Hobby Lobby – a Case of Corporate Rights vs. Human Rights

The Hobby Lobby ruling by the Supreme Court today is illustrative of just how urgently we need to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution as well as an amendment to abolish corporate “personhood” and money as “speech.” This ruling graphically displays the need for these two constitutional amendments as it empowers corporations’ so-called “personhood” while ignoring the actual personhood of 51% (!) of the population. It demonstrates how far the current court is willing to go to enshrine corporate constitutional rights while emboldening religious fanatics and stomping on the human rights of women. It is the perfect example of religious oppression and tyranny masquerading as religious “freedom” and the corporate 1% using any excuse to minimize costs and maximize profits.

The radical religious right has infested the Supreme Court in addition to Congress in the persons of particularly Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, and Antonin Scalia, who in turn were enabled by the other right-wing male members of the court. What is unbelievable is that the anti-abortion fanatics like Hobby Lobby have now gone after birth control, revealing their hypocrisy regarding abortion given the fact that birth control prevents abortions, which is no surprise to those of us who have always known their agenda. They are not the least bit interested in “life,” caring nothing for the lives of women, only feigning angst for non-viable zygotes, gametes, and fetuses because what they are actually interested in is invading and negating women’s bodily sovereignty, privacy, autonomy, and agency so that women have no freedom or control over their lives.

The attitude of fundamentalist fanatics is not only sexist, but male supremacist; women are seen as nothing more than sexual commodities, brood mares and chattel whose bodies are property to be allocated and controlled. These Christian fascists think they have the right to dictate to women their most intimate decisions about their bodies and their sexuality, an outrageous discrimination against only females as women are the only persons who use prescription birth control or need abortions and because procedures like vasectomies for men are not excluded. Their goal of female enslavement and bondage through forced childbearing is abundantly clear.

As Ginsburg warns, this decision will be applied broadly and open the floodgates for corporations to claim all kinds of exceptions to abiding by the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, whether it be certain procedures such as pap smears, mammograms, or even denying women equal pay. If it’s ok to discriminate against women in one way, why wouldn’t it be in another? This is just the beginning in terms of lawsuits to give corporate “persons” the right to openly discriminate against real female persons, an expansion of rights for artificial entities stolen from our Bill of Rights intended for natural persons, and these kinds of rulings will continue until we pass a 28th and a 29th amendment to the Constitution to end discrimination based on sex and to end corporate personhood and money as speech.

NOW, AAUW, and PDA are among the groups working for the passage of the ERA.  To speak out about Hobby Lobby, go to:

Undo Hobby Lobby!  and #JointheDissent on Twitter.

For more info see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/us/hobby-lobby-case-supreme-court-contraception.html?_r=0

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/10-blistering-highlights-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburgs-hobby-lobby-dissent?akid=11975.950734.0rtxF9&rd=1&src=newsletter1008624&t=5

New York Times and the Guardian Calling for Clemency for Snowden

Both the Guardian  and the New York Times published editorials this week calling for Obama to offer Snowden clemency! (See also the Huffington Post for a good synopsis). This is much-heralded news by the activist community for whom Snowden has become a cause celebre for civil liberties and right to privacy and for much of the public who recognize him as a whistleblower and consider him a hero and a patriot.

Snowden’s revelations have resulted in extensive outrage and worldwide demonstrations and have brought the issue of the surveillance state into the light of day so that it can finally be examined and debated by the public.  We at OCV are very grateful to him for this selfless act.  Our position is that Snowden not only did our nation and the world an incredible service, and that he not only should not be charged with a crime, he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, earning it far more than Barack Obama, and that his leaking of governmental and corporate malfeasance in the face of such personal risk reveals his principled character and high-minded motives. This stands in stark contrast to the utter lack of scruples evidenced by NSA officials such as James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who told bold-faced lies to Congress, denying what we now know to be true:  that we have been subjected to widespread surveillance that has vacuumed up all manner of electronic data on all Americans and that heads of state, allies, and foreign governments have been spied upon as well.

