Spirit in Action

Move to Amend - Fighting Corporate Power AGAIN!

MoveToAmend.org is a nationwide effort to reverse the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision. Rick Jurmain, engineer, co-owner of a very successful local corporation, and founder of Chippewa Valley Move to Amend, is passionate about reclaiming the people's rightful place over corporations, again, and he helps us learn from the historical record of American's rising up against corporate tyrants.

Broadcast on:: 03 Nov 2013
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we're tackling one of the most crucial issues in current American politics. Corporate power in the aftermath of the horrendous Citizens United decision. Specifically, we'll be talking with Rick Jermaine, one of the founders of the Move to Amend organization in the Chippewa Valley of Wisconsin. Move to Amend is pushing for a constitutional amendment to roll back Citizens United, and Rick and Chippewa Valley move to Amend are the local fulcrum for this effort. I'm sure you'll find that Rick, who with his wife, Mary, owns three very successful local corporations, is knowledgeable and passionate. Get ready to learn some history of the struggle between people and corporations that, for whatever reason, got omitted from our history books. Just now, let's join Rick Jermaine of Chippewa Valley, Move to Amend. Rick, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you for inviting me. I understand, Rick, that you were the founder of Eau Claire's version of the Move to Amend organization. Could you tell me about the inception of that organization when it was founded, why and where it's going right now? The local organization, Chippewa Valley, Move to Amend, is an affiliate of the national organization, MoveToAmend.org. The Move to Amend organization got started immediately after the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court as a reaction to that basically give away of constitutional rights to corporations. There were a number of people around the country, a number of organizations, who felt this was a perversion of the Constitution, and brought together many organizations coordinated by MoveToAmend.org to resist this perversion, and go back to a more originalist interpretation of the Constitution without corporate constitutional rights. So you got in on the ground level here in Eau Claire County. What's the status of that organization right now? What specifically have you been moving to do? My wife, Mary, got me interested in the Move to Amend movement back in 2010. She dragged me to a meeting in Madison at which some speakers spoke very eloquently about the abuses of corporate power and the perversion of the Constitution by corporate constitutional rights. I almost immediately founded an affiliate here in the Chippewa Valley for MoveToAmend. It's the affiliate it's called Chippewa Valley MoveToAmend, and that's been active for the last two years, and this past June we were helpful in encouraging the county board to pass a ballot referendum for the November ballot that calls for a constitutional amendment to limit corporate constitutional rights. So that will be on the November 6th ballot for Eau Claire County. It is not calling for the removal of corporate rights that would be crazy. I'm not anti-corporate. I own three corporations, one of which employs 50 people here in Eau Claire. Rather, I do not want my corporations running my government. The point of this resolution is not to get rid of corporate rights, but to restrict their rights, actually their privileges to those that are given to them by the states, since they are not given any by the Constitution. And their state rights are perfectly adequate for them to do their business. It sounds like you could get an argument with our current Republican presidential nominee because he said the corporations are people. I guess there's enough history with the Supreme Court providing some rights in that direction. What do you think are appropriate rights or privileges extended to corporations and what shouldn't be extended to them? Are they people? Are they what? What do you think they are? The answer to your question is actually fairly lengthy, but let me give a brief answer. Corporations consist of people, but they do not act as people. In fact, they are forbidden by law from acting as people. There is a long-standing tradition law called the laws of fiduciary duty, which forbid any person in a corporation from acting as an individual or acting for the benefit of individuals. They are only allowed to act for the benefit of the corporation. Now, fiduciary duty, the word means trust. So this is a duty of trust. The duty of trust for any corporate officer or any member of a corporation is to act in the best interests of that corporation, not of the people in the corporation. Now, there's some subtlety here. For example, unions are considered corporations under the law. And when a union acts, it is actually forbidden by law from acting solely in the best interests of the union members. The union leadership, according to fiduciary duty, may only act in the best interests of the union organization, not the union members. A subtle difference, but extremely important difference there. What that means is that a person in a corporation or a union management may not act as a citizen. They may not act as they would outside that corporation except by coincidence. They are bound by the law of fiduciary duty to act only in the best interests of that corporation or that union. And in the case of the corporation, it is for profit for the stockholders. They can have no other outlooks along as they are wearing their hat of fiduciary duty. When they go home, they may act however they want as citizens, tout whatever political ends they wish. But when they put on their hat of fiduciary duty, they may only act as the corporation, not as individuals. So that's the general philosophical difference, the legal