can show us bankers just rewards jamie whyte in the city am proposes that strippers and bankers they operate on a similar performance bonus scheme but here is one of the many differences he says between lap dancers and bankers whereas mr stringfellow makes his lap dancers pay for the privilege of being put in the way of their bonuses with a house fee of about one hundred pounds a night investment bankers are paid to have the chance of earning bonuses in the millions with base salaries ranging from roughly fifty thousand pounds to three hundred thousand pounds it's not even that they're being paid but they're given a subsidy if you look at in terms of the concept of too big to fail banks the government gives investment banks a subsidy in the form of low interest rates and bailouts so that they can go ahead and do what is no more instrumental in keeping the economy going as the average pole dancer so the pole dancing model of you've got to give the house some money to

basically rent space to pole dance is exactly what the model should be for investment bankers because their job at the end of the day is just a seduce suckers into giving them lots of money for cheap thrill as we just reported the headstrong community does not deliver alpha that is to say they don't make anybody money they instead produce they get about which is to say they lose people money which is exactly what the typical pole dancer does they get the client all hot bother but they don't actually deliver what the ultimate desire of that client would be same thing with an investment banker they talk a good game but they deliver nothing and the fact they are nothing but subsidy suckers in germany you know the street prostitutes they have a kiosk or they put in some money and they rent space to do their job this is exactly the same on wall street jamie diamond something go to walter government put in a million dollars and exercises right as. a wall street prostitute this is do say it

it's into j.p. morgan stock in all their products that's exactly the way it should be done he and lloyd should put on their g. strings man and do a little dance and see who is better i think jamie's got some nice chicks when you compare it to lloyd blankfein is kind of out of shape but you know jamie jamie is constantly out running the pitchforks and torches and he's got nice legs well investment bankers like lap dancers should have to pay to go to work if investment banks held auctions in which prospective employees bid for jobs by offering an annual fee the bank's owners and all of those others who nowadays concern themselves with the issue could be confident that they are not overpaying their staff any excess pay would be competed away in the auction auction is capitalism we don't have capitalism you know thanks to the predatory behavior on wall street and the city of london no more bear stearns no more lehman brothers the competition is shrinking the too big to fail problem is growing the agency fraud as bill black

calls it is increasing well between these two headlines max i haven't told you this yet but i did put out word to the primate community basically looking for somebody to audition to be our fund manager and i've got this video here from gibbon he's ru hedge fund manager and of course it is imposable but he could pull in there. yeah this guy has got the chops and he's got what it takes to be a good fund manager because he's decisive you know there's a credible analogue between a suicide bomber and a hedge fund manager they are willing to die for market fundamentalism without thinking about it too much what i'd like to see lloyd and jamie performing next and see who could do that better swinging on those are oh well some clearly the government isn't down in ways that i don't think either of those other two gentlemen are but that's clearly maybe not great for the hedge fund industry for say but it could be useful in other. contexts speaking of natural endowments there

are certain artists who are naturally endowed with great art and those who still taking the mickey joy division drummers anger at disney t. shirts inspired by unknown pleasures album cover so joy division drummer stephen morris has hit out at a disney t. shirt which appears to have been inspired by the band's first album cover the waves mickey mouse t. shirt is similar to the one thousand nine hundred eighty nine album unknown pleasures but uses silhouette so here you can see the images side by side the one on the left is the mickey mouse t. shirt and the one on the right is joy division's album cover now disney originally said that it was inspired by the iconic sleeve but the disney store website now contains no reference to the band well let's introduce a new personality to our role gal gallery of terrorists and kleptocrats bob iger our c.e.o.

of does they just announce fifty million dollars compensation for the air bob iger are is to do copyright terrorism what blankfein and diamond are to financial terrorism and disney of course is the company that every single time mickey mouse is due to enter the public domain they lobby congress to extend copyright most famously with bondo bono bonnie bono bono cher's ex husband who got extended by another twenty years to create what lawrence lessig calls perpetual copyright and gives a cook to crowd of powers to do this actually this a that we know we're violating copyright law but we don't care because we have the power to tell you to go buzz off at the same time we're going to use it to deprive you of your constitutional right to fair use this is at the nexus of the copyright problem the soap of the people that i go are copyright terrorist disney is a shameless organization that really needs to be broken up as well as these big banks so stephen morris the drummer from joy division said i was quite. angry when

i first saw it no one asked us they were trading off the band and our album cover but get away with it by apparently saying the design was inspired by us so why isn't that the argument for mega upload we were just inspired by warner brothers music or universal music one of the creators of that show californication it's from the title of a hit red hot chili peppers song they simply stole it they didn't pay him compensation they said you know we're we're bigger than you tough luck well so it's part of that banana republican ism however where a certain class of kleptocrats get all sort of rights exclusions exemptions from all laws and tax laws and criminal laws and the other class have been out as thrown at them behind a cage that's right those are americans so fur that you mentioned sopa thirty years before sopa m p a feared the v c r so somebody uncovered some

