Don't take it from me. Take it from the book being published today that will mainstream the movement to end corporate personhood: "Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do, And What You Can Do About It," by Jeff Clements with foreword by Bill Moyers.

Clements traces the development of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood back long before the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision two years ago this month, in particular to President Richard Nixon's appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court in 1972. Led by Powell's radical new conception of corporate rights, Clements shows, the court began striking down laws that protected living breathing persons' rights in areas including the environment, tobacco, public health, food, drugs, financial regulation, and elections.

SIX PROBLEMS UNIQUE TO 2012 NEW HAMPSHIRE ELECTIONS:
1. Removed safeguards for its same-day registration system.
2. Ignores the law on ballot-stuffing safeguards
3. Breaks the chain of custody
4. Conceals vote-counting from the public, in violation of Article 32 of its own Constitution
5. Removed candidate recount rights (2009)
6. Made it illegal for public citizens or members of the press to examine the ballots after the election is over (2003)

TWO THINGS YOU CAN DO
1. Get involved with Protect the Count NH or Watch the Vote 2012 (links below)
2. Monitor the trap doors

WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT NEW HAMPSHIRE'S FIRST-IN-NATION PRIMARY?

On New Years Eve, a 4.3 magnitude earthquake hit Youngstown, OH. Despite there never being a recorded earthquake before, this was the 11th earthquake in Youngstown this year alone. Why the change? In 2011, D&L Energy began disposing of over 200,000 gallons a day of toxic frack water from Pennsylvania and Ohio (or enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool every 2 to 3 days) by injecting it underground. Not surprisingly, by 2011 this toxic mixture had forced its way into a previously unknown fault and presto chango, earthquakes in Youngstown.

Preliminary reports from seismology experts from Columbia University say that even if they permanently stop this injection well, the earthquakes are probably going to continue for up to a year. But the chances of Gov. Kasich and the ODNR permanently stopping injection wells is about as possible as, well, an earthquake in Youngstown before this year.

Dear Harvey,
I am a friend of Bob. I met you at a Free Press et. al conference pre-last presidential election. While I have admired your work for years, it took your article on Shakespeare and Co to move me to contact you.

I, too, left a part of me that still inspirits the streets of Paris. As I read the first few paragraphs of your article, I thought immediately of my own experience (not as grand as yours) and, of the recent Woody Allen film. How delighted I was to read on and find your reference to "Midnight in Paris." And, what a beautiful symmetry was felt in your remembrance of your first stay and the juxtaposition of your last return; the kindness of the gentleman who let you stay and then the kindness of your message to him, now upstairs where you had been.

I remember years ago seeing a documentary about the first owner of S&Co along with her lesbian lover. I also remember the simple act of kindness that was extended to James Joyce when no one would publish his novel Ulysses. The owner said, "Would you like me to publish your book, James?" It was so sweet, so unassuming, so considerate.
Maybe they’re trying to remind us that democracy isn’t merely a matter of casting that little vote once every Leap Year — but, far, far more significantly, it’s about getting that right to vote in the first place, keeping that right, and having it matter.

Every one of these rights is in jeopardy as 2012 opens and another presidential election season gets serious. But this is nothing new.

After all, democracy is nothing if not a perpetual nuisance to the powerful. It asserts that public policy is everyone’s business, and that the concerns of even the most financially and socially marginal citizens are equal to those of the most elite. Indeed, no one is marginal in a democracy — a concept we embrace as a nation but don’t believe. And thus citizens are marginalized all the time.

As activists and journalists debate whether Homeland Security and the CIA are actively involved in the recent domestic crackdown on the Occupy movement, evidence mounts that the progressive populist movement is being targeted by COINTELPRO style repressive tactics.

Four of the seven Occupy Columbus activists who were arrested on November 15 appeared at pre-trial before a Franklin County municipal judge on Thursday, January 5, 2012. The four had pled not guilty after being charged with “negligent trespassing” for entering the lobby of a US Bank. The activists were touring Columbus banks to inquire about their banking policies. Two of the Occupy activists have pled guilty to a minor misdemeanor trespass charge, and one has not entered a plea.

At the January 5 hearing, the four turned down a plea deal from the prosecutors and received a continuance. They will reappear for another scheduled pre-trial on February 9.

At this moment the four appear ready for a full blown trial that may possibly reveal ties between federal and local police authorities regarding surveillance of the Occupy movement.

The year 2012 has opened with news that Fukushima's radioactive cloud may already have killed some 14,000 Americans, according to a major study just published in the International Journal of Health Services.

Some 100 million tons of tsunami trash---much of it radiated by Fukushima fallout---has begun contaminating the beaches of our west coast.

Germany and Japan, the world's third and fourth largest economies, along with numerous others countries, have definitively turned away from the "Peaceful Atom."

But it hasn't yet been buried. That's up to us. And 2012 is the year to do it.

We are already very close. The mythical "Nuclear Renaissance" has been gutted by Fukushima, low gas prices and the escalating Solartopian revolution in green energy. Solar panels, wind turbines, sustainable bio-fuels, geo-thermal, ocean thermal, increased efficiency and much more have simply priced atomic energy out of the market.

Exercise. Lose weight. Be nicer. Work with not just this year but many future years and generations and centuries in mind.

Work with an international perspective as much as possible. Collaborate internationally as much as possible.

Work to turn last year's Arab Spring into this year's Worldwide Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter.

Help to create a worldwide movement against plutocracy and violence.

Stop thinking of defeating horrendous proposals as the only kind of "victory" possible.

Within the United States, help to advance the organization of a student loan debtors union large enough and strategic enough to both refuse payment and to build a campaign that will make education free going forward — in the United States and around the world.

Help to advance a nonviolent resistance campaign to halt foreclosures on homes, one by one, and through legislatures and courts.

I stopped by a corporate chain bookstore this week and checked out the "Current Affairs" section. I was a little surprised to discover that according to a dozen or more books dominating the display we are all under a vicious life-and-death assault from a raving, drooling mob of communist devils led by that well-known pinko guerrilla Barack Obama.

Of course, further investigation tends to reveal that the crimes of this mythical nouveau-Soviet assault by Democrats in D.C. are a combination of tasks performed for their masters on Wall Street and tasks they would never perform even under enhanced interrogation technique. The Obama-gang of rabid leftists stands accused of bailing out banksters and mega corporations, as of course they have eagerly done, just as have their Republican partners in crime. And they stand accused of taxing the rich and cutting the military while providing healthcare, education, retirement security, renewable energy, and affordable housing to the least well-off among us, as of course they will do the day Newt Gingrich turns monogamous.

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