Exposing intrusive, unconstitutional, and even criminal activity of renegade agencies and corporations SHOULD NOT BE A CRIME, nor should these entities be able to operate in secret, while citizens have no privacy.  This is a reversal of the way a democratic society should function, where the citizenry have a constitutional right to privacy while the government has a duty to be transparent and open. But surveillance is a given in a country whose democracy has been subverted as has ours by corporate interests like Booz Allen Hamilton  who receive government contracts for cybersecurity and whose personnel are cycled through the Washington revolving door and are essentially getting corporate welfare to spy on the very citizens who pay the taxes that pay their salaries.

Chris Hedges, who formerly reported for the New York Times as an investigative reporter, calls an ultra-secret government run by Wall Street and the corporate criminal class an inverse totalitarian state in his book, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” as we are now living in a country where the corporate world is running the government, enabled by a Supreme Court which has ruled corporations are “persons” and money is “speech.”

From Wikipedia:

“In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt  by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, inverted totalitarianism is described as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics. In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse and the citizenry are lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in their government by excess consumerism and sensationalism.”

Much has been made of the recent brouhaha tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have made of the back-door penetration of their networks by the surveillance state (see Tech Industry Leaders Recent Meeting with Obama), but this is mere posturing, as their interest is in their bottom line, certainly not the privacy of consumers or users of the Internet and their products. Google has been building psychological profiles of its users for some time: http://www.alternet.org/google-using-gmail-build-psychological-profiles-hundreds-millions-people and there is Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America’s Out-of-Control National Surveillance State .

Chris Hedges was let go from the New York Times because of his unswerving devotion to reporting the truth and we sincerely hope that this editorial is a sign that the New York Times is becoming more willing to risk speaking truth to power and covering issues important to the 99%.  It is our fervent wish that Snowden’s revelations continue to cause a ripple effect throughout all levels of our society and that it results in government and corporate surveillance being heavily curtailed and monitored so that we can again live in a freer, democratic state wherein our civil liberties and right to privacy are respected as inviolable human rights.

Romney: 10 Really Important Reasons to Vote for Anyone Else!

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And by anyone, I mean even Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, or Barack Obama, though there are far better choices out there:  Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson, and Roseanne Barr for example.  I feel compelled to spell this out, especially since Romney is trying so hard to pretend he is someone other than who he really is, by listing the reasons he is the worst choice in my humble opinion.  When reviewing them, you may wonder why I have left out civil liberties, foreign policy, trade agreements, drug policy, and war.  This is because this piece is about reasons voting for anyone other than Mitt Romney, and Obama and Romney are both so disregarding of our civil rights, militaristic, devoted to continuing the destructive and pointless war on drugs, and ready and willing to enable corporate world government and a police state that Romney could not be singled out as worse, though on foreign policy his debate comments about “getting bad guys” reveal a more simplistic, comic book tone than Obama’s.

Ron Paul is only marginally better on most of these issues I have enumerated but infinitely better on war and civil liberties (except for women as he is anti-choice).   The only person running that is worse in most every way than Romney is Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party because he is right-wing-on-steroids crazy when you look at his voting record vs. what he says in the debates, where he comes across less extreme (kind of like Romney and Obama).  That should put this in perspective. Even so, voting for him means less chance of a Romney/Ryan win so I can still say for that reason, he is a better choice (only because he has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning). Remember you can write names in in many states, even if they don’t appear on the ballot!