difference. Can you flesh it out by giving an example of how those different interests, something that might slice between those two different possibilities, the interests of the people versus the interests of the corporation? Yes, there are several examples I can give of the interests of the corporation being different from the interests of the people or the nation, the community. For example, you may have heard the expression that corporations like to outsource or externalize their costs. Well, polluting the environment is a perfect example of a corporation externalizing the cost of pollution. They don't have to pay to clean it up. They externalize that cost to the community, and the community cleans up the cost of their pollution. Another example is in some large organizations that are externalizing the cost of their health care, that if they allow their workers to work above a certain number of hours a week, then the corporation must pay for their health care. But if they keep their workers below a certain number of hours a week, then the workers are covered by community health care paid by taxes. So that's a means by which a corporation externalizes a cost to the community. It's very much to the benefit of the corporation and their stockholders and their profits to do this, but very much against the best interests of their employees and their community, both of whom must pay the cost of that health care. So it sounds to me like you could have a situation in which virtually any American citizen could look at the organization and say, well, it makes perfect sense that the corporation should make X decision, but that because of this rule of fiduciary duty that they must make a different decision. Are there actual court cases out there, which say, yeah, the board of the corporation, the officers of the corporation, were forced to make a decision that made no sense in terms of public opinion and public well-being? Actually, there are many such specifics. I can think of one offhand. For example, if British petroleum had offered to pay for pollution cleanup in the Gulf oil spill, they could easily have been sued by their stockholders for breach of fiduciary duty by trying to take unto themselves costs that they could have externalized onto the nation as a whole and let the taxpayers clean it up. So the stockholders have every right to sue the corporate management if the corporate management pays more than it absolutely has to to perform its duties because that cuts into the stockholders' profits. This isn't just a rule of fiduciary duty. This is the law of fiduciary duty. I've heard it said that corporations, if you examine their behavior, and this is by psychologists or sociologists, that what is mandated as corporate behavior is from our point of view, as a point of view of a regular human being, is sociopathic. They're sociopaths because they are only self-interested. They're only interested in what's good for them. They're not interested in the wider community. Obviously, and we have to note this exception, sometimes you have to look like you care about the community in order to do well for the corporation. So that's why, of course, many corporations say what we care about is our customers, what we care about. We're a proud supporter of the city of Eau Claire, or the state of Wisconsin, or the Green Bay Packers, whatever it is. Being the owner of three corporations does that mean that you have to act sociopathically as an owner of a corporation. I don't know if it's a closely held corporation or just owned by you and your wife. Do you end up feeling like that you have constraints, or maybe because it's closely held, that doesn't come up for you? This is a real concern for all corporate owners. Now, while my wife and I owned 100% of our corporations, we did not have to worry about what's called minority stockholder lawsuits, which would be others objecting to the way we allocated the funds of our corporations. As such, we were able to make our corporation perform according to our personal ethics. However, my wife and I now have just recently changed our corporation into an employee owned company, and we are gradually selling our stock to our employees. We do this because we believe our employees share the mission of the company just as Mary and I do. But we do not trust selling our stock to the general public or to another corporation that other owners would share these ethics. To us, it is crucial that a corporation reflect the personal ethics of the owners. But when a corporation is publicly held, there is no ethics of the owners. Many owners don't even know what corporations stock they own. All they want is the profit, and all they demand is the quarterly return on investment. Mary and I refuse to play that game, even though we could make vastly more profit by selling our company publicly. We refuse to do so. It's against our ethics. Again, I'm talking to you about this, Rick, because there is going to be on the ballot November 6 here in Eau Claire County, a question of move to amend. How about you tell us what that specific provision is, what we're going to be voting on here, because I think there's very similar motions that are being voted on nationwide. There are about 350 communities throughout the country that have voted or are about to vote on resolutions similar to what's about to happen in Eau Claire County. In virtually all of these communities, resolutions have passed by between 75 and 85 percent super majorities. This isn't a resolution that crosses party lines. It does and it well should cross party lines. The resolution in Eau Claire County that will appear on the ballot reads as follows. "Should the United States Constitution be amended to establish that regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting freedom of speech by stating that only human beings, not corporations, unions or PACs, are entitled to constitutional rights." Now, it's a bit of a mouthful, but basically