Elizabeth Gurley Flynn with Pat Quinlan, Carlo Tresca,
Adolph Lessig, and Big Bill Haywood
Paterson, New Jersey 1913

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Arrives

On January 27, 1913 at the Doherty Silk Mill in Paterson, New Jersey, a workers committee requested a meeting with management. They wanted an end to the hated four-loom system which had doubled their work load with no increase in pay, and had caused the lay-offs of many of their fellow workers. When four members of that committee were fired, 800 silk workers, almost the entire work force, walked off the job spontaneously. They were without union organization to back them up. Being mostly foreign-born, non-English-speaking, unskilled workers, the AFL’s United Textile Workers did not want them.

But, in fact, there was another textile union in Paterson at that time: the IWW’s National Industrial Union of Textile Workers, Local 152 which local organizers, Ewald Koettgen and Adolph Lessig had established over several years of organizing. It was there, with this stalwart band of 100 Wobblies, that the strikers found a union willing to back up their strike. As it became clear that Doherty would not bargain with the strikers, Local 152 request help from IWW headquarters in Chicago.

On February 25, 1913, national IWW organizers, Pat Quinland, Carlos Tresca, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrived to speak at a mass meeting. All three were arrested that night at the meeting. Strikers followed them to the jail and held a rally outside the jail, singing and shouting for their release. Women shouted, “When the strike is won, Gurley Flynn will be the boss!”

By the time Big Bill Haywood arrived, later that week, the strike had spread to silk mills across Paterson. 300 mills were shut down, and 25,000 silk workers were on strike. Big Bill advised the strikers: “fold your arms or put your hands in your pocket and let the manufacturers do the worrying.”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaking to Strikers
Paterson, New Jersey 1913

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaks to Strikers

Meetings, rallies, marches, speeches, and singing were features of any IWW strike, and the Paterson Silk Strike fit that mold. Mass meetings were held every morning, and shop committee meetings each afternoon. Each shop elected two strikers to represent them on the shop committee, and this was the committee that ran the strike. There were also special meetings for the women and children who made up more than half of the strikers.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was much beloved by the strikers. Reporter Art Shields describes the strikers reaction to her:

Fifteen to twenty-thousand strikers and sympathizers were applauding a beautiful young woman, whose passionate voice reached everyone in the crowd. She spoke from a high platform heaped with gorgeous flowers. But violets and roses paled before this twenty-one-year-old beauty, and I fell in love with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at first sight.

I wasn’t her only captive. No other woman speaker except Mother Jones won so many hearts as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She won them in struggles against big exploiters, not in quiet lecture halls….

And there was a dramatic scene when Elizabeth called an Italian girl she knew to the platform. This was a pale, thin teenager..Elizabeth embraced her and then said, “The silk bosses are killing Angelica. They are working her to death. They put her on four looms instead of two. She’s working twice as hard as before.”

…”But that isn’t all the silk bosses did to Angelica. They didn’t give her enough to eat.” Angelica, she said, was the only support of a sick mother and her younger brothers and sisters. Her father was dead. Her family was hungry The family seldom ate meat. “She’s also striking,” Elizabeth said, “for a raise to give her family enough to eat.”

The silk bosses are robbers, Elizabeth continued. The cars they are driving, the diamonds their wives are wearing, the rich food their families are eating, their winter vacations in Florida’s sunshine-all come from the labors of Angelica and twenty-five thousand other silk workers. “And when you win the raises you are fighting for,” she said, “you’ll get back only a little of what you produced. But these raises are just a beginning. The time is coming when you will run these plants for yourselves.”

“She got to be an idol with us.”

Irma Lombardi was a young seventeen-year-old striker. She left us this description of Gurley Flynn:

Gurley Flynn called a meeting just for the women one day. She started with that lovely way of hers. She looked at us and said, “Would you like to have nice clothes?” We replied, “Oh, yes.” “Would you like to have nice shoes?” “Oh,yes.” we shouted. “Well, you can’t have them. Your bosses’ daughters have those things!” We got mad. We knew it was true. We had shoes with holes, and they had lovely things. Then she said, “Would you like to have soft hands like your bosses’ daughters?” and we got mad all over again. She was a beautiful speaker. She got be an idol with us.

Sophie Cohen was the child of a former mill worker. Though not a striker, her father was passionate in his support of the strike, and often brought her to the rallies. She later remembered Gurley Flynn:

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
IWW Organizer

Gurley Flynn looked just like the pictures we see of her now. She was young, vibrant, enthusiastic. She wan’t really a good speaker, but she gave so much of herself in her talks. She would come at night to the soup kitchens. There were big cauldrons of soup set up in a lot next to the church and she would get up on a platform. There were red flares around her, and she’d get them singing and then she’d talk with them. It was just the thing people needed to keep them together and give them courage.

Sundays in Haledon

Meetings were not allowed in Paterson, but the nearby town of Haledon had a Socialist mayor who welcomed the strikers. On Sundays thousands of strikers marched to Haledon. A striker’s family offered the use of their two-story house. Speeches were given from the upper balcony to the crowd gathered below in the street and in the large green field opposite the house. Gurley Flynn later remembered those Sunday meetings fondly:

Sunday after Sunday , as the days became pleasanter, we spoke there to enormous crowds of thousands of people-the strikers and their families, workers from other Paterson industries, people from nearby New Jersey cities, delegations from all over America and from foreign countries. People who saw these Haledon meetings never forgot them.

But there was a deeper reason for going to Haledon on Sundays, Gurley Flynn explained:

Because Sunday is the day before Monday. Monday is the day that a break comes in every strike, if it is to come at all during the week. If you can bring the people safely over Monday they usually go along for the rest of the week. If on Sunday, however, you let those people stay at home, sit around the stove without any fire in it, sit down at the table were there isn’t much food, see the feet of the children with shoes getting thin and the bodies of children where the clothes are getting ragged, they begin to think in terms of “myself” and lose the spirit of the mass and the realization that all are suffering as they are suffering…And so our original reason for going to Haledon was to give them novelty, to give them variety, to take them en masse out of the city of Paterson some place else to sort of picnic over Sunday that would stimulate them for the rest of the week.

Mass Arrests
On the picket lines, the strikers were subject to daily mass arrest. Many were sentenced to ten or twenty days, some to six months at hard labor. Most of the strikers went straight back to the picket line upon their release. Seventeen-year-old Hannah Silverman was arrested three times. She was back on the picket line the next morning each time she was released. Big Bill Haywood hailed her as “the greatest little IWW woman in America.” When Carrie Torello was arrested, she gathered her children together, put them in the patrol wagon and told another striker, “If you see Freddie, tell him to come to Jail.”

The Paterson Press
The Paterson Press openly called for violence against the IWW organizers, calling for the formation of a vigilance committee to drive them out of town:

Los Angeles, Akron, Denver, Ottowa, and other cities kicked the I.W.W. out of town in short order…What is Paterson doing to discourage this revolutionary horde?

And another example:

Akron, Ohio, could not find a law to banish this dangerous revolutionist [Big Bill] and his cohorts but a citizens’ committee of 1000 men did the trick in short order. Can Akron, Ohio, accomplish something that Paterson, N.J., cannot duplicate? The Paterson Press dislikes to believe it, but time will tell.

WE NEVER FORGET
On Thursday, April 17, 1913, Modestino Valentino was murdered by private detectives, hired gunmen imported from New York by the mill owners. This man’s only crime against the mill owners was that he was standing on his own front porch watching the strikers hoot at the scab-herders. He was not a striker, nor was he a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The hooting so bothered the gunmen that they felt compelled to open fire on unarmed workers. Gurley Flynn described how he died:

[He] grabbed his child and started through the doorway, when he was shot in the back. His wife grabbed the child and her husband fell and dead at her feet.

Gurley Flynn went with a committee of strikers to visit the widow:

She was in bed, awaiting the birth of a second child. On the other side of a folding partition was the casket of her dead husband, parallel to the bed. The priest came in while we were there but he made no objection to our request [for the I.W.W. to provide for the funeral.] She was a simple grief-stricken woman, who expressed her sympathy with the strikers, many of whom were her neighbors. She placed the blame where it belonged-on the company thugs who murdered her husband. It was a tragic example of force and violence by the employers in the class struggle-a worker dead , a woman widowed, two children, one unborn, left orphans-a story repeated all too often in my experience.

According to IWW historian, Fred Thompson, five workers in all lost their lives in the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913.

Hunger, the Great Strikebreaker
In spite of the courage shown by the strikers and their leaders, the silk strikers were defeated. Some small concessions were made by a few of the mill owners, but for the most part, strikers went back to work defeated. Some had been replaced by scabs and were never rehired. Gurley Flynn partially blamed the Pageant for the loss of the strike, asserting that it was a distraction from strike duties. It was a financial disaster also, which only further discouraged the strikers. But in the end the strike was lost because the strikers were starving. Gurley Flynn later spoke of the suffering that the strikers endured before they were driven back to work by hunger:

I saw men go out in Paterson without shoes, in the middle of winter and with bags on their feet, I went into a family to have a picture taken of a mother with eight children who didn’t have a crust of bread, didn’t have a bowl of milk for the baby in the house,-but the father was out on the picket line. Others were just as bad off. Thousands of them that we never heard of at all. This was the difficulty that the workers had to contend with in Paterson: hunger; hunger gnawing at their vitals; hunger tearing them down; and still they had the courage to fight it out for six months.

Let us honor their courage and sacrifice by continuing the struggle for social and economic justice.

Solidarity,
JayRaye

SOURCES

The IWW: Its First Seventy Years 1905-1975
-by Fred W Thompson & Patrick Murfin
IWW Press, 1976

The Rebel Girl
My First Life (1906-1926)
-by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
NY, 1979

Women and the American Labor Movement
From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I
-by Philip S Foner
NY, 1979

My Shaping-Up Years
-by Art Shields
NY, 1982

Solidarity Forever
An Oral History of the IWW
-ed by Bird, Georgaks, & Shaffer
Lake View Press, 1985

Words on Fire
The Life and Writing of
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
-by Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall
Rutgers U Press, 1987

Rebel Voices
An IWW Anthology
-ed by Joyce L Kornbluh
Charles H Kerr Pub, 1988

From the cover of the International Socialist Review of March 1913

MOTHER JONES ARRIVES IN WEST VIRGINIA

June 11, 1912
Charleston Gazette
Interview with Mother Jones

I am simply a social revolutionist. I believe in collective ownership of the means of wealth. At this time the natural commodities of this country are cornered in the hands of a few. The man who owns the means of wealth gets the major profit, and the worker, who produces the wealth from the means in the hands of the capitalist, takes what he can get. Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner than we think, evolution and revolution will have accomplished the overturning of the system under which we now live, and the worker will have gained his own.

This change will come as the result of education. My life work has been to try to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer, and does suffer-and to stir up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightfully theirs. When force is used to hinder the worker in his efforts to obtain the thing which are his he has the right to meet force with force. He has the right to strike for what is his due, and he has no right to be satisfied with less. The people want to do right , but they have been hoodwinked for ages. They are now awakening, and the day of their enfranchisement is near at hand.
[Reprinted in the March 1913 issue of the International Socialist Review.http://archive.org/stream/InternationalSocialistReview1900Vol13/ISR-volume13#page/n683/mode/2up/search/648] (pdf!)

Mother Jones gave this interview shortly after her arrival in Charleston. She came by train from Butte, Montana where she had been working with the copper miners of the Western Federation of Miners. Now, she was in West Virginia to assist the the striking miners of the United Mine Workers of America. The miners of Paint Creek were striking for renewal of their contract. The operators were refusing to sign a new contract preferring instead to bust the Union. At issue were all of the usual grievances: dangerous conditions, short weights, payment in company scrip, poor housing, low wages, blacklisting, poor medical care, and never-ending debt. But above all, the miners hated the brutal company-guard system.

