges of their employees, forcing them to seek heating, rent and nutrition assistance, are operating in a parasitic fashion, while embarrassing their the employees and making them take the rap.

Those companies that have advanced the fiction of corporate personhood have clearly distorted what was, at one time, a constitutionally grounded democratic republic. While such companies masquerade as good neighbors and “good corporate citizens” they are, in actuality, no such thing.

The static cliche in the suburbs is promoted by the evangels of mammon, the penny-wise, pound-foolish that are currently at the commanding heights of the world’s economy. Even so, we must know, that we are not going to put a ten to twenty trillion dollar national debt to rest by sustaining the last gasp of an outmoded economy or the fossilized thinking of those deeply vested in it.

We are faced with the reality that we must rebuild our nation’s economy. We should be asking ourselves: “What kind of economy do we want?” Faux corporations, those controlled by outside investors, act in parasitic fashion. They engage in tax avoidance to maximize returns primarily for those outside investors. This is most recently evidenced by the fact that 91 of the Fortune 500 companies paid no federal income taxes in 2018. It is common practice for a business, consistently offering high dividends and low prices, to deliver these competitive advantages to investors and customers by the systematic tamping down of employee compensation, through a combination of poverty wages and hollowed out benefit packages.

A new type of Employee Owned Benefit Corporation or EOBC is less likely to exert a distorting and malevolent influence upon our democracy. It is far more likely to act in the greater interest of the community. Within the body politic, healthy enterprises are the foundation for affluent countries and a thriving global economy.

If we are to expose the blithering incoherence of those who believe increasing the minimum wage is a job killer, it will be by questioning how paying a CEO over one thousand times an entry level employee’s wage is not a job killer. Pseudo-conservatives have demonstrated their calloused disregard for the health and welfare of marginalized people throughout human history. They have claimed that financial assistance for those in need would run up deficits, negatively impacting future generations. In their self-serving world view, only the most privileged are likely to become a part of any future generation.

The US economy and that of the world is not sustainable to the extent it is overly burdened with an increase in the cost of disease care, perpetual warfare, migration patterns driven by genocide, pollution, and climate change; plus a seriously demotivated workforce. When the will of the electorate is continually subjugated to that of the moneyed interests and the whims of authoritarian leaders, democracy declines as would-be participants adopt a “Why the hell should I bother?” attitude.

We can break this cycle of corporate socialism and parasitism for ours is an entrepreneurial country. To fix it, we must first realize that a corporation, controlled by outside investors, is not a store of value nor is it typically a center for creativity. It is not a job creator and instead devotes significant resources to getting the people out of the loop. It is far more likely the means to siphon the life plasm out of any organization, composed of diverse personalities, working together for a better life.

Intentional consumerism is how we vote every day with every dollar. It is how the citizenry can express its preferences for a promising future with each and every transaction. It’s how we can direct our purchasing power towards employee owned corporations and better yet, Employee Owned Benefit Corporations (EOBC’s).

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Full Transcript:

When most people think about the Roaring Twenties, the highlights quickly come to mind. Women in the U.S. gained the right to vote in 1920. People of that era also witnessed the advent of broadcasting, a steady climb-out from the post Word War One recession, and a shift in emphasis, from wartime production, to a new mass production that yielded an abundance of consumer goods. In our reprise one century later, we hope to tap the enthusiasm that characterized the twenties of a century ago as we also consider ways to avoid the pitfalls.

The 1920s were capped off with a global depression, caused by recklessness, the counterfeit wisdom of many who occupied the commanding heights of the U.S. economy. The 2020s began with a similar, all too familiar recklessness. It started with a depression that is, in no small part, also attributable to such run-of-the-mill selfishness on the part of the inheritors, skimmers and hoarders of wealth.

The fiscal policies of the years preceding 1920 and those preceding 2020 have certain common elements that suggest our leaders have failed to learn from history while dooming the rest of us to repeat it. A pair of once in a century global pandemics revealed that the so-called “smartest guys in the room” ran their businesses in such a way that they failed to maintain a rainy day fund, they paid their employees poverty wages that made it almost impossible to build any kind of savings on a personal level.

Where the 1920s ushered in a frenzied era of mass consumerism. Today we must place a new emphasis on a form of consumerism that is far more intentional. We will borrow the best from the earlier era’s artistic, social, and cultural dynamism. And we will, at the same time, give preference to those businesses that exhibit a genuine culture of benevolence.

John Wycliffe, in the preface to his fourteenth century middle English translation of the Bible wrote: The bible is about government of, by, and for the people. This principle is reflected in the cardinal precepts of the United States Constitution through the first three words: “We the People.” The thread was later highlighted when Abraham Lincoln said: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Horse and Sparrow Theory of Economics holds that, if you feed the horse all the oats it wants, the sparrows can subsist on the undigested oats that are to be found in the dung piles along the road. Since this theory was advanced in the 1890s, a number of efforts have been made to disguise a clear condescension and disgust, the most privileged among us hold, for We the People.

Today, the same theory has undergone some name changes to make it a bit more, if you’ll excuse the expression, palatable. Leaky, trickle-down, and supply-side are among the names floated to make such unmitigated selfishness less discernible and thereby less offensive to the masses. All of the inequities on our planet are directly traceable to such depraved heart indifference and unconscionable attitudes.

The United States was formed when the founders sought to throw off the yoke of those they described as “foreign potentates.” Then over time, the ownership of certain companies and corporations transitioned from control by the enthusiastic entrepreneurial cohorts that formed them, to the domestic robber barons, and then to a new generation of outside investors, foreign potentates.

These inauthentic companies and corporations are no longer characterized by people associating for a common purpose or acting corporately. Their fate is rather in the hands of outside investors that have no deep-set stakes in the companies or the countries in which they operate. The Supreme Court of the United States has effectively promoted a strangely sociopathic form of corporate personhood through a clear lack of intellectual rigor, together with its failure to differentiate between the persons within, against a fictitious oftentimes heartless overlay.

What if we could strike, perhaps even force a better balance? What if outside investors could participate without siphoning the life plasm out of our enterprises, without exerting the kind of control that has resulted in hollowed-out benefit packagers and subsistence wages? After all, the compensatory costs, such as housing, heating and nutrition assistance are borne by the taxpayer. Think about how vibrantly alive and competitive our companies and our communities could be if everyone within them was truly enriched by them.

That passes for conservatism today is, for the most part, penny wise and pound foolish. It is, at times, even parasitic. How much healthier would our democratic republic be if the outside investors were unable to exert a distorting influence in the name of those by whom the company actually operates?

To effectively convert or sunset such pretentious companies, while raising a new 21st Century enterprise architecture, can help to cure the ills of our otherwise abundant world.