Here are 10 reasons why anyone sitting on the fence should NOT cast a vote for Mitt Romney:

  1. Paul Ryan – the architect of the most severe austerity budget imaginable, anti-government fanatic, misogynist extraordinaire, self-congratulatory elitist, utterly confused religious zealot who simultaneously embraces fundamentalist Catholicism (except for the part about caring for the poor) and the ultra-selfish philosophy of the very damaged, anti-social, arguably sociopathic Ayn Rand (an atheist), oblivious to the inherent contradictions. Romney, with his corporate raider, fascistic, anti-human policies and questionable ethics, not to mention his polygamist father and beliefs that are viewed as cultish by the rest of Christendom, has picked an even more dangerously fringe running mate who would be a heartbeat away from being President, in addition to being set up for a White House run later if elected VP.
  2. Women’s Rights – If you are a woman or care about a woman—any woman, say your mother, sister, wife, daughter, grandmother, friend, or your housekeeper, Romney is a disastrous choice.  Romney not only has declared his intention to defund Planned Parenthood, supported employers being able to refuse to cover employees’ birth control for ‘moral’ reasons, continued to back the likes of Todd Akin and now Richard Mourdock and Joe Walsh with their abhorrent views on abortion and rape and rape-induced pregnancy, and vowed to work towards Roe v. Wade being overturned, but has even endorsed the crackpot idea of a Constitutional Amendment to endow “fetal personhood” on nonviable life, like gametes and zygotes, being included in the Republican platform, and has never supported Lily Ledbetter and equal pay.  Romney and Ryan don’t have “binders of women,” they are BINDERS of women!  They will not stop until women have no rights whatsoever and are barefoot and pregnant, dependent brood mares; if elected maybe Romney might provide some “sister-wives” to help out with the laundry and childrearing since he certainly won’t support day care.
  3.  The Earth – Fast track to environmental doom with resulting drought, famine, worsening storms, hurricanes, fires, and water shortages await if this demonic duo wins the White House.  Romney is a climate change denier and actively promotes nothing but dirty forms of energy like oil and nuclear power and environmentally devastating practices like clearcutting, drilling in the antarctic, mountaintop removal, and fracking, when clean alternatives are not only preferable and available but essential, and actually uses the term “clean coal,” an oxymoron if there ever was one, while being hellbent on dismantling all of our environmental regulations and agencies.
  4.  The 99% or the 47% – If you are a member of the 47%, or even the 99%, Romney clearly not only doesn’t care about you, he sees you as a “parasite” who wants to mooch off of him and his other plutocratic, capitalist multimillionaire/billionaire/multibillionaire friends.  If anyone is parasitic, it is these two guys who have lived off of the work of the 47% and the 99% their entire privileged lives.  Romney and Ryan will do everything in their power to amass more power and wealth for the 1% and themselves at the rest of our expense, and enable the so-called “job-creators” they promote to do exactly what they are doing now–sit on all their cash like the fat-cat hoarders they are.
  5.  The Economy and Income Inequality – Extremist, trickle-down, voodoo economics is what this man and his side-kick believe in, the same policies that will only increase the already huge divide between the haves and have-nots.  The pathetically inadequate health care reform bill, otherwise known as “Obamacare,” that has instituted a few much-needed reforms such as outlawing the practice of denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, Social Security, Medicare, and the entire social safety net will be under attack; tax breaks for the ultra-rich will not only be continued but likely increased while they pile on more taxes for the middle class and the poor; the already bloated military budget will increase (along with the deficit) and there are not going to be any jobs, not here anyway. Romney and Ryan believe in austerity, for everyone but the uber-wealthy and people like them who serve them; this is a rehash of Hoover’s policies that plunged us into the Great Depression and are currently causing financial collapse and social chaos in Europe.  A vote for Romney is a vote for Herbert Hoover.