To break the strike, the operators had contracted with the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency which supplied them with three hundred gun-thugs who began a campaign of terror against the miners and their families. Even before Mother Jones arrived, there had been clashes with the company guards, and loss of life on both sides. The guards had more weapons, including machine guns, but the miners had more men, seven thousand by some accounts.

MOTHER JONES BRINGS OUT CABIN CREEK

Cabin Creek was known as “forbidden territory.” Miner [Frank Keeneyhttp://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1172] was not afraid to enter, but could find no one to go with him until early August when he found Mother Jones. Miner [Fred Mooneyhttp://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/2028] later told the story:

He [Frank Keeney] proceeded to locate Mother Jones and after a thorough understanding was reached, a date was set for Mother Jones to go into the forbidden territory. I was standing on the bridge at Cabin Creek Junction the day Mother Jones entered Cabin Creek. Her hair was snow white, but she could walk mile after mile and never show fatigue. When we saw her drive by in a horse drawn vehicle we knew the meaning of that visit and we fully expected to hear of her being killed by the gunmen. She arrived at Eskdale without mishap, but after she passed through the business center of town and as she approached the southern residence section a body of gunmen could be seen just ahead….

But she drove her rig near [to the gunmen] and one of the miners assisted her to alight. She surveyed the scene with a critical eye and walked straight up to the muzzle of one of the machine guns and patting the muzzle of the gun, said to the gunman behind it, “Listen here, you, you fire one shot here today and there are 800 men in those hills (pointing to the almost inaccessible hills to the east) who will not leave one of your gang alive.”

It was a bluff, there were no miners in those hills. But the bluff worked. Mother Jones held her mass meeting in Eskdale, and the miners of Cabin Creek joined the strike with Eskdale as a militant center of strike activity.

MOTHER JONES SPEAKS

Mother Jones Speaks

We have the stenographer hired by the operators to thank for the preservation of these speeches. These five speeches were later entered into the court-martial proceedings as evidence against Mother Jones. Full text of the August 15th speech can be read [here.http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/mother-jones-speech-at-a-public-meeting-speech-text/]

August 1, 1912
Charleston, WV
Speech on the levee
from the back of a dray wagon:

…We have broken the chains of chattel slavery, we changed his condition from a chattel slave to wage slave. But you say we didn’t make it any better. Oh, yes, we did, we made it better for the chattel slave. Then we entered into industrial slavery. That was one step in advance. We forever wiped out chattel slavery and came into industrial slavery. Now, industrial slavery is the battle you are in….

Today we are four hundred thousand strong, marching on to liberty, marching on to freedom. We are the United Mine workers of America today numbering four hundred thousand….

August 4, 1912
Montgomery, WV
Speech at the baseball park:

…Now, the Judge said if the operators would quit paying the Baldwin guards they would leave the State. The operators don’t pay the Baldwin guards, they don’t pay them a penny. If it had to come out of their pockets the Baldwin guards would be gone long ago. The miners are robbed in the weighing of coal, in rent and in the store, they pay the Baldwin guards. (Applause.)

You are the fellows that have got the right to clean up the Baldwin guards because you are the fellows who pay them…

August 15, 1912
Charleston, West Virginia
Speech on the capitol steps:

[After first reading a petition to Governor Glasscock for removal of the armed company guards...]

I want to say with all due respect to the Governor-I want to say to you that the Governor will not, cannot do anything, for this reason: The Governor was placed in this building by Scott and Elkins [industrialists] and he don’t dare oppose them. (Loud applause.) Therefore, you are asking the Governor of the State to do something that he cannot do with out betraying the class he belongs to…

We will give the Governor until tomorrow night to take them guards out of Cabin Creek..Here on the steps of the Capitol of West Virginia, I say that if the Governor won’t make them go then we will make them go…

It is freedom or death, and your children will be free. We are not going to leave a slave class to the coming generation, and I want to say to you that the next generation will not charge us for what we have done, they will charge and condemn us for what we have left undone. (Cries of: “That is right.”)…

I see that hour. I see the Star breaking your chains; your chains will be broken, men. You will have to suffer more and more, but it won’t be long. There is an awakening among all the nations of the earth…

Oh, men, have you any hearts? Oh, men, do you feel? Oh, men, do you see the judgement day on the throne above, when you will be asked, “Where did you get your gold?” You stole it from these wretches. You murdered, you assassinated, you starved, you burned them to death, that you and your wives might have palaces, and that your wives might go to the sea-shore…

[They say] “Oh, them horrible miners. Oh, that horrible old Mother Jones, that horrible old woman.” I am horrible, I admit, and I want to be to you blood-sucking pirates. I want you, my boys, to buckle on your armor. This is the fighting age. This is not the age for cowards, put them out of the way…

This day marks the forward march of the workers in the state of West Virginia. Slavery and oppression will gradually die…The day of oppression will be gone. I will be with you whether true or false. I will be with you at midnight or when the battle rages, when the last bullet ceases, but I will be in my joy…

September 6, 1912
Charleston, WV
Speech in the courthouse square:

…When we were on the Capitol grounds the last time you came here, you had a petition to the Governor for a peacful remedy and solutiion ot this condition. The mine owners, the bankers, the plunderers of the State went in on the side door and got a hearing, and you didn’t. (Loud applause.)…

Now, then, go with me up those creeks, and see the blood-hounds of the mine owners, approved of by your public officials, see them insulting women, see them coming up the track. I went up there and they followed me like hounds But some day I will follow them. When I see them go to Hell, I will get the coal and pile it up on them….

Now then, let me ask you. When the miners-a miner that they have robed him of one leg in the mines and never paid him a penny for it-when he entered a protest, they went into his house not quite a week ago, and threw out his whole earthly belongings, and he and his wife and six children slept on the roadside all night. Now, you can’t contradict that. Suppose we had taken a mine owner and his wife and children and threw them out on the road and made them sleep all night, the papers would be howling “anarchy”…

The whole machinery of capitalism is rotten to the core. This meeting tonight indicates a milestone of progress of the miners and workers of the State of West Virginia. I will be with you, and the Baldwin guards will go. You will not be serfs, you will march, march, march on from milestone to milestone of human freedom, you will rise like men in the new day and slavery will get its death blow. It has got to die…

September 21, 1912
Charleston, WV
Speech on the lawn of the YMCA:

…We have entered West Virginia-I have – and a hundred thousand miners have pledged their support to me, “If you need us, Mother, we will be there.” Five thousand men last Sunday night said, “We are ready, Mother, when you call on us.” The revolution is here. We can tie up every wheel, every railroad in the State, when we want to do it. Tyranny, robbery and oppression of the people must go…

This strike ain’t going to end until we get a check-weighman on the tipple. That is the law. It is on the statute books-that your coal will be weighed…You miners here have stood for it [being robbed of weight], you have starved your children, starved yourselves, you have lived in dog-kennels -they wouldn’t build one for their dogs as bad as yours. You have lived in them and permitted them to rob you, and then got the militia for the robbers. You can get all the militia in the state, we will fight it to the finish-if the men don’t fight, the women will. They won’t stand for it….

I don’t worry about [jail], I am down at the Fleetwood when they want to put me in jail for violation of the law, come along for me, come. There is coming a day when I will take the whole bunch of you and put you in jail. (Applause.)

TRAVELING AND SPEAKING

Throughout that fall and winter, Mother Jones continued giving speeches for the miners. She led parades for the women and children, always advocating for the education of the miner’s children and end of child labor. She traveled to Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, and Washington D.C, giving speeches and raising money for the strikers. Sadly, these speeches have not been recorded for history.

THE ATTACK ON HOLLY GROVE & THE BATTLE OF MUCKLOW

At about 11 PM on the night of February 7, 1913, the “Bull Moose Special,” an armored train equipped with machine guns, opened fire on the miners and their families at Holly Grove. Maud Estep later [testifiedhttp://www.wvculture.org/history/labor/paintcreekestep.html] that her husband, stiking miner, [Francis Estephttp://www.wvgenweb.org/wvcoal/estep.html] was shot dead as he tried to get his pregnant wife and son to safety in the cellar.

Three days later the miners marched in protest to Mucklow where they were met by the gun thugs. Twelve miners and four company guards died in the battle that followed. Governor Glasscock declared martial law in the strike zone, ordered six companies of militia to occupy the area, and established a military commission. A wave of arrests soon followed.

IN THE MILITARY BASTILLE

Mother Jones in the hands of the military.

On February 13, Mother Jones was in Charleston attempting to lead a protest march and speak with the Governor when she was taken into custody along with 125 other protesters. Charleston was outside the area of martial law, yet those arrested were transported into the martial law district and imprisoned in Pratt to await trial by the military court. The miners were held in harsh conditions, but Mother Jones was held in a [commandeered boardinghousehttp://www.nps.gov/nhl/DOE_dedesignations/Jones.htm], and cared for by the landlady, Isabel Carney.

Meanwhile, a new governor, Dr. Henry Hatfield, was sworn in on March 4, 1913. In later years he recalled traveling to the strike area where he found Mother Jones sick with pneumonia and with a temperature of 104 degrees. He recalled having her treated in Charleston and then returned to the boardinghouse prison, although there is no official record of this.

Visitors were forbidden, but one reporter did manage to get in to see her, A.J. Hollis of the Pittsburgh Leader who managed to interview her through the basement floorboards. He was detained for several hours in the bullpen for his efforts. An exception was made for Cora Older, wife of the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, who quoted Mother Jones:

I can raise just as much hell in jail as anywhere.

Mother Jones did write letters from the military prison, perhaps smuggled out as she later remembered. She had some powerful allies in Washington D.C: William B Wilson, former UMWA official and, now Secretary of Labor, and also US Senators Borah and Kern. She was able to get messages out to all three of them. Some of her letters were published in the [Appeal to Reasonhttp://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAappealR.htm] and other socialist newspapers of the day. Other letters were more personal:

March 6, 1913
Letter to [Terence V. Powderlyhttp://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USApowderly.htm]
(as written, without correction):

Pratt W Va
Military Bastile
My dear friend
You no doubt have heard of my arrest by the hounds of capitalism they have me in close confinement-there are two military guarding me day and night. No one is allowed to speak to me. they squashed all constitutional rights and handed me over to the military. here I am-the first thing I will do if I am turned loose will be to go up and see you.
Tomorrow at ten o clock we will be taken before the Military Court for trial. They charge me and 3 national organizers besid the Editor of the Argus a local labor paper. neither one of us was in the marshall law zone they picked me up on the streets of Charleston-kidnaped me moved me with 2 others down in the military camp. here I am now for 22 days! not allowed to speak to anyone or see anyone. Just think of it I have lived 80 years and never before charged with any crime. Now I am charged with stealing a cannon from the Military-inciting to riot-putting dinamite under track to blow up A.C.O. road-We were not there at all. Just think what the tools of the olagarchy can descend to. I know they are death on me for I have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They came to me yesterday wanted to get a Lawyer & witnesses I refused to get either. I said if I have brok the Law of the State or nation I do not want any Lawyer or Witnesses. One fellow Said I should be Drummed out of the State. I have a lot to tell you when I see you God spare me the Heart to fight them Love to my dear Emma [Mrs Powderly] tell her not to worry-I’ll fight the Pirates forever.
Mother

THE COURT-MARTIAL OF MOTHER JONES

Friday, March 7, 1913, 10 AM
Pratt, West Virginia
From the Proceedings of the
Military Commission:

Mary Jones: Will you permit me to make a statement, General Wallace?
The Judge Advocate: Proceed, Mother.
Mary Jones: I have no defense to make. Whatever I have done in West Virginia, I have
done it all over the United States, and when I get out, I will do it again. The Judge Advocate: We will enter a plea of not guilty for you.