what it boils down to is over the past 100 years, actually 150 years, the Supreme Court has gradually given corporations constitutional rights that they were never intended to have. Corporations are created by the states. They have no standing whatsoever in the Constitution. The states endow corporations actually, not with rights, but with privileges that allow them to facilitate business. They can enter into contracts, they can go to the courts, they can perform as if they were persons, so that they may function in business. To give corporations constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, is a perversion of the Constitution so profound. I really would need to go into about 300 years of history to show how the founders actually prevented corporations from having rights, and in fact fought a revolution largely against the abuses of the transnational corporations of the time. For example, the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest, not against tea, not against taxes. It was a protest against the special treatment of the British East India Company and the special tax breaks that the East India Company bribed from Parliament. So the Boston Tea Party, it was only the East India Company tea that they threw into the Boston Harbor, and that was because they were protesting taxes too low. It was the East India's taxes, East India Company's taxes, that were too low because of bribery of Parliament, and because every member of Parliament owned stock in the East India Company. This was a major reason why we fought a revolution, the abuses of multinational corporations or transnational corporations held by stockholders elsewhere that were subverting the law locally. We fought a revolution about that, and that is only the first of four instances in our history in which we have actually fought against transnational corporations. The current instance is the fourth, but when time permits I'd like to go into the other two. I would say that time permits Rick, but first let me remind our listeners that you're tuned in to Spirit In Action, a Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at nordenspiritradio.org, and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. Please check out our website, listen to and download any of the seven plus years of archives of both Spirit In Action and Song of the Soul, follow links to our guests, give us your feedback, including suggesting future guests, and you can also donate via our webpage. Click on the donate button or send your contribution to the address on the site. As today's Spirit In Action guest is making clear, America's corporations have lots of money and leverage, and few are eager to have an alternative message out there. I'm not counting on them for financial support, but I am counting on you. You make a difference by supporting Northern Spirit Radio. Rick Germain, founder of Chippewa Valley, moved to amend is here today for Spirit In Action. You can contact him or find someone with the comparable organization in your area via the national website, or movetoamend.org. I think, Rick, you were just tuning up to fill in a rather glaring lack in our knowledge of the history of corporations and the USA. You said that historically there were four different wars between the people and corporate power and abuse, the Revolutionary War being the first one, and the struggle against the unfortunately named Citizens United decision being the latest. Why don't you fill us in if you'd care to? Thanks. It's always nice to get carte blanche to talk about whatever you want. I'd like to wax rap-sotic here for a moment and tell a story. Actually, this is history, but it's exciting. This is a fascinating history of America and corporations. There's really nothing new that's going on here of the corporations having undue influence over our government. Americans and transnational corporations have been at odds for over 300 years. It long predates our Constitution and our revolution. There are four distinct times in the past when Americans have had to fight for their freedom and their self-rule against transnational corporations. First, let's look at what a corporation is. The first 13 colonies in America were originally set up as transnational corporations by the British. For example, the Massachusetts Bay Company was a joint stock company designed basically to extract the wealth of the Massachusetts area and return that wealth to England for the benefit of the stockholders, the stockholders being the wealthy people of England and, as it turns out, virtually every member of Parliament. So, these original 13 colonies were originally transnational corporations for the benefit of the British to extract the American wealth from America. Now, we need to describe what a corporation is. A corporation is not just a bunch of people sitting around a table. A corporation is a very precise and powerful legal entity with extra rights. Now, the original corporations, which are very similar to the corporations we have now, were established by kings to rule a remote colony somewhere else on the planet, to rule that colony in the king's place. And then it took a year to go around the world. The king could not directly rule his colonies. The king therefore created joint stock companies to govern colonies with the specific instructions to extract the wealth of those colonies and return that wealth to England for the benefit of the English stockholders. Kings gave corporations some very powerful rights that only kings had back then. They had the right of limited liability and protection from prosecution. Corporations have those rights. Limited liability means that the stockholders of a company are not liable for the debts of the company. And it's very important because it allows a corporation to raise enormous amounts of money that are needed to raise fleets and armies to build colonies. But it's basically a protection from the law. The other is protection from