  6.  Education – Romney believes in education for the 1% and those who can afford to go to an Ivy League school; everyone else doesn’t need an education because the fictional “jobs” he is going to provide won’t require one, especially if you have to commute to India or China. He probably “loved” his teachers at Harvard, but he doesn’t love the ones at your child’s grade school or those teaching at a community college, and you can forget about Title IX or Brown v. Board of Education because these rightwing people want to do away with equal opportunity.  If you think education should be less important than Halliburton’s profits, especially for girls and minorities, vote for this guy.
  7.  Theocracy, not democracy – These two men have no respect for the separation of church and state, support the blurring of these lines, and espouse beliefs that rationalize rule by the church.  Which one you ask?  Any of the authoritarian, fundamentalist, patriarchal religious sects will do as they all agree that basic human rights are expendable, such as sovereignty over one’s own body, right to make your most personal decisions regarding conception, whom you bed and whom you wed, what books you can read and films you can see, what words you can say and hear, freedom from religious tyranny, and so on.  The Bill of Rights (especially the 1st amendment) is basically superfluous to these people, except for corporations of course, though they love to abuse particularly the 10th and 14th amendments; only the 2nd amendment is exempt because corporations rake in obscene profits on firearms.  Obama has been a civil liberties nightmare also; he just isn’t as much of a Bible thumper as these two and doesn’t support their radical religious social agenda—nor does Biden, despite being a practicing Catholic.  You might as well vote for the Taliban as for Romney/Ryan as there is little difference.  Do we need more gun-toting religious bigots?!
  8. Corporate rule unchecked – The fact that corrupt billionaires like the Koch Bros. and Sheldon Adelson (a modern-day Meyer Lansky) support Romney and Wall Street has abandoned Obama for him says it all, this despite Obama’s letting banksters off the hook and caving in left and right to corporate demands. Romney, which someone pointed out can’t be spelled without “money,” is going to make sure that Bain Capital and its ilk are the bane of our existence because he is 110% corporate.  He thinks they should rule over every single aspect of our lives and continue to get government handouts in the form of subsidies and military contracts and pay no taxes in order to line the pockets of their shareholders while complaining about the deficit.  Corporations are not only “people,” they are the only “people” that matter.
  9. The Supreme Court – Mitt Romney has reportedly said that Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Antonin Scalia are his favorites.  Need I say more?  He apparently favors judges who give corporations free rein to wreak havoc on actual people and the environment, allow unlimited contributions from billionaires and super-pacs to elections as in the 2010 Citizens United decision because they claim money is speech, collude in the stealing of elections by ordering a voter recount to be stopped as in the 2000 elections, and who, like Thomas, don’t believe they need to report their wife’s income or recuse themselves from cases where there is a conflict of interest (his wife employed by the Susan Komen foundation and the Affordable Care Act ruling, for example).  What can you expect from a presidential candidate who doesn’t think the American public has a right to see his tax returns?  With him in the White House, he may be able to nominate up to FOUR justices to the Supreme Court, who we will have to endure for 40 or 50 years.  Remember Robert Bork?  He’s BA-A-CK as Romney’s top legal advisor!
  10. Oppression vs. Justice – that means people of color, LGBT people, women, workers, students, older Americans, the poor, the ill, virtually everybody but the privileged, entitled, ultra-wealthy, elitist 1% will be further disempowered, their rights trampled, their votes suppressed, and their lives and health degraded.  Vouchers for inadequate, for-profit healthcare (another oxymoron) at astronomical prices, no equal pay for women, no raise in minimum wage, corporate price gouging, GMO-engineered, pesticide, hormone, preservative-laden Frankenfood, exploitation of public lands, pollution of the air, water, and soil, privatized social security, corporate propaganda passing for news, no public television with quality programming or accurate, in-depth journalism, and limited legal recourse for injustice.