Mother Jones along with four other defendants refused to recognize the validity of the military court. Pleas of not guilty were entered for them. The forty-five other defendants pleaded not guilt and were provided counsel. The charges included murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit property damage, charges of being an accessory after the fact, and weapons charges. They were all facing long prison sentences, and even the death penalty was a possibility.

The five speeches noted above were entered as evidence by the prosecution in an attempt to prove that the Mother Jones had inflamed the miners and had caused them to murder company mine guards. When in fact, she had counseled only self-defense. The mine guards who died, were killed in battle with weapons in hand. Unlike Francis Estep who was shot and killed, unarmed, in his own home.

The editor of the socialist newspaper, Labor Argus was one of the defendants, and several pages from that newspaper were read into the record, including this:

It has always been said that it was a hard job to keep a woman’s mouth shut. Governor Glasscock is evidently of that opinion as he sent sixteen soldiers with guns and ammunition to keep an old woman over eighty years of age from making a speech and then failed. We would advise the Governor to send the whole regiment along the next time he wants to stop Mother Jones from speaking.

March 12, 1913
Captan Charles R Morgan for the defense:

Now, gentlemen, as to one of my clients, the aged lady, who has sat here so patiently and listened to the testimony…this old lady is fighting the battles of the laboring man and has been for years and years…

[Those] speeches that she made were made all the way back last summer, shortly after the poor old woman had waded the creek in order to get to the place she was going to speak. My God, it is enough to make the blood of an old woman boil when she is force to do things of that kind; when men-will stand on each side of the creek and force an old woman to march in the middle of it, in order that she may get up to say a few works to “the boys” that she-whose interest she thinks she is advancing-Where is there a single item of evidence connecting this old woman with the conspiracy, if a conspiracy has been shown, and which we say we do not think has been shown. Now, the state has failed.

The verdicts and sentences were submitted by the military commission to Governor Hatfield under seal, and were never revealed by the Governor. No official record has ever been found. However, many of the prisoners were soon released. Mother Jones was one of those who remained a prisoner of the military. According to Edward Steel, the “ringleaders” were kept as hostages to strengthen the Governor’s hand in forcing the the national leaders of the UMWA to accept his proposed settlement of the strike.

ON THE SENATE FLOOR

Meanwhile, Senator John W. Kern of Indiana, Democratic Majority Leader, had introduced a resolution calling for an investigation into the conditions of coal mining in West Virginia. During debate on the resolution, Senator Goff of West Virginia referred to Mother Jones as the “grandmother of all agitators.” Senator Kern then took the floor and read this telegram from Mother Jones into the Congressional Record:

Hansford, West Virginia
May 4, 1913
Senator Kern
Care Senate Chamber
Washington, D.C.
From out the military prison walls, where I have been forced to pass my eighty-first milestone of life., I plead with you for the honor of this Nation. I send you groans and tears of men, women, and children as I have heard them in this State, and beg you to force that investigation. Children yet unborn will rise and bless you.
Mother Jones

The Kern Resolution passed and the investigation eventually totaled over 2000 pages of testimony. The final report is available online and makes interesting reading:

U.S. Congress. Senate. Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor. Investigations of Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia. 1913.
[Final Reporthttp://ia700202.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924002217234/cu31924002217234.pdf] (pdf!)

The strike was eventually settled with some concessions by the operators as to checkwieghman, bimonthly pay, and a grievance procedure. But the hated company-guard system remained intact.

Mother Jones was released May 10th, and the last prisoners were released in June, about the time that the Senate committee arrived in West Virginia to begin hearing testimony.

MOTHER JONES AT CARNEGIE HALL

May 27, 1913
New York City
Speech at Carnegie Hall:

I hope you do not believe that, as Comrade Wanhope has said, that the miners of West Virginia simply decided casually “to take guns and do a share of the killing.” They got guns only wen it became clear that the authorities, acting on behalf of their masters would not accede to the just and peaceful requests of the miners.

I organized a meeting at which a committee was chosen to go to Charleston to present a petition to the Governor asking him to remove the Baldwin gunmen from the mine territory. We went, several thousand miners and myself to Charleston, and met on the grounds in front of the State Capitol. The Governor came out and heard the petition read….

The petition was unavailing. The guards were not removed. The men came back to Charleston, and held another meeting on the river bank. Then they went and bought up every gun in Charleston. They had appealed to the constituted authorities for protection, but they had failed, and they decided to fight for themselves-not because they favored violence but because they had no other choice.

Meanwhile, encouraged by the indifference of the Governor, the thugs began a veritable reign of terror. The war was then begun. Some guards were killed by miners in self protection, and the militia came. A short period of peace followed, and militia was withdrawn. This was the signal for the agents of the mine owners to intensify the war against the workers. Men, women and children were evicted from their home; miners were shot down in cold blood, and reign of terror grew even more terrible. When I protested the barbarism of the capitalists and their henchmen., I was deprived of all the rights of an American citizen and imprisoned in a military bastille for three months…

West Virginia is on trial before the bar of the nation. The military arrests and court-martial to which I and others were forced to undergo in West Virginia was the first move ever made by the ruling class to have the working class tried by military and not civil courts. It is up to the American workers to make sure that it is the last.

Mother Jones,
Grand Old Champion of Labor:
O’er the hills and through the valley
In ev’ry mining town;
Mother Jones was ready to help them,
She never turned them down.
On front with the striking miners
She always could be found;
And received a hearty welcome
In ev’ry mining town.

[The Death of Mother Jones, sung by Gene Autry, 1931https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDVqPxqW0KA]

SOURCES

Struggle in the coal fields:
the autobiography of Fred Mooney
With JW Hess
WV University Library, 1967

Mother Jones Speaks
Collected Writings and Speeches
Edited by Philip S Foner
NY, 1983

The Correspondence of
Mother Jones
Edited by Edward M Steel
U of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

The Speeches and Writings of
Mother Jones
U of Pettsburgh Press, 1988

The Court-Martial of
Mother Jones
Edited by Edward M Steel, Jr
U Press of Kentucky, 1995

The Mother Jones Museum

http://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/

(Amazing photo collection!)

FOR FURTHER STUDY

Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party
in West Virginia, 1898-1920
by Frederick A. Barkey
WV U Press, 2012

And see this link for interview with Barkey:

http://wvgazette.com/Entertainment/Books/201301060031

A Union Man: The Life of C. Frank Keeney
Charles Belmont Keeney
Available here only:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/union-man-the-life-of-c-frank-keeney/oclc/47358602&referer=brief_results

The Autobiography of
Mother Jones
With Mary Field Parton
[Charles H Kerr Publishinghttp://www.charleshkerr.com/], 1990
Pittston Strike Commemorative Edition

This diary is dedicate to
Francesco Estep
Who lost his life in Freedom’s Cause.

Francis Estep, from Holly Grove, W. VA,
In 19 and 13 loaded coal, twelve hours a day.
Six days a week, 47 and a half cent a ton.
He was hot down by gun thugs
At the young age of 31.

So is this little marker his only memorial today?
For a man who gave his life to the UMWofA.
Is this how we remember all the sacrifices he made?
To let the briars and the weeds
Take over his union and grave?
-Hazel Dickens

Let us honor our Martyrs by keeping our Unions
strong and democratic.
Solidarity,
JayRaye

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Mother Jones

Today, instead of presenting a diary written by one of our regular or guest members, we are presenting an excerpt from a paper on “Crowdfunding” by Minsun Ji and Tony Robinson. Crowdfunding is the term used for raising money over the internet. In most cases, a political candidate or charity solicits donations to fund their organization. Recently it has also been used to solicit donations for socially responsible businesses (usually cooperative start-ups). And since Obama’s JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, it has been used to solicit not just donations but equity investment funds for cooperative start-ups by exempting these ventures from Security and Exchange regulations.

It is this last feature which has led to all the brouhaha. On one side, are anarchists, libertarians, the cooperative movement and silicone valley free traders, supporting Crowdfunding as democratizing the investment process so that the 99% can develop capital which has previously been controlled by — well, the big capitalists–or the 1% ; on the other side are the unions, most Marxists and some liberal democrats who see the crowdfunding provisions in the JOBS Act as a plot by Wall Street to avoid SEC regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act and that will, once again, allow for speculation, fraud and destabilization of the economy at the expense of the 99%.

The political compromise in the JOBS Act was to establish regulations to limit the size of the investment (both in terms of a $1 million cap and no more that 10% of an investor’s income), exclude the investment of pension funds, exclude investors from decision making rights, etc. The authors of the paper excerpted below also note that so far there has been very little fraud in crowdfunding due to its emphasis on smaller, more socially responsible ventures. (They failed to note, however, that most of this fraud free history was when crowdfunding still consisted of donations, not profit making equity — also, does anyone remember the 1984 Saving and Loan scandal after government regulations had been decimated under Regan, where Wall Street types stole billions from the small Banks set up to help the “little guy”?).

Personally, when I first heard about crowdfunding, my reaction was pretty much like most class conscious workers and Marxists — I was afraid, not only of individual investors and small businesses being duped, but that the whole thing was a Wall street scam which could cause the whole economy to go under due to speculative financial “bubbles.” (And I wrote as much in a diary in this very venue).

On the other hand, in a paper on a hybrid union- cooperative model from the United Steelworkers (“An Emerging Solidarity:Worker Cooperatives, Unions,and the New Union Co-op Model,February 1, 2013), Rob Witherall does not totally discount the idea of crowdfunding as one of many methods to develop capital investment for coops — as long as it controlled and regulated by the union. At this point, my own position(and that in Ji’s and Witherall’s papers) place crowdfunding in the context of a global economy where changes in technology, capital mobility and the end of centralized industrial manufacturing has resulted in the growth of the informal workforce (both here and abroad) that has greatly damaged traditional union organizing solutions. This has led us to explore if we can use new possibilities to our advantage in a changing world. And whether these possibilities will take us toward or further away from a true anti-capitalist future. So here is a full discussion, presented primarily from the pro-crowdfunding point of view since this is the view, as anti-capitalists, that we don’t often hear. Let the argument begin.

“Crowdfunding the Future of Union-Coop Collaboration” by Minsun Ji,
Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, mji@du.edu.
Tony Robinson, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Denver,
tony.robinson@ucdenver.edu, February 2, 2013:

In 2012, United States union leaders and the worker cooperative community split ways over President Obama’s “Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act,” which significantly liberalized regulations on small business equity financing, including “crowdfunding” practices. Both the AFL-CIO and SEIU took vigorous stands against the JOBS Act, claiming that by diminishing government oversight over small business crowdfunding, the JOBS Act promoted corruption and destabilizing investment bubbles.

Major American labor leaders condemned the bill, claiming that the “cynically named JOBS Act” would weaken government SEC regulations and expose workers and small investors to fraud and financial disaster (Elk, 2012). AFL-CIO president Trumka said he was “personally outraged,” with the bill. “This is a vote against investors in the real economy and for Wall Street speculators. When the next bubble bursts, Americans will know who to blame” (Kapur, 2012).

Even as U.S. labor leaders criticized the JOBS act and its crowdfunding centerpiece, other progressive leaders—and in particular leaders within the workers’ cooperative movement–celebrated the act as ushering in a new era of democratic, decentralized capital investment (Fink, 2012; Mann, 2011). Progressive champion of economic localism, Michael Shuman (2009), has long lauded crowdfunding for taking investment decisions out of the hands of an elite circle of SEC accredited investors and giving them to millions of small-scale, local investors. The 2012 Conference of the Federation of Worker Owned Cooperatives hailed crowdfunding as ushering in a “new era of innovation” (http://conference2012.usworker.coop/) Kassan and Long (2012) summarized the enthusiasm for crowdfunding among many supporters of an alternative economy: “While crowd funding alone isn’t a silver bullet, it does play an important role in revitalizing the entrepreneurial small business sector of the economy. Its simplicity and ingenuity is American capitalism in its finest form.”