prosecution in that the stockholders and directors and executives of a corporation are protected from prosecution for any misdeeds done by that corporation. That means that a corporation being tasked by a king to subdue a land and extract the wealth from the land, and in fact sometimes raise armies to seize and protect those colonies, there were frequent excesses of force. And the stockholders and the board members and the executives needed protection from prosecution for those excesses, i.e. murders, massacres, rape, pillaging, plunder, whatever. It was all done by these transnational corporations. That was what they were designed to do. They were given the rights to do them, and the extra special protections so that the people who were behind doing this could not be prosecuted. Well, those protections remain in today's corporations. They designed corporations to subdue the world, for example, to make the world England, to extract the wealth from the world. That's what corporations began as. Now, another example, Georgia, Georgia gets its name from King George of England. Georgia was originally a penal colony, a corporate penal colony, run by a corporation. English prisoners were basically the slave labor in that colony. They are the ones who started the, let's call it the slave labor in Georgia, which spread to the south. Now, there came a point when there were not enough prisoners in all of England's jails to provide sufficient slaves, provide sufficient slave labor for all the plantations that were growing up in Georgia. It was too profitable. They were growing too fast. They were not enough prisoners. Well, the Georgia company says, "I don't have enough labor here." And guess what? The British Africa Company says, "I think I may have a solution for you." So, the Africa Company says, "I've got a whole bunch of people here of a different color. I think we can turn them into slaves, sell them in Georgia, and continue all this profit we're making." In fact, it increases our profits, because now I've created a new market for all these different colored people I've got here in Africa. You see where this is going? Okay, there's actually another twist to this. Now, the Massachusetts Bay Company says, "Hey, I want a piece of that action." And they say, "Well, we don't really want slaves up here." However, your slaves are working plantations that are growing sugarcane, which is turned into molasses. How about Africa Company? You send the slaves to the West Indies and to Georgia, where they grow the sugarcane and make the molasses. You now send the molasses and the sugarcane up to us in Massachusetts, where we're going to turn it into rum. We will then ship the rum now to England and to Africa, and you've just created the famous Triangle Trade. Three transnational corporations, they ran out of white slaves, so they created a new market. They opened the African market for slaves. That's where the Triangle Trade came from, the transnational corporations. And remember, these corporations, the directors, the managers, and the owners, the stockholders of the corporation, are protected from prosecution for what they've done, because the king made it so. Now, the king is not an idiot. The prophets are flowing in, but he knows that any organization that's this wealthy is a threat to him, so the king retains the right to dissolve any corporation that gets too powerful and steps out of line. Actually, they don't, not that they get too powerful, but that they step out of line. That's what the king is afraid of. If they do anything that is not in the best interests of the king and England, he will dissolve the corporation. Well, guess what? That check and balance that even a king would put on a corporation. We have removed in America. We no longer dissolve corporations as we did back in the 1700s and 1800s when they acted against the best interests of our country. That used to be the law of the land. Corporations used to be created by an act of law. The state legislatures had to pass a bill creating a corporation that was required to do only a few specific things, like build a canal. And only those things, if it stepped out of line, as some did, those corporations were dissolved. We now have reached a point where corporations, rather than being dissolved when they step out of line, they now, they become too big to fail, and they threaten entire economies if they fail, and they now extort, bail out money worth a trillion dollars. From even the most powerful nation on earth, rather than allowing those corporations to fail, how have things been twisted around? Okay, that's the first abuses of power that America fought a revolution against. The greatest abuses of power were by the governors of the colonies who were exercising their rights, running these transnational corporations, which were the colonies. What the Americans did was they petitioned to the king and said, "Hey, your governors are messing us up. They are exceeding their authority. They are abusing their privileges, and we colonists, your loyal subjects, are suffering." Well, the king sees all this wealth flowing in, and all the members of Parliament who are stockholders of all these colonial corporations, they're getting richer from it. They do nothing. So America, which wanted to be a loyal British colony, says, "This is not working." We have to break free. The only way to get rid of these corporate colonizers is to fight a revolution. And we went in a short space of 10 years from begging the king to get rid of the governors and to make the corporations more fair. In span of 10 years, we went to actually fighting a revolution against the corporate colonizers. Somehow, this has been lost in our history that we were fighting against transnational corporations that were run by Parliament and the king, but it was the corporations that were abusing, abusing their privileges. That was the first war Americans had against the transnationals. Now, the second time that