When considering for whom NOT to vote, Romney is at the top of my list; I hope you will consider putting him there as well and pick any of the others.  I personally am voting for Roseanne, the antithesis of everything Romney represents being a feminist, environmentalist, populist, pro-education, pro-worker, secular humanist (yes I used that wonderful term!), working-class, civil libertarian peace and justice advocate and the antidote to everything that is wrong with Washington.

Children Taught to Obey Genocide Orders in US Schools

The fundamentalist group, the CEF (Child Evangelism Fellowship), has utilized its foothold in the public schools, enabled by the 2001 supreme court decision, to push its ever-increasing extremist agenda of intolerance and hatred that legitimizes even genocide of groups who believe differently than the CEF, all under the euphemistic, innocuous title of the “Good News Club”.  This could, incidentally, include not only other religions like Islam, but even mainstream Christians who do not go along with their literalist beliefs.  The article is also making the point that using the school grounds (likely classrooms) to inculcate this kind of message imbues it with more authority and makes it appear to a small child as if the school approves it.

It is important to point out that while Jesus taught and practiced kindness, love, and compassion, he was a departure from the Old Testament patriarchal god of wrath who was more than ok with genocide and in fact demanded it regularly towards the Mesopotamian peoples who practiced goddess worship.  The case of Jezebel and her people is instructive.  This is why the radical religious rightwing are so hellbent in their persecution of women and people who believe differently than they do. These hatemongers who preach this vile swill now have representatives in the highest court and every branch and level of government.

As Dorothy R. commented on this article, the Bible should not be taken literally; Joseph Campbell said that people read the Bible as prose (literal) when it should be read as poetry (symbolic). Her interpretation, though a very meaningful one,  does not undo the fact that the Hebrews quite literally wiped out whole civilizations justified by their self-serving religious beliefs and must be acknowledged as quite real in their violence.

The most disturbing aspect of all this is that young children are being terrorized and brainwashed in this way when they are much too young to be able to cognitively evaluate it or defend against the emotional impact of it, and the eventual way this will affect larger society.  Whether their parents think it is “ok” to subject them to this or not (some of them I’m sure don’t realize the content of these “lessons”) does not make it ok.  This is a form of emotional and psychological child abuse and the CEF should be up on charges of such in my opinion, as well as arguably the parents of these poor kids who are, for all intents and purposes, hostages.

The overarching danger here is that the Judeo-Christian extremists today are following in the footsteps of the Hebrews of ancient times and continue to read biblical passages like this as literal injunctions to mindlessly apply in the present as they were in the past and to inflict this authoritarian fascism on others, even innocent little impressionable minds. This is monumentally abusive of our children, our schools, and society at large and MUST BE RESISTED if we are to retain our democracy. It is a violation of the separation of church and state and puts us ever closer towards being a fundamentalist theocracy.

Children Taught to Obey Genocide Orders in US Schools | Care2

Children Taught to Obey Genocide Orders in US Schools

This is an outrage and is severe psychological and emotional child abuse to terrorize and brainwash young children with such repugnant ideology. It is important to point out that while Jesus taught and practiced kindness, love, and compassion, he was a departure from the Old Testament patriarchal god of wrath who was more than ok with genocide and in fact demanded it regularly towards the Mesopotamian peoples who practiced goddess worship.  The case of Jezebel and her people is instructive.  This is why the radical religious rightwing are so hellbent in their persecution of women and people who believe differently than they do. These hatemongers who preach this vile swill now have representatives in the highest court and every branch and level of government.  It is past time to wake up to the danger fundamentalist “Christian” extremism poses to this country and to the world.  We MUST get religion out of politics and our schools!

Children Taught to Obey Genocide Orders in US Schools | Care2 Causes#comment-3764575

SCOTUS Invalidates Breast Cancer Gene Patents | Care2 Causes

It is astonishing that the Supreme Court, with its pro-corporate majority, finally got it right.  The patenting of human genomes is an outrageous idea that should never have been allowed at all.  Hopefully this decision sets a precedent that will allow for suits to be brought regarding other such corporate abuses of humanity for profit and we can outlaw it entirely.

This is one of the myriad examples of why we need a Constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood so that corporations’ singleminded pursuit of profits over people can be reined in and governed by the actual citizens of this country instead of monstrous emotionless artificial entities who have no conscience being allowed to run amok with impunity.

SCOTUS Invalidates Breast Cancer Gene Patents | Care2 Causes