This paper explores the crowdfunding revolution celebrated by the JOBS Act, and examines reasons for the striking disagreement between labor unions and the coop community regarding the JOBS Act. We argue that instead of resisting crowdfunding, labor unions should embrace it as a democratic financing tool that can support union-friendly worker owned cooperatives in growing a progressive economy. We also explore how the owners of worker coops should consider union membership, for both pragmatic and political reasons, as union connections can help finance and strength worker cooperatives, even as they can help keep the worker owned cooperative movement grounded in political transformation, rather than just pursuing economic growth.

The Crowdfunding Revolution and the JOBS Act. … Taking advantage of the democratization of information and connectivity afforded by social media, crowdfunding appeals in the last decade have raised millions of dollars in donations to support thousands of small-scale initiatives. Crowdfunding—the mobilization of small scale donations or investments from a crowd of individuals—has funded activities ranging from indie band tours across America ($60,000 raised by the UK rock band Marillion), the production of independent movies (The Age of Stupid film project raised £1.5 million British Pounds), and social purpose ventures (the Tesla Museum project raised $1.4 million). In 2011, there were over 500,000 crowdfunding appeals made over the internet through crowdfunding portals like Kiva, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which ultimately attracted millions of small donors who gave over a billion dollars to small businesses nationwide (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012: 25; Drake, 2012).

The new JOBS act promises to dramatically grow these numbers. Until the JOBS Act, all crowdfunding transactions were required to be donations to small businesses, rather than equity investments. Under U.S. Securities law, it was illegal for average people to give their support to a small or local business with the expectation of economic return. This is because prior to the crowdfunding law, all companies (even the smallest) were prohibited from offering equity to the general public without full registration with the SEC and adherence to all SEC rules, which is costly and complicated. Furthermore, only SEC accredited investors (less than 2% of the population [Shuman, 2009]) were allowed to directly purchase those equity securities, substantially limiting the kinds of companies allowed to offer their stock publicly and the pool of people who were allowed to invest in those companies. … But rules changed after the JOBS ACT.

The 2012 JOBS Act amended federal securities law to benefit small and emerging businesses by easing rules on public offerings by small businesses and by broadening the base of people allowed to buy equity in those companies. In signing the law, President Obama was responding to a groundswell of pressure from innovative venture capitalists, small businesses locked out of traditional venture capital circles, and progressive economic thinkers who all supported crowdfunding liberalization as a way to decentralize capital formation, foster innovative businesses and social enterprises, and encourage small business florescence (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012; Bradford, 2012; Sustainable Economy Law Center, 2012). The idea united liberal economists with free-market conservatives, and the JOBS Act sailed through Congress with historic speed, passing in mere months with solid bipartisan support.

Perhaps the most dramatic reform was Title III of the JOBS Act, which created a new exemption from federal securities law for “crowdfunded” securities offerings. This exemption is meant to substantially democratize investment into small businesses, by making it possible for small businesses to raise money through small investments from a large number of people, even without filing an array of financial and registration documents with the SEC under traditional securities law. Furthermore, small-scale investors in the company do not need to be SEC accredited (Bradford, 2012; Vidra, 2012). Anyone in the public who is attracted to a small entrepreneur’s internet crowdfunding appeal can invest in the company, joining with a crowd of other small donors in mobilizing what can be huge cash infusions into the business. In 2012, for example, Pebble Watches raised more than $10 million dollars in less than 30 days from 69,000 small web donors (Heesan, 2013).

The JOBS act dramatically democratized the capital financing landscape. Small companies with unique business models now have an alternative source of “venture capital,” which has historically been controlled by a small circle of traditional profit-seeking investors. These small companies can now turn to “community finance” circles—crowds of small scale donors contacted across the internet and who are more likely than accredited Wall Street investors to support small, local businesses with a “social purpose” (Lehner, 2013). In this way, crowdfunding “stands to revolutionize small businesses and entrepreneurial capital raising by permitting any individual to invest in private companies over the internet with limited regulatory hurdles” (Fink, 2012: 4).

By decentralizing processes of capital formation, crowdfunding undermines the power of traditional capital investors, transfers the social web’s model of informal cooperation to the world of investment, “and leads to democratization and transparency in finance” (Rothler, 2011: 5; see also Best, Nice and Jones, 2012: 3).

There are, of course, restrictions meant to direct crowdfunding to small businesses and to balance the desire for freely flowing, decentralized capital investment with the need to minimize investor risk and the dangers of financial chicanery or ineptitude by either businesses or investors. For example:
• A business can sell no more than $1 million of securities in the aggregate to all investors;
• No single crowdfund investor can purchase more than $2,000 of securities, or 5% of the investor’s annual income or net worth (10% for investors with annual income or net worth exceeding $100,000);
• The transactions must be conducted through a registered funding portal or broker who must adhere to rules meant to insure investor knowledge of the risks involved.
[Editor's Note: Further important restrictions prohibit investment of any pension funds and do not allow investors any decision making power over the business/coop]

With these basic regulations, supporters hail the Act as ushering in an era where average people will have the ability to support local business or social purpose business ventures, and where businesses can turn to sources of capital beyond the Wall Street moguls who prioritize high profit rates over such concerns as local embeddedness, social purpose, or fair labor practices (Elk, 2012). In so doing, the JOBS Act represents a democratization of capital formation—a radical “disruption of the finance supply chain and distribution mechanism” that has been previously controlled by a tiny percentage of accredited institutional investors (Drake, 2012). Scott Purcell, President of the Crowdfunding platform Arctic Island, argues that the Crowdfunding allowances of the JOBS act “will completely transform capital formation for small businesses, [enabling] small businesses to get the capital they need.” (cited in Drake, 2012)

The scale of democratic capital that could be unleashed through crowdfunding is immense. Even before the JOBS act, when crowdfunding could only be through donations without any equity return, $750 million was given through 532,000 American crowdfunding campaigns (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012: 25). Industry consultants are now predicting equity crowdfunding to grow to somewhere between $4 and $6 billion by 2015 (Price 2012; Best, Nice and Jones, 2012; Fink , 2012). Analysts predict a global trillion dollar crowdfunding market in the years to come, and the Word Bank is partnering with groups like Crowdfund Capital Advisors to explore crowdfunding’s potential benefits in developing countries (Lawton and Marom, 2012).

As Kassan and Long (2012) describe the future of the United States:

“The vast majority of the American public, the 99 percent of us who
are ‘unaccredited’ investors, will soon have the opportunity to keep
their money local. The half of our economy made up of small, independent
businesses will now have access to capital that previously could only go to
giant public companies. Americans have $30 trillion dollars invested in
securities — imagine if even 10 percent of that went from Wall Street to Main
Street. What could $3 trillion dollars do in our communities?”

Labor and the JOBS Act

Why did labor leaders resist the 2012 JOBS Act? It comes down to labor’s enduring concern with the dangers of deregulated capital. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, labor leaders and a many economists found it dangerous that the government was once again on a bi-partisan path to financial deregulation. Simon Johnson, the former chief IMF economist, called the bill “a colossal mistake of historic proportions,” that “would gut investor protection in the United States” under the cloak of creating jobs (Johnson, 2012). William Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth for Massachusetts, expressed similar concerns:

“As regulators we must be vigilant that the exemption will not
become a tool for financial fraud and abuse…Unscrupulous penny stock
promoters have used misrepresentations to market obscure and low-value
stocks to individuals, often through pump and dump schemes. These kinds
of fraud operators have not gone away…In this segment of the market,
company information may be limited or simply false, and investors typically
lack investment sophistication and are often insufficiently cautious (Sullivan
and Ma, 2012).”

In the AFL-CIO’s statement opposing the Act, labor leaders argued that the Act deregulated Wall Street, weakened the regulatory ability of the SEC, and allowed companies to sell stock “without complying with key corporate governance reforms in the recently passed Dodd-Frank Act” (Elk, 2012). Small, untested companies would now be allowed to circulate all sorts of promotional claims, without producing the audited financial documents now required by the SEC (Moberg, 2012).

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said he was outraged by the act, which would do nothing but “re-inflate a stock market bubble” (Kapur, 4). Critics found particular animus for the “crowdfunding” exemption in the bill, with the IMF former chief economist Johnson calling it “perhaps the worst part of the bill,” allowing companies to solicit small investors with little government oversight (Johnson, 2012). Moberg (2012) explained specific labor union concerns as follows:

“For at least two reasons, unions have a stake in how the financial markets work. They are interested in protecting investments that provide retirement security for their members and other workers. And they have seen how deregulated financial markets have disastrous effects on workers. They encourage financial speculation and engineering that worsens inequality and often destroys jobs (witness the merger and takeover craze), exploits the vulnerable (witness the predatory lending during the last decade), and creates bubbles [...] all at the expense of the real economy and the majority of working people.”

Though such concerns are understandable, there is substantial evidence that fears of a crowdfunded “stock market bubble” destroying the wealth of millions of small investors are overstated. First, the reality is that the JOBS Act maintains a healthy set of regulations on both the issuers of crowdfunding appeals and those who invest in them. Issuers must file disclosure documents with the SEC detailing the names and addresses of business owners, providing prior year’s tax returns, outlining the business plan and governance structure, describing the intended use of crowdfunding proceeds, and setting targets for the offering (with regular progress updates). Offerings can only occur through registered brokers or funding portals, which must show due diligence to insure that companies listing on the portal are legitimate and that investors are aware of the risks of investing. In fact, some economists find that the regulations remain too excessive for the kind of small-scale investment contemplated under the Act (Bradford, 2012).

Second, the Act limits funding appeals to no more than $1 million in a 12 month period, and restricts any individual donor from giving the greater of $2,000 or 5% of their annual income/net worth (10% of income or net worth if the individual is worth more than $100,000). These restrictions substantially limit the damage that can occur from bad investments and financial fraud, and hardly suggest that a massively inflated stock market bubble such as the pre-2008 market would be likely.

Third, the crowdfunding marketplace has been remarkably fraud free for years. Though billions of dollars have been donated through crowdfunding portals over the last decade, there has not been a single case of prosecuted fraud involving crowdfunding (Fink, 2012). The absence of fraud and investor disaster is due to several factors, including the small scale of crowd-funded investments (most people invest less than they do in lottery tickets during the year [Forbes]). Additionally, the “transparency and social networking dynamics of crowdfunding have been excellent at keeping fraud near zero” (Lawton and Marom, 2012) as crowdfunding typically involves thousands of small investors tracking the businesses they are investing in and sharing information across the web. Furthermore, the kinds of social ventures that take the crowdfunding route are inherently less likely to engage in the kind of profit-seeking fraud that characterized the moguls of finance preceding the 2008 meltdown.

“The trustworthiness of social entrepreneurs is regarded to be much higher due to the primacy of the social aim, and the thus the costs of fraudulent risk should be reduced in theory,” Lehner (2013) explains. “We see early empirical claims for this based on the traditional non-profit literature” (see, for example, Haugh, 2006 and Laratta, 2010)…..

Unions and Cooperatives Face the Informal Economy.It is well established that the rise of an increasingly informal and flexible global economy, populated by non-standard and casual workers, has resulted in shrinking union density in the United States and elsewhere. Temporary work is a rapidly growing sector of the U.S. economy, and the explosion of non-standard and casual workers across the globe has led to the new concept of a global “precariat” (precarious/informal workers, who are unlinked from dependable job prospects), which is increasingly replacing the large factory based “proletariat”– once the backbone of union organizing campaigns (Standing, 2011; Davis, 2006).