Americans fought against the colonial corporations was during our westward expansion. In this case, the colonial corporations were not British. They were Spanish. When you look at Texas and California, those were colonies of Spain, and those colonies had exactly the same instructions from their king that the British had, and that was colonize the place and extract its wealth and bring that wealth back to Spain. Well, in our westward expansion, we were a much stronger nation at that point, and we pretty much brushed aside, or more easily brushed aside, the Spanish colonies. Although there were still battles, Texas in particular had some battles. By the time we got to California, the Spanish were so outnumbered, it was effectively a fatal complete, so that was not much of a battle. Now, the third time Americans fought against corporations actually was after the Civil War. As Lincoln warned, the Civil War, the money flowing to corporations for armaments, for food, for clothing, for building an army, the money involved in creating and building these corporations was so vast that corporations became vastly more powerful throughout and after the Civil War. And these corporations, Lincoln warned us, were going to cause problems. He was absolutely right, but he didn't live to see it. The corporations that came out of the Civil War led to the gilded age, or the robber barons. The robber barons, the railroad barons, they built a continent, but in so doing, they bought a government. The robber barons were literally openly bidding to buy congressmen. They were openly bidding for laws. The going rate for a law was well known to the robber barons. They would trade congressmen among themselves. And in fact, during the era of the robber barons, the corporations bought not just the federal government, but also local governments. And in so doing, they instituted a new form of slavery that was called debt bondage. And not many people have heard of debt bondage. Perhaps you've heard the old song, sold my soul to the company store. So that song actually comes out of the era of debt bondage. What debt bondage was, there were major corporations that needed vast numbers of employees, and they would build small cities, communities for those employees who worked at that factory. And they would put barbed wire fences around those communities, and they would put company stores in those communities. And all employees were required to purchase all their food and goods from those company stores. The wages and the prices, the wages of the workers and the prices of the goods of the company store were always set up so that the workers were always in debt to the company store. They sold their soul to the company store. They were not allowed to leave the company so long as they were in debt, and the local governments were purchased effectively by the companies so that their police departments were to enforce the barbed wire around the communities so that the workers could not get out. Now if anyone's ever, if you've read any works of Clarence Darrow, he was instrumental in breaking up this debt bondage. In many respects debt bondage was a worse situation than slavery in the old South. It's difficult to compare atrocities, but they were both atrocious. But debt bondage, people who walked through those communities where five families were sharing a 10 foot hut, where there was only one outhouse for every 10 huts, where the conditions were beyond horrible. There was cholera, there was every disease imaginable, and the local police departments enforced it because they had been purchased by the corporations. In this type of situation of debt bondage is what gave rose to labor unions. It was the protests against debt bondage that caused the workers to gang together to fight the local police departments and many of them lost their lives in these battles. That's where labor unions came from, and that's where labor reform came from. It was a battle against corporate control of the local and the federal government. What you're describing there sounds like the kind of thing that Upton Sinclair was writing about, and it must be that period between the end of the Civil War in the very early 1900s where corporations had such power, people were so downtrodden by the corporations by the robber barons as you call them. That is the period that we're talking about. That is what Upton Sinclair is addressing. That's exactly what he was addressing. And it lasted until Teddy Roosevelt was elected. In fact, he was elected specifically to bust up the robber barons. One of the key things he did to bust up the robber barons was something called the Tillman Act, which forbade corporations from any involvement in government. It excluded them from the bribery. They could not get involved in elections. They could not get involved with buying congressmen. In the hundred years since then, the Supreme Court has gradually thrown out bits and pieces of the Tillman Act. And in the past 20 or 30 years, it has been completely dismantled. The last bit of it being tossed overboard with the Citizens United decision. In that decision, the Supreme Court said not only that corporations are artificial persons with the right to do business, but they are constitutionally protected citizens. And here's the real perversion. They not only have free speech, but their money is their free speech. Talk about carte blanche for bribery. At no time in the history of America has free speech ever been absolute. You could not extort. You could not defame. You could not slander. You couldn't threaten or perform fraud or incite to riot or collude with a crime. All these forms of speech are against the law, except now with money being speech, bribery has been made legal by the Supreme Court. Now, we're talking five unelected people have just perverted the Constitution. Now, I've given you a history of why corporations have always been at odds with the freedoms of American people. Corporations have