January 21st Speech at Minnesota State Capitol rotunda

By Laird Monahan

One year ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a five to four decision, gave away our Democracy to the Oligarchs and corporate elites. They made a fraud out of our Constitution and I was mad as hell. I told my brother, Robin, that I was going to walk across the entire United States and tell the people that their government no longer belonged to We the People and that if we wanted to get it back we were going to have to get the support of every American Citizen.

Robin, who had just laid down while waiting for his anger to pass, thought mine was the better idea and decided we had to do this walk together. We did. We started in San Francisco on May 16th and arrived at the Lincoln Memorial on October 20th. And we found that everyone we talked to along the way was mad as hell, too.

What those five justices did was to make law from the bench telling the corporations they were protected by the constitution to spend as much money on their favorite candidates as they wished. And in so doing they institutionalized and legalized both bribery and the intimidation of our representatives.

We have already seen the results of corporate influence on laws and regulations passed by Congress prior to the Supreme Court ruling on corporate personhood. Every one of them has made me mad as hell:

    1. Over the past 20 years our schools have dropped to 14th place in college graduates among the developed countries of the world. Also, McGraw-Hill is the biggest textbook publisher and McGraw-Hill, in partnership with Council of Chief State School Officers, is our biggest “independent classroom testing agency.” Go figure.

    2.  Our health care system is the most expensive in the world. It’s almost double the cost of Switzerland, the second most expensive country. And, according to the World Health Organization, the United State’s overall health care ranking among 191 nations is 37th, just behind Costa Rica. Say what?

    3. Our military, our sons and daughters (God bless them all for volunteering their service and their lives for our country), are fighting an illegal and trumped up war promoted by corporate interests that are making enormous profits from it, with no end in sight.  “When will we ever learn?...”

    4. Our representatives have passed laws for the benefit of corporate profits that have reduced or rendered ineffective environmental and health regulations, allowing the pollution of our water, air and the food we eat. We are daily subjected to chemical spills, emissions and inadequately tested crop sprays, not to mention genetically altered plant and animal species designed more for corporate convenience and profit than for consumer health.

    5. BP has destroyed the eco-system of the Gulf of Mexico for decades, maybe centuries, to come thanks to lack of government oversight and those revolving-door handpicked regulators who allowed cost-cutting and corner-cutting, turning a blind eye to allow increased corporate profits for BP.

    6. Our banks have turned to fraud as their best way to enhance profits and we, the taxpayers, are made to pick up the tab. After destroying our world-economy our bank executives demanded - and received - increases in their annual bonuses.  What the…?

    7. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our roads and bridges - once the envy of the world - are falling apart. Our school buildings need repair. Our water mains and sewer systems are ancient and in many areas leaking contaminants into the ground water. Meanwhile, the wealthiest one percent of the population - the elite corporate executives - are being taxed at their lowest rates in eighty years.

    8. NAFTA and fair trade laws have taken good jobs from the United States and allowed corporations to enslave children and workers in foreign countries to both maximize their profits and avoid safety and pollution standards.

    9. Just last month the FCC, with the advice of industry leaders, allowed Verizon and AT&T (and other major players) to become the gatekeepers of our wireless internet.  Net neutrality is a dead issue.  We may not see immediate changes, but they are systemic - and they are coming.

All of these issues have one common thread.  Corporations have preempted the debate. Corporations own the representatives we elected.  We need to deny corporations protections of the Constitution and make them servants of the common good.

Here's our message for those legislators we voted for to represent us: Unless they support an amendment to the constitution to ABOLISH CORPORATE PERSONHOOD they no longer represent We the People.  

We want them to pass the Fair Elections Now Act.

We want each of them to know that if they take a campaign contribution from any corporation, they have lost our vote.  From now on, corporate contributions are the kiss of death for their campaigns and we demand transparency.

 - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power."

 We are telling our state representatives, our Congressional legislators and our Senators that we are mad as hell and we are taking our government back!!! If they want to represent We the People they had better get on board this train - or get run over.

we are telling them

we are mad as hell!