A related development is the decline of manufacturing and the rise of service-sector employment: 85% of today’s U.S. economy is service-sector work (Curl, 2010), which is typically more informal and precarious than the manufacturing employment of old.

These trends of an increasingly informal service economy help account for dramatically shrinking private sector union density in America (falling from 24.6% in 1973 to 6.9% in 2010), simply because informal workers are much more difficult to organize and because employers can flee unionized sites for non-unionized locales of more exploitable workers (Schmacher 2000, 2).

While formal unions have found their strength eroding in the new global order, decentralized workers cooperatives have grown rapidly, as their organizational model matches the decentralized and fluid dynamics of today’s global world. “Today, increased technology, globalization of labor markets and the mobility of capital has ended the reign of large centralized factories. The new casual and decentralized labor force has decimated the major strength of trade unions’ power—a large, unified labor force. Unions have been forced to look at the creation of unionized worker-coops, not just as a fall back during depressions, but as the new order of the day” (Geminijen 2012).

As union strength declines globally, worker cooperatives are growing. In 2010, the International Cooperative Alliance represented co-operatives with over one billion members, in 180 countries (including cooperatives of all sorts, not just worker coops). In some countries, like Spain and Italy, workers cooperatives have grown to constitute a sizable share of the national economy. Some studies have found that worker coops have proved more resilient than mainstream businesses after the 2008 crisis, creating more post-recession jobs in many countries than has the traditional business sector (CICOPA, 2012) .

In the United States as well, the trend of economic informalization has been coupled with expanding worker owned cooperatives, especially within the service sector (i.e., cleaning, food catering, moving assistance, landscaping, child care), and with an especially notable growth of immigrant worker own cooperatives (Ji and Robinson, 2012). In New York City and the Bay Area, worker cooperative networks are rapidly growing. In Cleveland, city, university and business leaders have united behind the innovative “Evergreen Initiative,” a well-funded plan to build an expanding network of worker cooperatives across the city (Alperovitz, et. al.2010; Johnsen, 2010).

Still, the economic scale and impact of worker cooperatives remains very small overall—especially in the United States. Even as workers cooperatives blossom across the globe, with a model of decentralized, small-scale employee ownership that responds well to the growth of the precariat in the increasingly informal global economy, these small businesses still lack mass numbers, organizational power, and—most importantly—adequate access to capital resources (California Financial Opportunity Roundtable, 2012).

Non-traditional small enterprises like a local worker cooperative face tremendous difficulties raising adequate capital (Bauer-Leeb and Lundquist. 2012; Lehner, 2013; Schwienbacher and Larralde, 2010). For one, the typical “social purpose” goals of worker cooperatives are often seen by investors as undermining financial returns. Furthermore, the unfamiliar corporate governance and legal structures of workers cooperatives can dissuade traditional investors (Artz and Kim, 2011: 47). There is also a deep cultural distance between the social entrepreneur and the traditional wall street investor, who speak fundamentally different languages (“social purpose investing” versus business/managerial excellence) (Lehner, 2013: 2-4; Ridley-Duff and Bull, 2011). These obstacles help explain why a 2003 bank of England study found that “social entrepreneurs indeed have a hard time accessing traditional debt finance,” and why the business plans of small social entrepreneurs are rejected 98% of the time by traditional venture capitalists (Lehner, 2013: 4).

With their decentralized and flexible business model, worker owned cooperatives are a good match for today’s globalizing informal economy—yet they lack adequate capital to fully exploit their potential. Unions have deep wells of intellectual capital, financial resources and organizational might, and yet their membership and power is shrinking as they face new economic realities. Both coops and unions, therefore, can benefit greatly from partnership and collaboration. But in a country like the United States, with little history of deep union-coop collaboration, the question remains: how to do it? The JOBS Act offers one answer to that question, because the “relatively new form of informal financing” (Hemer, 2011) that it has set free—crowdfunding—presents unique opportunities to bring labor and coops together around a flexible and decentralizing funding strategy that well matches today’s underlying economic trends.

Union-Coop Collaboration: A Crowdfunding Solution.

The SEC has not yet fully written the new investment regulations that will guide the implementation of the JOBS Act’s crowdfunding regime. But as those rules are announced, workers cooperatives will be able to directly market the social vision of their business through internet platforms, attracting crowds of small investors. In preparation of the new rules, Websites like “The Crowdfunding Cooperative” are emerging with a goal to “massively scale” cooperatives, “making it easy to manage community share issues and find coops to invest in” (http://uniteddiversity.com/projects/crowdfunding-cooperative/) .

For these reasons, the 2012 National Worker Cooperative Conference called crowdfunding a revolutionary “new era of innovation” for worker coop financing . Reflecting on the favorably changing landscape of worker cooperative financing, Melissa Hoover (Director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives) concluded that “there are some substantive things happening in the past year that feel different. There was the International Year of the Cooperative, more media attention, more academic inquiries, enough lawyers to start a [workers coop] legal professionals group, interest from sustainable business and socially responsible business people, crowdfunding tools starting to be used for worker cooperatives, and first calls from outside investors wanting to develop funding vehicles for worker cooperatives.”

Unions can be part of this crowdfunding revolution. There is already a history of financing collaboration between unions and coops, as unions have sometimes helped finance worker buyout of companies. But most union-facilitated worker buyouts in the last several decades have resulted in only nominal worker ownership and governance of a company— as in the case of most Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) that do not give workers democratic control of management and which do not always result in workers have majority ownership of all the stock (Bell 2006; Olsen, 1982; Hochner et., al. 1988) . Through the creative embrace of crowdfunding, unions can go beyond ESOPS and help finance actual worker-owned and worker-managed cooperatives. We are seeing movement in this direction already.

Republic Windows.

In 2012 the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) successfully executed a buyout campaign to turn one of their unionized workplaces into worker owned cooperative. This coop campaign had been pursued since 2008, when 250 workers from the Republic Windows manufacturing company in Chicago occupied the factory to demand unpaid wages, and then occupied again in 2012 in order to prevent a second owner from shutting down the factory (Kunichoff, 2012).

The largest obstacle to the success of the worker buyout of Republic Windows, and the same obstacle that has undermined so many other worker cooperatives, was inadequate access to start-up finance capital. The Bank of America, which owned most of the debt at Republic Windows, refused to consider financing a worker cooperative buyout. In the absence of traditional capital to finance the worker owned cooperative—known as New Era Windows– the Electrical Union Local 1111 played a critical role in solidifying community support, developing worker leadership and negotiating with a bank for financing (Flanders, 2012). But additional funding was needed. In the end, to fully fund their vision of a worker coop, Republic Windows workers turned to a grassroots microcredit organization, Working World, which helped finance the worker buyout with no-interest loan money. This loan money came from a small scale capital loan fund for locally based worker cooperatives, that was seeded by community crowdfunded donations (Gonzales, 2012; see also www.theworkingworld.org/us/ex-republic-windows-and-doors/).

Though such examples are promising, the fact is that these kinds of union-facilitated cooperative start-ups have been quite rare, and typically involve very limited capital. Part of the reason is that before the JOBS act, U.S. securities law meant that community supporters wishing to crowdfund such businesses as New Era Windows had to donate their money without hope of financial return. But after the JOBS act, community supporters can now choose to actually buy an equity investment in social purpose companies. It is predictable that even more community crowdfunding dollars will flow into businesses like New Era Windows , since there is now a possibility of receiving a return on one’s social investment.

In this new environment, labor unions could choose to embrace crowdfunding, and deepen their connection to the workers cooperative movement by developing strategies to catalyze the investment dollars of individual union members into community-sensitive, socially responsible worker cooperatives, as now allowed by law. For their part, workers cooperatives could self-consciously “earn” union support by building business models in accordance with union friendly practices, becoming community members of local unions, and involving their worker-owners in broader political causes than the economic success of their cooperative.

To be clear, unions would not be allowed under the JOBS act to channel their pension fund investment dollars or any other institutional investment fund into crowdfunded worker cooperatives—simply because the JOBS Act targets individual donors and frees them to make small investments in non-SEC registered businesses. Nor would union leadership be able to offer specific investment advice to their members, urging them to invest in any specific crowdfunded business, as such formal investment advice remains illegal under the JOBS act, except when done by accredited brokers, promoting SEC registered companies. But, there are several ways that unions might use the new Crowdfunding law to build on the latent support that their members might have for worker cooperatives, and to bring the efforts of unions and coops closer together. We lay out some possibilities below.

[…]Certify Unionized Crowd Fund Advisors. The National Crowdfunding Association has launched a Certified Crowdfund Advisor (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012) certification program. As described on the CCA website, The CCA certificate “identifies the holder as being an expert in crowdfunding and thus professionally able to help everyone from small business owners to investors regarding how to participate in crowdfunding” (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/here-come-the-certified-crowdfund-advisors-172244921.html). Dedicating union dollars to helping members of union locals and state labor federations achieve such certificate would facilitate the educational strategy discussed above, while providing authoritative and specialized investment education to union members interested in building up worker cooperatives.

Establish a Union-Sponsored Crowdfund Portal. Unions have been successful at mobilizing social purpose spending by their members when they have self-consciously created the “environmental conditions” to catalyze such actions (Zhullo, 208). In the field of crowdfunding, one of those environmental conditions could be to establish a union-sponsored crowdfund portal that facilitates investment in worker cooperatives that share union values of worker empowerment and broader social justice. Such crowdfunding investment portals are necessary because under the JOBS act, crowdfund investors and businesses cannot connect directly. Rather, to better insure the validity of businesses seeking crowdfunds and the knowledge level of potential investors, these two parties must connect through an independent “middleman” portal—a web-based platform that must insure that the businesses on their site meet minimum standards outlined in the law and that small investors using the portal are educated into the risks and opportunities of investing. Many of these crowdfunding platforms already exist, such as IndieGoGo, Kiva, and Kickstarter. Furthermore, many of these extant portals have a specific angle—such as portals that focus on green businesses (Green Unite), arts related businesses (New Jelly), local agricultural initiatives (Three Revolutions), innovative product designers (Christie Street) or on projects friendly to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals (FundPride). There are also several emerging portals already dedicated to cooperative financing, such as coop.org and the crowdfunding co-operative.
Along those lines, a union collaborative could come together to launch a crowdfund portal that features only worker-owned cooperatives that share union-friendly business practices and values. In providing information about businesses featured on the union crowdfunding portal, the portal could publish metrics to rate businesses on a “social purpose” scale, using such tools as the Social Return on Investment (SROI) method, as standardized by the SROI network (www.thesroinetwork.org; see also Lehner, 2013). Union members (who arguably are more willing to accept lower rates of return in favor of “social investment” goals [Quarter, et. al., 2001]) could be directed to this portal to facilitate their investments into union-friendly worker cooperatives.

Such a portal would have important legal restrictions on its communications with users. Under the law, crowdfunding portals cannot offer investment advice or recommendations, but it as of yet unclear how the SEC will interpret this principle in terms of what kinds of information portals can and cannot share with their visitors. Clearly portals cannot advise investment in any specific company, but it seems likely the SEC will allow them to act as a kind of educational clearinghouse, focusing all their offerings only on one kind of business (worker cooperatives) and sharing information such as which businesses are union organized and where businesses might be rated on the SROI scale.

n.b. Cartoons come from The Scoop Shovel, the official Organ of the
Manitoba Co-operative Dairies, Manitoba Egg and Poultry Pool, Manitoba Co-operative Livestock Producers at http://www.ecclectica.ca/issues/2007/1/photos.ecc.asp?i=0

“When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run /There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun / Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one / But the union makes us strong.”