their place, and I want to make very clear. I am not anti-corporate. I own three corporations, and they're very successful, and I've done very well by them. But I refuse to let them govern my government or by my government. That's just wrong. That's un-American. Corporations today are not buying American government because they're evil. They're buying it because it's profitable, and they would be sued by their stockholders if they didn't. Take GE, for example. They have a division that writes laws for regulatory capture for the rights, regulations, and lobbies for General Electric, lobbies the government for General Electric. They have 150 lawyers. That's three times the size of my entire corporation. And it turns out these 150 people, that's the most profitable division of all of General Electric. When you count the tax breaks, that GE effectively bribes from our government, when you count the tax breaks and the market protections, the protections from small business competition, that GE bribes from the government in a process called regulatory capture. We seem to blame the government, but it isn't the government. The government is being controlled by the corporations, and it is the corporations that are writing these regulations, and they've bribed the government to be the fall guy. Even Adam Smith, the original free market capitalist, warned everyone, don't let corporations get anywhere near government, because the first thing they will do is create monopolies for themselves. They will use government regulation to create monopolies. Adam Smith was all for free market, but very much against corporations and corporations being involved in government. That's a total perversion of the free market. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeat, for this Nordenspirit Radio Production website, NordenspiritRadio.org. Come to our website and you'll find seven years of programs with people who are making our country a better place and making our world a better place. People working for peace, justice, and care for creation, many other ways that people are making a difference in this world. On the site you can listen to or download any of the programs. You can also get us via iTunes. You can find the list of stations where our programs are broadcast. You can leave us comments. We do love to hear from you so this conversation can be two-way, and you can also make a donation. We always need your help that way as well. Again, we're speaking today with Rick Germain. He's one of the founders of Move to Amend in the Chippewa Valley. The national website is movetoamend.org. Go to that site and you can find where these actions are taking place. In this case, we happen to be dealing with on the November 6 ballot here in Eau Claire County of Wisconsin, voting on a resolution to support constitutional amendment. There's some 350 organizations, communities nationwide who've either voted on or will be voting on this kind of an amendment. I do urge you to go to movetoamend.org and find about specifics, what's going on where you're living. We're talking to Rick to get a history of these corporations. We just had an excellent overview of corporations and their power and efforts to control their power, which have unfortunately turned in favor of corporations over the last 30 years. Rather dramatically. We've got this vote coming up on Move to Amend, and I wanted to ask you some specifics about if this passes. Now, you said in the past, everywhere it's been voted on, it's been strongly supported by the people of this nation. Once these resolutions pass, do they make any difference? We know that the United Nations, they pass resolutions all the time and nothing happens. Is there something concrete that should be coming out of these resolutions? Move to Amend is still in the early phases of developing support throughout the country. About 350 communities have voted on it. It's passed by 75 to 85% super majorities everywhere. It may yet be 10 years before we get an amendment passed. But what this resolution, this referendum does, is a small drop in a bucket. The bucket is the American populace. We all have the duty as citizens to contribute to this. What we are doing is sending a message to our state legislators to call for a constitutional amendment. Right now, individual citizens do not have a specific role in creating a constitutional amendment. The process for a constitutional amendment is for the states to call for an amendment, then for the federal government, for our federal legislators to pass an amendment, and then it goes to the states for ratification by three quarters of the states. At no point in there is the common populace explicitly, they explicitly have a role, but we do have a role, and that is to lean on our state legislators and on our federal legislators to support an amendment. We have a very powerful lean. When enough of us get together and say, we've had enough, it's time for things to change, and it's time for this perversion of corporate constitutional rights to end. And when enough of us stand up, governments listen, and that's the way it should be, that's the way this was designed. First three words of our constitution state, there's only one power in this nation, and that's we, the people. Government is created by we the people, government is subordinate to we the people, and government has no rights, government only has duties to we the people. One of those duties is to create corporations, and these corporations are created by a government which is created by people to serve us, not to serve them. So to now give corporations the standing of constitutional rights, the same as we the people, when we the people create the government which creates the corporations to serve us, talk about a perversion. That's definitely putting the wolves in charge of the sheep as it were. We have these corporations that were created by kings effectively to rule the world and to pillage the world for the