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This Resolution was passed by the State Central Committee of the Democratic Party of Oregon on Dec. 6th, 2009.

This is not an official copy but should be pretty close
2009-043: Opposing Corporate Personhood
RESOLUTION 2009-043
A RESOLUTION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF OREGON

WHEREAS, (as stated in the preamble to our Oregon State Democratic Platform) “...as Oregon Democrats, we assert that the citizens of our state and our country ARE the government, we hold up the Bill of Rights and derived civil liberties as the enduring standard of liberty, and we firmly oppose abrogation of those rights and liberties in the name of governmental convenience or security....” [emphasis added.] and

WHEREAS, The basis for establishing rights as “persons” for corporations under the U.S. Constitution has been and currently is based upon a questionable interpretation of the Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, and

WHEREAS, Our country and the world have suffered catastrophic economic devastation as a result of the ensuing imbalance of political and economic power, and

WHEREAS, Corporations, relying on the Supreme Court's Buckley vs Valeo decision, now wield undue political influence since they are allowed to use money to exercise their putative first amendment rights.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED AS FOLLOWS:

1. We strongly urge our state legislators to submit and vote for a State constitutional amendment that declares that in the State of Oregon corporations shall not be recognized as persons nor accrue the rights of persons under State laws.

2. We strongly urge our Representatives to the U.S. Congress as well as our Senators to the U.S. Congress to submit an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which declares that “the rights and privileges granted by this document shall accrue to natural persons only.”

The Key to Democratic Recovery

I believe that I express the feelings and opinions of most of us in the MCDCC when I say that we want:
Universal free education
Universal health care (preferably Medicare for all)
Monetary System & Banking reform
Campaign finance reform (preferably publicly funded)
Election reform (every vote counted and verifiable)
Energy independence (through green energy)
Bringing manufacturing and jobs back to this country
etc., etc., etc.
We may not agree on the order of the list, but the list itself is pretty representative of our concerns. There is, however, one underlying principle that is preventing us from implementing that list; even with a Democratic majority in the Legislature: Corporate Personhood.

For over 120 years there has been a concerted effort to increase the power and rights of corporations, and it has been extremely successful. Even though it had some setbacks stemming from the FDR administrations, the general trend has been upward and recently has been climbing at a 90° angle. CP has now brought us to the point that Corporations can donate large sums of money to our legislators and employ obscene numbers of lobbyists to fight laws that reinstate the rights of the people and write laws that promote their own mercenary interests. We have to stop them!

Dear Mr. President,
Like millions of other Americans, I joined your campaign for change and hope during the 2008 election because I saw in you the leadership potential of a great president. Not since John Kennedy took the world stage have I felt so exuberant and joyful for the inauguration of a new president. I knew then as I do now that your fledgling presidency would face monumental challenges, but I believed you had the courage to face them head on and not seek the time-honored tradition of borrowing time and money from future generations to defer the hard choices needed to be made today.

I was pleased in the way you aggressively tried to deal with our economic crisis and how you correctly linked our health care crisis with the economic one. You have said over and over, we can't fix the economy without fixing health care. Not only did you know that health care in this country was costing us 18% of GDP, but our competitors in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world are doing it for half of that and taking care of everyone, while we have over 50 million people without any health security. You also know that for all of our vaunted technology and the money we spend, we rank 37th in the world in health outcomes. So you may imagine my disappointment several months ago when you responded to the question of health care reform by saying, “If we were starting from scratch, single payer would be the way to go,” and then proceeded to dismiss the possibility of achieving it any time soon. Yet I continued to hope because you remained staunchly in favor of a robust national Public Option - A government administered insurance program that would compete with for-profit insurers and whose success, in time, would bring us to a universal, national single payer health care system.

This August of our National Discontent has enabled the right to derail the health care debate, but it also has given our Democratic legislators a windfall - Not having to answer uncomfortable questions about real health care reform.  Questions like, why isn't Medicare for All being considered despite huge public support? Why won't you talk with representatives from countries such as Taiwan and Switzerland who made the switch to national health care in the past 15 years to find out how they did it? If reduced cost, better outcomes, and universal coverage are the goals, why won't you allow your proposals to be examined against the countless  studies done around the world that have examined the benefits (and short-comings) of national health care?

These are the kind of questions I would have liked to put to my elected representatives when they came back to Oregon. Instead, I find myself in the position of being a political lineman, defending the quarterback from being sacked, and all the while not at all in agreement with the play he called. It angers and frustrates me. It also makes me wonder if the Democrats aren't quietly chortling over this "opportunity" the crazy right has given them - the opportunity not to have to defend their choices.

 It's evident in following the mainstream media that a backlash to the boorish town hall behavior is taking hold. Editorials are lashing out at the perpetrators, letters to the editor and columnists (Rich Lowry excepted) universally condemn the disruptions. Meanwhile, the conversation has moved away from specifics and devolved to: Health care reform - Are you for it or against it? Yes, or no? It's like a segment from the McLaughlin Report.

It's been said by Senator Wyden and others that Congress has the best healthcare available. So we have to ask the good senator and most of the other members of Congress: 'Shouldn't you get yourselves some quality hearing aids with that great insurance of yours?' There's no other (polite) way to explain their universal deafness to the public out cry for a national single payer health system, or at the least a robust national public option that could lead us to single payer.