It was about an attempt to destroy collective bargaining. It was about furthering the war on one of the last remaining bastions of union strength, the public sector workers. It was about entrenching the idea of education as a corporate tool to create “human resources” instead of educated citizens. It was about destroying another union by pitting the “reserve army of the unemployed” – capital’s most potent tool – against the ginned up image of “union thugs”, worker against worker.

The attacks on the Chicago Teachers Union were typical of the attacks on organized labor all around the United States. Those greedy, ungrateful teachers – don’t they know that workers are supposed to consider themselves lucky to have a job, any job, under any conditions and for any pay? How dare they strike when so many people are unemployed? When the Democratic mayor supports the corporate backed “charter – schools” ? And – unspoken, but implicit in every attack – when we are, after all, only talking about minority children and the women who teach them.

Union President Karen Lewis, an African American woman and the subject of endless vitriol, saw it clearly.

She invited the billionaires, the Gates Foundation elite, the politicians, to sit in unair-conditioned rooms amid peeling plaster and be evaluated. Be unable to go to a dentist when they have a toothache, a doctor when you are ill, be hungry while you are tested. Show us, she said, why do the billionaires have so much influence because they can write a check, despite having only one vote? She asked the questions that needed asking, the questions the media would not ask otherwise.

What, she asked, is unreasonable about what the teachers are actually asking for? Why do kindergartners need to be tested five and six times a year? I’m tired, she said, of being called a“thug”. “We are the foundation and they are trying to destroy us!” she shouted, at an impassioned rally at Union Park. “Your policies are harming children,” she bluntly stated. She knew what the attacks were really about and named it. “Introducing the market into the classroom is not education. You are asking us to do harm to children and THAT’S why we are here!”

From a striking teacher, about Lewis’ words: I want to cry tears of joy because I feel validated. No one has ever validated what I do and how hard I work. As a teacher, no one ever thanks me.

What are public resources? And what are they for? This is a germinal issue and your answer will determine which side of the class struggle you are on. The privatization of public space, public money, public assets has yielded great profits for the few and great hardship to the many. The attack on public workers in Wisconsin, in Chicago, and across the nation is another front in the war on workers everywhere.

I am not a human resource. I am a human being. Our children are not resources to be exploited by the ruling class for private profit. And education is not simply an indoctrination process meant to churn out cheap labor. That is what the Chicago teachers strike was about.

The tentative ( as I write this) agreement includes the following :

* 600 additional art, music, physical education and world language teachers.
> * Prep time for paraprofessionals and clinicians.
> * Teacher evaluations limited to 30% of the student test scores.
> * Up to $250 reimbursement for school supplies, which are often out of pocket for teachers.
> * Additional wrap-around services, including hiring of nurses, social workers and counselors.
> * Books on day one for teachers and students. Teachers had to wait for up to six weeks for materials to arrive
> * Defeating merit-pay for teachers. (Note – studies show merit pay does not work).

In many states, the attacks on teachers have had different outcomes. The state of public education in Florida, for example, public schools have been thrown into the volcano to appease the endless appetite of the corporate god: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/what-florida-is-doing-to-its-public-schools/2012/02/29/gIQADTYDjR_blog.html

High priced “consultants” are brought in to produce reports that will destroy the public schools and the unionized teachers:

http://roconrant.blogspot.com/ (for a glimpse into the truly amoral and horrifying human debris that are being used to destroy public schools and students in Florida, make sure you read this. )

And all working people suffer. It’s a scenario that has been replayed in many states.

The Chicago Teachers Union stood up to the bulldozer of private profit at public expense and said “enough”. They were supported by a majority of the public – something that astonished the media and the politicians who were confident that their slander and lies would have the desired effect. But the Chicago Teachers Union got the facts out:

http://www.wbez.org/no-sidebar/Chicago-school-closings (the truth about school closings)

http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/news/2012/09/17/20431/why-parent-blames-mayor-teachers-strike (the truth about who is to blame for the conditions in the schools)

http://www.ctunet.com/blog/anti-union-ads-in-chicago-paid-for-by-hedge-funds-billionaires (The truth about the origins of the propaganda)

http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=PORTSIDELABOR;a8a81e0.1209b (what it is really like to teach in a Chicago public school, and what the challenges mean to teachers and students).

The Chicago Teachers Union did not create the poverty, the crime, the homelessness, the hunger, the lack of essential resources. The working class people of Chicago did not create them. The union pointed this out, clearly and sharply, and told the corporate interests and their political mouthpieces that their “prescriptions” would harm, even kill, the “patients”.

This is a fight for all of us, emblematic of the fight of workers everywhere. The courage of the teachers of Chicago, their refusal to be intimidated by an apparently overwhelmingly powerful foe, gives inspiration and instruction. They are winning. And the eyes of the world are indeed watching – will this start a trend? Or will it be a hope crushed in its infancy?

“You can blow out a candle / But you can’t blow out a fire / when the flames begins to catch/ the wind will blow it higher” – Peter Gabriel, “Biko”

The answer will depend on our willingness to live and support what we’ve always known. The Union makes us strong.

As I wrote a week-and-a-half ago (www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/02/1107935/-Anti-Capitalist-Meetup-Working-Class-Self-Activity-Leading-the-USA-to-Democracy, the concept of self-activity was introduced to me by my first intellectual mentor, labor historian George P. Rawick, a lifelong left activist who edited The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, a definitive, 41-volume collection of oral history interviews with former slaves taken during the 1930s under the auspices of the WPA. In his book on slavery, From Sundown to Sunup: The World the Slaves Made, Rawick emphasized the self-activity of American slaves, which he defined as that which exploited people do in coping with and resisting the conditions of their exploitation. He was especially interested in their strategies to (1) undermine the system of exploitation (e.g., tool-breaking) and (2) assert their human dignity in the face of a system that denies it (e.g., slave family life).

As my study of Marxian socialism has progressed, I’ve come to understand that self-activity is central to the humanist core of Marx’s thinking, and that it represents nothing less than the active, creative aspect of humanity. Creative human activity, aka work or labor, is how we express our deepest selves and how we ensure our survival, but under capitalism labor becomes an activity alien to ourselves, directed and controlled by another, something that degrades us rather than exalting us.

Marx’s concept of man is rooted in Hegel’s Idealist philosophy. Hegel starts with the proposition that appearance and essence are not the same, and that the purpose of dialectics is to grasp the relations between the two, or in other words, between essence and existence.

How to do that? Unlike René Descartes, who wrote “cogito ergo sum” and thus embraced a proto-positivistic conception of thought-grounded identity, for Hegel, essence is realized not in passive contemplation, but through a subject’s active process of existence: “facio ergo sum” (I act therefore I am). (I’ve no idea if Hegel ever wrote that, but he could have.)

However, Hegel’s system is inherently abstract, as the Subject that actively unfolds its essence is the “Idea,” and its dialectical processes take place in the realm of the intellect, then to be expressed in the material world. Thus “Freedom” realizes itself through successive stages of history, but Hegel was not especially interested in the actual struggles of real people for freedom, and was politically quite conservative, supporting the Prussian state and its established Lutheran church.

Nevertheless, Hegel’s Idealist conception of “self-activity” formed the basis of Marx’s materialist dialectic and in particular his understanding of self-activity of the working class. It is not the purpose of this essay to explore Marx’s materialist dialectics in detail, nor to explore how he developed them out of Hegel’s Idealist system.

As a materialist, Marx took his subject to be humanity, i.e., human beings as intelligent mammals actively engaged in producing and reproducing the conditions of their survival: food, shelter, defense, child-raising. The activities in which humanity engages itself Marx called “labor,” synonymous with “life activity.”

“For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity.”

Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, “Estranged Labour” (1844).

Nor was this mere philosophical flourish of the young Marx. He wrote very similarly in 1867:

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention.”

Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 7, 1867.

Because under capitalism the labor process yields a wage to the worker but the product belongs exclusively and totally to capital, the latter also holds authority over the details of the production process. Whereas the pre-capitalist artisan or small farmer owned his own means of production (tools, raw materials, land, animals) he also controlled them and the labor process. Over several centuries prior to the last one, capital gradually took ever greater control over production itself, but even at the beginning, the initial development of the division of labor under manufacture, the alienated character of labor under capitalism became clear, and precipitated much of the labor activism from then on.

“This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. … The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. … The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”

Marx, E&PM, 1844.

Alienated activity is thus the opposite of self-activity.

The same dynamic applies to political activity, for human beings engage in politics, understood broadly as power relations throughout a social formation, and create political movements just as they do everything else: via the materialist dialectic of making their life activity itself the object of their will and their consciousness as they engage & reproduce the world, both natural and social, around them. To oversimplify: learning by doing.

And what do working class women and men learn when they engage in politics, whether at the workplace, or at the ballot box, or in the streets? The dominant lesson throughout the history of capitalism has been that collective action is necessary for working people to have even a chance of success in pressing their interests, which are often learned to be collective in nature: higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, more control over the work process.

That is why, despite the forceful and fatal efforts by capitalist governments for centuries, workers spontaneously form unions and engage in collective action against capital: the nature of capitalism renders this the only possibly effective route to influence for the mass of people.

Such institutions and activism may become the schools for working class self-activity, where the ideological hegemony of capital may be challenged. However, as we have seen, the institutions of labor are quite vulnerable to capture, whether total (company unions) or partial (conservative trade unions). At such times, the union itself may temporarily become a more important locus for self-activity than the workplace.

For an excellent example of working class self-activity in relation to OWS, there is the recent struggle by restaurant workers at the Upper East Side location of the “Hot and Crusty” chain, who recently organized a union and extracted a promise from their employer to bargain in good faith.

“After enduring below minimum wage pay and verbal and sexual harassment, the workers reached out to labor organizations and began attending Occupy Wall Street meetings last fall. With the support of OWS and the Laundry Workers Center, a volunteer organizing group, the workers organized an independent union, the Hot and Crusty Workers Association, this spring. They won thousands of dollars in backpay and safer workplace conditions.”

According to Marx, human beings are productive and creative by nature, and when forced to produce and create under conditions that alienate them from the creative process and its results, they will create ideas and activities that are opposed to those alienating conditions and the economic system that requires them. It doesn’t mean they will win, but they will fight. That’s why the struggle continues. Not solely because of the imperatives of capital, but because the imperatives of the creative human spirit demand it.

Cross-posted on Voices on the Square

“When the madness is directed towards the likes of you and me,
Then our blindness may be lifted and we might begin to see.
For when others are afflicted, with the scourge that has no end,
Then we practice our denial — and the purging, we defend.

 

So the powers and the peoples of the nations of this Earth
Could be fully in connivance — or denial of the hurt…
And even, in our hubris, in our information age,
We are blinded by our bias — and at petty issues rage.

 

So the workers were divided and they voted Nazis in,
And so many were the workers, who paid dearly for this sin!
And we see now in Wisconsin, there’s a Walker riding high,
And there’s cash enough from coffers to propagate the lie.”
(excerpted)
Arjun Jalah

Sometimes you would give anything not to be right! When I started writing this diary three weeks ago, I predicted that Scott Walker would win the recall election for governor in Wisconsin. Walker, with unlimited corporate money, was challenged by a massive people’s movement when he outlawed most collective bargaining rights in what was usually considered a progressive state. I knew, with the certainty of a cynic that that much money would out-weigh people power. It was the fight between John Henry and the steel driving machine all over again. Yet, there I was, Tuesday night, praying that the people power would, in the end, win. Not. Walker beat Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate 53%-46%, winning by a whopping 6% points. As Ed of the Ed Show so colorfully pointed out, there was no way to put lipstick on that pig. Or as Chris Hedges had said a couple of weeks earlier: “We lost. They won.”

HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?

Much of the blame was placed on the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 08-205 (2010), 558 U.S. ––––, 130 S.Ct. 876 (January 21, 2010) In this convoluted 5-4 decision designed to expand corporate rights and often referred to as the “corporations are people” decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot restrict most corporate spending in elections. Using several of the most treasured democratic protections to turn our own Constitution against us, the Supreme Court held the following:

 

1) prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations violates the First Amendment’s political protection of free speech. Because corporations are “groups of individuals,” the corporate form must receive the same free speech privileges as individual citizens. The court’s rationale for the Citizen’s United decision is based on the concept that a corporation, is an organization that acts, for legal purposes, as an individual or a “person”. “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” In a particularly inverted bit of logic, the Citizens United decision reinforced an expanded an earlier decision under the 14th amendment which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law. The 14th amendment was originally passed to protect freed slaves after the Civil War. However, in this case, the Court argued that if we, the people, have free speech rights, then corporations, as “persons” must be given the same rights under the equality clause.

 

2) The Court, likewise, argued that independent expenditures are a form of speech, and limiting a corporation’s ability to spend money also limits its ability to speak. At the same time it overruled that portion of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003) that upheld the restriction of corporate spending on “electioneering communications”. The Court’s ruling effectively freed corporations to spend unlimited money both on “electioneering communications” and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties). Combined with the court’s decision to strike down restrictions on corporate spending in elections, this gives the corporations unlimited power in the sphere of communications which, next to finance and the military, is the dominant form of control in our modern society. If we look at the historical efforts of our society to provide an electorate with the necessary information for a free and fair choice, it is clear that the corporate “persons” are winning at our expense.

 

3) Finally the Court overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652 (1990) which allowed a union’s right to advocate and contribute to political elections while restricting contributions of commercial corporations. In striking down this distinction, they argue that the First Amendment does not tolerate prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. This further blurs the lines between economic and political democratic rights in elections since a commercial corporation’s members often do not have voting rights and, when they do, the voting rights are based on the number of shares a shareholder owns whereas in a union voting is based on the democratic principal of one person one vote. The present court argued that Austin was based on an “equality” rationale – trying to equalize speech between different speakers – that the Court had previously rejected as illegitimate under the First Amendment in Buckley v. Valeo. It is here that we most clearly see the confusion between, or the merging of, the concept of individual human social rights and the concept of individualism in the economic sphere which is based on the accumulation of wealth. In Citizens United, the majority argued that the First Amendment purposefully keeps the government from interfering in the “marketplace of ideas” and “rationing” speech, and it is not up to the legislatures or the courts to create a sense of “fairness” by restricting speech.

 

4) As a secondary corollary to the concept that they couldn’t distinguish between types of corporations, they criticized Austin’s reasoning that the “distorting effect” of large corporate expenditures constituted a risk of corruption arguing that the government had no place in determining whether large expenditures distorted an audience’s perceptions, and that the type “corruption” that might justify government controls on spending for speech had to relate to an individual transaction, not a “general perception”. According to the majority, “there is no such thing as too much speech.”[19] The public has a right to have access to all information and to determine the reliability and importance of the information.” Additionally, they did not believe that reliable evidence substantiated the risk of corruption or the appearance of corruption.

WE ALL KNEW IMMEDIATELY THAT CITIZENS UNITED WAS ABSURD

As we watch the drama unfold, the vision of the behemoth contributions made by corporations competing with the contributions of small, individual donors is, indeed, an overwhelming thought that turns our most cherished beliefs in an individual’s individual rights, democracy and equality on its head.

If there was any question, that Citizens United would not unleash the corporate hoards loose to buy elections it was crushed by the empirical data after the 2012 primary results. Let’s just give one “general perception.” In the first 3 months of 2012, outside private contributors spent approximately 800 times more in the last six months than in all the previous election years since 1990 combined. Mitt Romney — the biggest spender of them all — won handily over his opponents although nobody seemed to like him.

The June 5th recall election of Scott Walker in Wisconsin was just the coup de grace. The failure of one the most popular grassroots people’s movement we have seen in years to recall Gov. Walker can be attributed, at least in large part, to the fact that Walker’s corporate sponsors from out of state (and a good portion from just two ultra right-wing brothers, the Koch brothers) spent 60 million compared to the populist movement’s 4 million.

There are a couple of caveats to this analysis:

1) Many folks also blame the rather “lukewarm” middle of the road approach of the Democratic Party’s DNC and the President for dragging down the support for the populist recall. But this, too, can be attributed to the influence of large financial donors to the DNC or the threat of the loss of such donations.

2) In a particularly paranoid view, the fact that Wisconsin has many of the “new” voting machines that can be hacked and where it is next to impossible to prove the fraud, there were “warning alerts” and some are arguing that the election was stolen. Again, it is the corporate powers that be that generally determine the types of voting machines we use and, as they say, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

THE ENEMY IN OUR OWN HEADS

In the end, the Citizen’s United decision was just the final nail in the coffin in a long line of government decisions that buried our aspirations for the democracy and individual freedoms promised us in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. But the worst betrayal may be the betrayal we perpetrate on ourselves. As we helplessly watch corporate money takeover our elections, we pretend it isn’t happening.

Oh, we might talk the good game about fighting back. We start talking about a Constitutional Amendment that “corporations cannot be persons” — but how would we get it passed when most of our congress people, at both the federal and state levels, who must pass or ratify such an amendment, are susceptible to, if not outright paid for, by corporate wealth?

Or we could target our corporations directly through our votes as shareholders. The fact is small investors do not hold enough of the shareholder wealth to make many inroads. And in large, multinational corporations the decision making is so removed from the shareholders that even where we might control a large block of stock (i.e., our pension funds) we have little or no control over the decision-making process.

Although more and more of us understand the fact that we live, not in a democratic republic (as we were taught in school), but under a plutocracy, most still suffer from what Richard Grossman and Ward Morehouse in Revoking the Corporation, call the “colonization of our minds”, the corollary of which is the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) phenomenon.

According to Grossman and Morehouse, the fact is there are alternatives to this “way of life”. But in order to change this society we must transform our own conditioned thinking from that of programmed consumer into liberated citizen. And this requires an understanding of how we have been “programmed.”

First, corporate person-hood is simply a legal construct conferred upon corporations exclusively under the law of the United States. Corporations were given certain rights and responsibilities similar to those of an individual so they could do certain economic transactions. However, there is a question about which rights afforded to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons.

Much of the confusion in how to deal with the current corporate takeover is a result of the historical fusion between individual political rights described in the Declaration of Independence as the pursuit of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the role of an individual’s economic rights such as the right to private property, upward mobility and the accumulation of wealth associated with capitalism that were developing at the same time. It is interesting to note that Locke, who put forth the original bourgeois democratic enlightenment treatise of natural rights defined it as the pursuit of “life, liberty and property.”

Most of us are programmed to think of America as the land of the free, of democracy and opportunity. Much of that opportunity is economic as well as political. If we want free speech, we also harbor the belief that we, too, can become Bill Gates. If we want equality, we also want upward mobility. The American dream is signified by owning a home of our own. The dream of democracy ties Democracy and Freedom to the free market capitalist system. And we are reluctant to give up that dream. We aspire to be part of the great “middle class.” (Even the Wisconsin movement was defined as a “Middle Class” movement (which allowed the right wing to divide the “Middle Class” from the less fortunate members of the working class and might have been one reason for Scott Walker’s victory).

There is no denying that capitalism has, historically given many people the opportunity of upward mobility in its early stages. Over the years, however, the promise of capitalism as a system that provides freedom and democracy is withering. The United States in fact has the greatest disparity of wealth between the 1% and the 99% (to use the Occupy framework)and the least social mobility of any industrialized country.

Economic individualism is the flip side of our individual political or public rights. The role of individual capitalist competition, in the long run, does not result in greater freedoms. In its pursuit of profit, it results in winners and losers, a drive toward monopoly, the increased accumulation of private property in the hands of a few and unequal accumulation of wealth. A look at the history of corporations in the United States makes this clearer.

A HISTORY OF HOW CORPORATIONS ARE GOBBLING UP THE WORLD

British Crown Corporations began operating in North America with the start of European settlement. The creation of corporations expanded empire and made the aristocracy wealthy. Colonial anger and resentment against corporate power grew as the English Parliament introduced measures that protected trade by Crown corporations over that of local colonial merchants.

After the American Revolution sovereign power was allegedly transferred from a monarch to “We the People.” Of course, “We, the People,” was still, at that time, the merchant class and constituted only 10% of the population — excluding slaves, property-less people, people of color, women, etc. The corporate form, however, still had a certain utility for the merchant class in aggregating capital for large scale projects, which is why “the people” allowed them to exist at all. In 1819, the Supreme Court of the United States (Dartmouth College v. Woodward) recognized corporations as having the same rights as natural persons in the economic sphere to make and enforce contracts.

Of course the concentration of capital that goes along with the establishment of corporations also brings with it inherent risk for the populace. For this reason the formation of corporations was restricted to parameters set up by state constitutions and constrained by specific limitations in the state codes. The early 1800s frequently reiterated the fact that corporations could only be created for public benefit.

When we look at the history of our states, we learn that citizens intentionally defined corporations through charters–the certificates of incorporation. In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators wrote charter laws and actual charters to limit corporate authority, and to ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter. Having thrown off English rule, the revolutionaries did not give governors, judges or generals the authority to charter corporations. Only state legislators (closest to the people) could charter corporations. Up to the mid-1800s:

•The amount of capitalization a corporation could have was limited.
•The corporation had to be chartered for a specific purpose — not for everything, or anything.
•The shareholders (even though it was still based on the amount of share, not a one person, one vote rule)had a lot more rights than they have today, for major decisions such as mergers; sometimes they had to have unanimous shareholder consent.
•There were no limitations protections on liability — managers, directors, and shareholders were liable for all debts and harms and in some states, doubly or triply liable.
•The states reserved the right to amend the charters, or to revoke them, even for no reason at all.
•Corporations had limited duration, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.They were not given forever, like corporate charters are given today.
•The amount of land a corporation could own was limited.

Still, as the 19th century matured, manufacturing in the U.S. became more complex as the Industrial Revolution generated new inventions and business processes. The favored form for large businesses became the corporation because the corporation provided a mechanism to raise the large amounts of investment capital large business required, especially for capital intensive yet risky projects such as railroads.

The Civil War accelerated the growth of manufacturing and the power of the men who owned the large corporations. Businessmen such as Mark Hanna, sugar trust magnate Henry O. Havemeyer, banker J. P. Morgan, steel makers Charles M. Schwab and Andrew Carnegie, and railroad owners Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould created corporations that influenced legislation at the local, state, and federal levels as they built businesses that spanned multiple states and communities. Beginning in the 1870s, corporate lawyers became bolder about using the Webster/Marshall theory that corporations could exercise the rights of their shareholders, arguing that as such they were entitled to some of the legal protections against arbitrary state action accorded also to natural persons.

In the late 19th century, railroads were among the most politically powerful corporations in the country as the corporate officers had to work with federal and state legislatures in order to obtain land grants for rights of way and the legislatures. One of the most egregious examples of railroad magnates exploiting the public coffers for private gain was that most of the land offered for free under the Homestead Act for poor landless farmers toward the end of the civil war was in fact gobbled up by the railroads.