profit of the kings. We have now removed all the checks and balances on those corporations. We can no longer dissolve those corporations as we used to be able to in this country. We are at the mercy of those corporations, and we haven't even told those corporations to go out and make the world America. At least the English told their corporations to make the world England. We haven't even done that. Our corporations are going out into the world to pillage for corporations to make the world corporations. This is wrong. This has to end. And one step in making it end will be the many localities and, perhaps, states voting to support the move to amend process, the process to amend our constitution to redress this horrible imbalance with corporations. I'd assumed, Rick, that one of the side effects of this growth in corporate power, it's the income disparity that's happening in this country, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. I assumed that what's happened is that people of the money who own the corporations who are only putting more money in their pocket by the growth of power corporations, that this wealth income disparity is one of the side effects of that. Is that how you read it? That's exactly right. It used to be that government was designed by we the people as a check and balance on corporations because government is the only power strong enough to be a check and balance on corporations. Corporations have now outgrown it, and we have forgotten the role of government as a check and balance. We have allowed corporations to get involved in our elections, and by doing so, it allows corporations to remove the checks and balances on them by electing people who will do so. I can tell that you're passionate about this, Rick, and I would love to spend more time talking to you about it, but we're going to run out of time here, the clocks clicking down. There are a couple questions I want to ask you more on a personal level because as always with this program, I'm interested in what motivates you, what drives you, and maybe it's because you're a student of history and you've seen what works well or badly for this country. I usually put that question in form of religion or spirituality or your worldview that makes this a primary issue. Obviously, you're busy enough with three corporations to your ownership. You could be doing something else besides running an organization like Move to a Men in the Chippewa Valley. So tell me, what makes this central to you? What in your spiritual, religious, or worldview background makes this an issue that's central for you? What makes this work for me is a couple of things. One is, I love the ideals of my country. I'm a patriot to those ideals. That doesn't mean I love what our country is right now, but I am a patriot to the ideals of equality. Our country was made for the power of the little guy, the power of the small business, the power of the individual having as much power before the law as the government and as any corporation, even more power. That's been perverted, but I am still loyal to those ideals. I'm patriotic to those ideals of the country. And secondly, as my children, I want them to live in that country for which I hold those ideals. I want that country to exist for my children, even if it doesn't exist now. That's worth fighting for. I have to say that the Chippewa Valley, and I think the nation as a whole, are fortunate to have you fighting for that through the Move to a Men process. I want to remind people that the website nationally is movetoamend.org. You can find about these efforts to overturn the effects of Citizens United and redress some of this balance that exists between real people and the artificial people that we call corporations. Rick Jermaine has been leading that fight in the Chippewa Valley, and if you go to movetoamend.org, I think you'll find people locally who are carrying on that effort towards you. I urge you to get involved in it and to make this world a better place. And I want to thank you, Rick, for doing that battle here and for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you very much, Mark, for having me here. We'll close out Spirit in Action today with an upbeat song about the people's power by the group Emma's Revolution. I've had Pat and Sandy of Emma's Revolution on my programs, and I hope you'll check them out. This song is about standing up to corporate power and getting government out of the corporation's pockets. It's called Stand Together. See you next week for Spirit in Action. Emma's Revolution, Stand Together. We teach our children, we plow your roads, we clean your office, we hold a heavy load. We're the workers who make this country run. We tend the gardens and the patients. We are families, friends and students, and we'll stay here until we've won. When the people stand together, ain't no power ever stronger. When the people stand together now. When the people stand together, ain't no power ever stronger. The people stand together now. They've got their money, they've got their name, but we'll no longer let them ring the game. And we like to suppose the unseat corporate hand that keeps on taking in return just once more. It's time for them to learn. This stain house is our night in the sand. When the people stand together, ain't no power ever stronger. When the people stand together now. When the people stand together, ain't no power ever stronger. The people stand together now. [Music] From Wisconsin to Ohio, Indiana, and then who knows? From Michigan to New Jersey, sure. United, we will gather for our families and our future. It's our unions, it's our lives we're fighting for. When the people stand together, ain't no power ever stronger. When the people stand together now. When the people stand together, ain't no power ever stronger. The people stand together now. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World", performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.