A review of national and regional polls for more than a year have shown public support to be between 59-73% for a national single payer system. In New Hampshire, 65% of all physicians and 81% of primary care physicians supported single payer. In Minnesota, 64% of physicians were in favor of single payer. No national poll in recent months has been less than 59% in favor of a national, universal, single payer health care system. An election victory with numbers like these would be called a landslide, a pubic mandate. So what gives? How can Senator Max Baucus, (D), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and by the way, a committee on which Senator Wyden sits – say single payer is “off the table”?

There’s a line from an old Broadway musical, Most Happy Fella, that says, “Oh you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking…” but it soon that won’t be true. A segment on Sixty Minutes, the TV commentary of Sunday, June 28, centered on neuroscience. It showed how patterns of thought could be read with a CT brain scan. The thought was relatively simple — a subject was given a word like hammer and the brain scan immediately showed a pattern. This pattern was replicated in other subjects. In effect, the brain scan read the subject’s thought.

The neuroscientist explained that this work was only the beginning. He talked about research techniques become more sophisticated so that it will be possible to read much more complex thoughts, and even to direct some kind of beam at a person and read what the person is thinking. It might even be used to learn what people in a crowd are thinking without them ever knowing that their thoughts were being read.

What a boon to merchandisers, explained the neuroscientist. Stores could help patrons find what they want easily, I suppose by directing them to the place where they can get the wanted item. So the brain scanner is not just reading thoughts, but also directing them.

The neuroscientist said that it wouldn’t be taking decades; it might be with us in just a few years. He said this with a great smile, as though it was the best thing in the world and there were no morals involved with his project. It seemed to me that he morphed into a great shark. It would be more than interesting to know who funds such research.

With the onslaught of technology that listens to our phone calls, directs some of what comes up on our computer screens, and who knows what else, our privacy is fast fading away. Maybe it is t only old cranks like me who think that privacy is essential to our way of life. Our thoughts may be the last bastion of privacy, but technology is promising to take even that away from us.

HOW TO CURE CORPORATE GREED
Most people think that heart disease, diabetes, or cancer are the biggest killers and maimers in the U.S. if not the world. However, there is a far larger cause of death in the U.S.; bigger than all of the above, far bigger than war, far bigger than accidents, far bigger than toxic wastes. That killer, maimer, destroyer of people's lives is CORPORATE GREED. In the Health Care field there is only one cure for this “disease”: SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE ADMINISTRATION.

I add the word “administration” because that is all that Single Payer changes. You will still have your choice of doctors or medical facility and your doctor will have more choices because his/her diagnosis will be accepted at face value. No bureaucrat will stand between you and the treatment or medicines that you need. No one will be trying to discover if your condition is preexisting. No one will be asking you to fill out forms or sign away the deed to your home in order for you to have treatment.

In short, you will have the care you now have (only better because it will include annual medical exams and wellness education). And when you leave the Dr.'s office you will not be presented with a bill for the deductible or coinsurance. So, if you just love your current care, it will only get better. Don't have dental? Don't have vision? You will have both, and mental health services as well.

Best of all, your neighbor will have this same care, and so will the veteran who has returned injured or mentally scarred and, having sacrificed so much for this country, is now being denied adequate health care. Everyone in this country will be covered; including the 87 million who are now uninsured (47 mil.) or underinsured (40 mil.).

I agree with the first principle of the Health Care Project of the Archimedes movement mentored by John Kitzhaber: “we cannot solve the health care crisis by simply giving everyone insurance coverage.”

I worked in this field for many years as an insurance agent covering the group market and also as the owner of a third party administration company. And I can tell you that insurance companies have no business being in the health care business. Insurance is a risk model and insurance companies try to sharply define risk. This inevitably leads to the exclusion of both conditions and treatments.

Supposedly there are over 1300 insurance companies competing for business in this field. So you would expect that, with that much competition, prices would be kept down. That is not the case!! Health Insurance Premiums have increased at double, triple, and quadruple the so called regular rate of inflation ever since the mid Seventies , and that is because free market principles do not apply here. Additionally, in reality, there are only five major corporations handling 90% of the the health care business.

Free market forces do not operate in this sector because demand has always been greater than supply: there have always been fewer medical services and medical providers than the people wanting and needing those services. And health care is not for the most part 'elective'; when you need it you don't stop to shop around for the best price. In some cases people could not afford to pay for those services so the third party payment system (TPPS) (insurance) was invented or applied to this new field.

Open Letter to President Obama

01/14/09

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations, you have achieved the highest level of servitude to which man, in our time, can aspire.

It is my HOPE that you will continue to see yourself in that light rather than as the newest poster child and member of The Elite.  It is that HOPE which led me to devote considerable time and resources to getting you elected.  It is that HOPE which compelled me to ask and answer the question: “If rich and powerful individuals and corporations can buy elections, why can't I?”  That HOPE seemed to become a living entity as more than three million other ordinary citizens asked and answered exactly the same question with "YES I CAN." In addition to the money, most of these same people devoted time to mobilizing every like minded individual to electing a president who would truly serve their interests rather than seeking to exploit them. Your efforts were Herculean and so were ours.

By our overwhelming efforts we were able to neutralize the covert and overt manipulation of our election system, and, while we will do it again, if we have to,  we must now seek to level the playing field so that in future elections  we can simply vote relying  on the knowledge that our vote will honestly and accurately be counted.  A great deal of effort has been expended in the last thirty years toward the subversion of democracy and we must consolidate our (the people's) power reversing that trend and securing once and for all time our Democracy.