As railroads increased their size, a number of conflicts between various states and the railroads began to surface. In four cases that reached the Supreme Court (94 U.S. 155, 94 U.S. 164, 94 U.S. 179, 94 U.S. 180 (1877) railroads tried to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment prevented states from regulating the maximum rates they could charge. These cases did not rely on just an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but also on the Interstate Commerce clause. In each case, however, the Court based its decision on the Interstate Commerce clause. While the social contract has expended to many groups over the centuries, the corporations have also consolidated their power. In every case where the social project conflicted with the commercial project, the capitalist commercial project used its wealth to prevail.

Throughout the 1800s but especially after the Civil War, pressure from industrialists and bankers resulted in a handful of judges giving corporations more rights in property than human beings enjoyed. The biggest blow to citizen constitutional authority came in 1886. The US Supreme Court, in a statement that was accepted as part of the ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the US Constitution, sheltered by the 14th Amendment which requires due process in the criminal prosecution of “persons.”

Following this ruling, huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on “equal terms” with neighborhood businesses and individuals. “There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view,” Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas wrote 60 years later. Once corporations were legally defined as “natural persons”, they automatically were endowed with the same “Bill of Rights” as human beings, and so came to possess and then exploit with devastating consequences, the same “rights” of the freedom of speech, and the ability to participate in elections and lobby elected officials.

RECENT DECISIONS LEADING UP TO CITIZENS UNITED

In more recent decisions prior to Citizens United, a similar shift of citizens control to corporate control has been occurring in the communications sector, much as the manufacturing sector was taken over during the industrial revolution. In the more modern cases, a shift from legislative control to control through the Executive branch and its agencies and the courts, where corporate influence can more easily be applied, enabled the corporate takeover. Two examples are the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule.

For example, The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission’s view, honest, equitable and balanced. The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented.

In 1985, under FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler, a communications attorney who had served on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign staff in 1976 and 1980, the FCC released a report stating that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. In August 1987, under FCC Chairman Dennis R. Patrick, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in the Syracuse Peace Council decision, which was upheld by a panel of the Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit in February 1989.[13] The FCC suggested in Syracuse Peace Council that because of the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional, stating that:

“The intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters … [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists.”

In August 2011 the FCC formally removed the language that implemented the Doctrine.

A similar fate was met by the equal-time rule which specifies that U.S. radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates who request it. This means, for example, that if a station gives one free minute to a candidate on the prime time, it must do the same for another candidate. However, there are four exceptions: if the air-time was in a documentary, bona fide news interview, scheduled newscast or an on-the-spot news event the equal-time rule is not valid. Since 1983, political debates not hosted by the media station are considered news events, thus may include only major-party candidates without having to offer air time to minor-party or independent candidates. Talk shows and other regular news programming from syndicators, such as Entertainment Tonight, are declared exempt from the rule by the FCC on a case-on-case basis.

IS THERE HOPE?

Ward Morehouse, speaking in Palo Alto this past January 29th, spoke of “The Seven Challenges” we face in order to get out of the mess we are currently in. While some of them seem to presume we can still control the actions of our elected officials by working inside the existing Capitalist Plutocracy, they are still worth some thought:

1. We have to come to grips with is how to overcome this colonization of our minds and to recognize that there are alternatives to a society dominated by giant corporations.
2. Our second challenge involves taking a lesson from the play book of the corporations who [...] have spent the last century or more consolidating their power and insulating themselves from meaningful democratic control. We need therefore to try to change a body of legal doctrine rather than fight case after case after case of corporate transgression.
3. Our third challenge is to resist the temptation for co-optation and accommodation and not to accept as “victories” those which leave corporate power unchallenged and intact.
4. Our fourth challenge is to recognize the myth of American democracy and to overcome the plutocracy with which we live. All societies have myths about themselves. Ours is no exception.
5. The fifth is to understand that we will never win in this struggle if we play by their rules because they wrote the rules.
6. Our sixth is to determine how we know when we really have won in the struggle against corporate power, and I would submit to you that we only really win when there is a fundamental shift in power from corporations back to the people where it was in the first place, and should be again [Can we really go back to regulated corporations like we had in the "good old days", long before we had global multinationals or must we move forward to some new formation?]
7. The seventh challenge is to take to heart the big lessons of 20th century history, and not to be discouraged by the challenges that indeed do confront us. It was said no where better or more eloquently than by Howard Zinn in one of his recent books, when he wrote that, “[t]he struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money, and who seem invincible in their determination to hold onto it. That apparent power has again and again proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, ingenuity, courage, patience. Whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Viet Nam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.”

Morehouse then went on to present tactics for establishing democratic control over corporations. [Some of which I think might also be tactics for a more far reaching evolution to a different economic system]. Here is an eleven-point program for doing just that:

1. We can start by revoking the charters of especially harmful corporations who have inflicted mass harm on innocent people. There are provisions for the revocation of charters in 49 of the 50 states. They have some provisions similar to that in the New York Business Corporation Law, Section 1101, which specifies that corporations that act contrary to the public policy of the state are subject to dissolution.
2. We can recharter corporations to limit their powers and make them entities subordinate to the sovereign people. For example by granting charters (as used to be the case) for limited time periods, requiring that there be a conscious, deliberate act of approval by communities and workers for corporations to continue beyond the initial time in which they have been chartered. For making corporate managers and directors liable for the harms done by corporations. (If this can be done through a referendum which we have in many states, instead of the state legislature, this might be a real possibility, especially if we only approve charters for corporations where shareholders have voting rights based on one shareholder, one vote.)
3. We can address what is a fundamental obstacle to democratic control over corporations, which is their sheer size. Many of you are well aware that the largest corporations today are larger than most nation-states. General Motors has gross income greater than the gross domestic product of Denmark. So we need to reduce the size of corporations by breaking them into smaller units with less power to undermine democratic institutions. For those of you who think this is a wild flight-of-fancy, I would remind you that as an issue in public policy, this has historical precedence in the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 which did just that: it said certain public utility companies will divest themselves because they may not be larger than a given set of criteria determined through a democratic process. (Maybe — but it woud be a much bigger struggle today with the degree of corporate control and a global economy.)
4. We need to establish effective worker and community control over production units in order to protect the “reliance interest”, an important, if not fully developed, legal doctrine which workers and communities acquire over time in the actions, the activities, and indeed the assets of corporations. This could be done in a variety of ways including prohibitions in the charter of the corporation in the future, prohibitions for the hiring of replacement workers (scabs in other words), requiring independent health and safety audits by experts chosen by workers in the affected communities, required voting rights in corporations based on one worker, one vote, and so on.
5. We can initiate referendum campaigns, or take action through state legislatures and the courts, to end constitutional protections for corporate persons.
6. We can prohibit corporations from making campaign contributions to candidates in any elections, and from lobbying any local, state, and federal government bodies. If you think this is off-the-wall, you should be aware that in the state of Wisconsin, up until a couple of decades ago, it was a felony for corporations to make political contributions. (Why do you think the right wing spent the last couple of decades buying Presidential candidates and making sure they got Supreme Court Justices who would pass Citizens United?)
7. We can stop subsidy abuse and extortion by corporations through which large corporations rake off billions of dollars from the public treasury. Please let us not call it “corporate welfare”. Welfare should be a positive concept. This is extortion and subsidy abuse and we need to stop it.
8. We need to launch campaigns to cap salaries of corporate executives, and tie them to a ratio of average compensation for production workers (say, five or ten to one).
9. We can encourage worker and community-owned and -controlled cooperatives and other alternatives to conventional limited liability profit-making corporations. They need not be the only game in town, in fact they are not the only game in town. But we need to work hard to expand alternative types of enterprises that will subject themselves to genuine democratic control.
10. We can prepare model state corporation codes based on the principle of citizen sovereignty, and begin the campaign for their adoption, state-by-state.
11. We can invigorate, from the grassroots up, a national debate on the relationship between public property and private property — including future value – and the rights of natural persons, communities, and other species when they are in conflict with those corporations. This whole subject of how we define property rights is at the heart of much of the accumulation and codification of corporate power. ←THIS IS WHERE I’M STARTING!

REFERENCES:
1. “Summary Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Docket No. 08-205)”. Cornell University School of Law. http://topics.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-205.
2. Liptak, Adam (2010-01-21). “Justices, 5–4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html.
3. CounterPunch, 4 February 2010, Chucking Precedent at the High Court
4. Syllabus : Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Supreme Court of the United States. “How Corporate Money Will Reshape Politics: Restoring Free Speech in Elections”. The New York Times blog. 2010-01-21.
5. http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/how-corporate-money-will-reshape-politics. Retrieved 2010-01-21.
6. Remsen, Nancy (December 8, 2011). “Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., offers constitutional amendment on corporate “citizenship”. The Burlington Free Press. http://blogs.burlingtonfreepress.com/politics/2011/12/08/sen-bernie-sanders-i-vt-offers-constitutional-amendment-on-corporate-citizenship/
7. Nader, Ralph (2010-01-22). “The Supremes Bow to King Corporation”. CounterPunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/nader01222010.html.
8. Sullivan, Kathleen (2010). “Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech”. Harvard Law Review 124: 143–177. http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/124/november10/Comment_7328.php.
9. Andre, Steven J. (2010). “The Transformation of Freedom of Speech: Unsnarling the Twisted Roots of Citizens United v. FEC”. John Marshall Law Review 44 (1): 69–127. http://works.bepress.com/stevenjandre/11/.
10. Ocean Beach Rag. July 6, 2011.
11. Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction. Boulder Weekly July 14, 2011.
12. Boliek, Brooks (August 22, 2011). “FCC finally kills off fairness doctrine”. POLITICO. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61851.html.
13. Rendall, Steve (2005-02-13).”The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost it, and Why We Need it Back”. Common Dreams (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0212-03.htm. Retrieved 2008-11-13.
14. FCC Video, NBC Universal (1987) (“Today we reaffirm our faith in the American people. Our faith in their ability to distinguish between between fact and fiction without any help from government.”) “FCC 1987″; see Robert D. Hershey, Jr.,
15. F.C.C. Votes Down Fairness Doctrine in a 4-0 Decision, New York Times, August 5, 1987 [http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/05/arts/fcc-votes-down-fairness-doctrine-in-a-4-0-decision.html]
16. Robert D. Hershey, Jr., F.C.C. Votes Down Fairness Doctrine in a 4-0 Decision, New York Times, August 5, 1987
17. Gardner, Eriq (2 December 2011). “Anderson Cooper’s Talk Show Is a News Program, FCC Rules; The government regulators have determined the talk show qualifies as news and is thus exempt from obligations to giving political candidates equal air time.”. Hollywood Reporter. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/anderson-cooper-talk-show-269175. Retrieved 24 December 2011.
18. Smith, Bradley. “Corporations Are People, Too”. NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112711410. Retrieved 2011-01-
19. Hartmann, Thom (2010). Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “”People”" –and How You Can Fight Back. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Http://books.google.com/books?id=zAmgOl5YT2QC.
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Corporate_personhood&oldid=487673157
21. Model Amici Curiae Brief to Eliminate Corporate Rights, by Richard L.
Grossman, Thomas Alan Linzey, & Daniel E. Brannen, 9/23/03
22. Revoking The Corporation, a discussion with Richard Grossman & Ward Morehouse, transcribed by rat haus reality press, 1996.
23. Richard Grossman &. Ward Morehouse, ASSERTING DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OVER CORPORATIONS: A CALL TO LAWYERS, The NATIONAL LAWYERS Guild Practitioner, volume 52, number 4, fall 1995, p. 101.
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Call2Lawyers.html#coom1
24. If you aren’t sure Citizens United gave rise to the super PACs, just follow the money. By Richard L. Hasen|Posted Friday, March 9, 2012, at 2:56 PM ET
25. Berle, Adolf and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932.