testimony by jack valenti the former n.p.a. head the motion picture association of america and this is him speaking before the house judiciary subcommittee in one thousand nine hundred eighty two he said to the gathered congress people i say to you that the v.c. are is to the american film producer and the american public as the boston strangler is the woman home alone. right jack valenti arguing against technology course the v.c.r. gave birth to the blockbuster franchise of rentals of video a multi billion dollar of revenue source for hollywood which that went into the d.v.d. market another multibillion source of revenue which could enter into the download market at every step of the way hollywood has put their foot down and said no we need protection from the government against any competition and they have reluctantly been dragged through the innovative process to multi-billion dollar profits going forward why anyone listens to these idiots in los angeles i don't

understand meanwhile in new york you've got people like louis c.k. who put on his concert film online no diarra asked for people to just give him money for the show and he raised over a million dollars no bob iger are no disney no c.a.a. no management fee just artist public and beaucoup bucks so he used this as an argument that it was just being used by people who were illegally copying material from the television he said the loser will be your public because they don't have these expensive machines and that is what i am saying sir the public is the loser when creative property is taken and here is the reason why the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars each year to produce quality programs to theaters and televisions will surely decline exact same words they're using today and what happened these expensive machines v.c.r. players used to cost a thousand fifteen hundred dollars they came down to fifty bucks today yeah yeah

they can't get more it's called capitalism right and this is the one thing that hollywood doesn't want to participate in they want to have like the big banks on wall street huge government subsidies for an industry that is completely superfluous you could go a limb in a hollywood eliminate too big to fail banks and the us economy would be the beneficiary of this more competition in the creative space more competition in the financial space for. well max i've got to go pay our fund manager he is paid in and mangos you know. those plenty more where that came from buddy keep picking those winners all right stacy ever thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you max and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy ever send me an e-mail at kaiser reported r t t v dot are you follow me on twitter max kaiser you can follow stacey on twitter too until next time x. factor saying bye oh.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.

download the official location on the phone called touch from the dumpster. life on the go. video on demand all keys in my world comes an r.s.s. feed now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. that's.

oh i'm tom arbonne in washington d.c. and this is the big picture. coming up tonight on the big picture it's friday so that means it's time for conversations with great minds tonight i sit down with jeff kline mounts to talk about the impact that the citizens united decision is having on our mockers also from the state of the union to the g.o.p. debate and everything in between we've got it all. it's a night's big picture rumble and bank of america will modify your mortgage but at

what cost how will their decision affect your freedom of speech. for tonight's conversations and great minds i'm joined by jeff. jeff is the former assistant attorney general of massachusetts and has been fighting on behalf of people business and the public interest for more than twenty years currently he's the co-founder and general counsel for the organization free speech for people which is a national nonpartisan campaign with the mission of overturning the supreme court's citizens united decision and fighting back against corporate personhood this is a movement that is nearing a tipping point in america as tens of thousands of people rallied in front of court houses across the nation earlier this month on the two year anniversary of the citizens united decision to protest corporate personhood and too much corporate

influence in our democracy and as an issue the comedian stephen colbert has taken to its logical absurdity with his super pac including his most notorious super pac ad about mitt romney the serial killer. if mitt romney really believes what christians are people my friend. than mitt romney is a serial killer. mitt the ripper. as a result as a result of corporate personhood and the supreme court decisions like citizens united our democracy frankly is in peril and jeff clements as someone who can help us he's the author of the new book corporations are not people and he joins us now welcome thank you tom good to be here great to have you with us before we get into into the book what what got you into the law and into the massachusetts a.g.'s office well it's a long story i'll give you the short version and i was actually out of college a canvasser with greenpeace. and i was going door to door in places of rural

virginia to suburban washington d.c. and other places like that talking about environmental protection and the balance of people and and corporate power even then that's really what the environmental movement is about how we make it more just better society for all of us and i went to law school because i saw that's where the battles were taken the we could talk about it but in the meantime the courts and the law were actually creating the results we all lived with and i wanted to have a more tools frankly to be involved in that and that effort and so i i went to law school tried to keep up the fight and when i was practicing law in my first few years i got him scott harshbarger an attorney general of massachusetts at the time was leading this effort to take on the tobacco industry with many other state

agencies across the country and i want to be part of it and so i banged down the door to let me in and i worked on the tobacco case in the mid ninety's in the a.g.'s office there that's great because if so great. in your in your own words what is corporate personhood this your book corporations are not people yeah you know it was quite well i start the book with some acknowledgement really that we. we need a book to say corporations are not people i think most americans know that the reason it does is a few who don't and unfortunately five of them are on the supreme court and so what corporate personhood is is a notion that corporations have taken on usurped are really the rights that belong to the people and when the due process clause and the equal protection clause and other aspects of the constitution use the word person the corporate lawyers have hammered away for years as as you know more than anyone to take the

rights of people and so that's the fight against corporate personhood now it shouldn't be confused with the state law of treating corporations with a metaphor of personhood so we we can sue them they can sue they can sign contracts and so forth but we the people make those laws when delaware corporate law is made it's made by the delaware state legislature and if if we the people decide a person metaphors useful one for some purposes that's fine but that has nothing to do with the constitution and so we confuse those two at our peril as the supreme court showed in citizens united the corporations along with other institutions governments churches typically it's been those three suppose you could throw in unions or non-profits. all the way back to seventh century british common law have had a person who had status as you point out so they could pay taxes on property sue and

be sued but it's always been a unique status separate from that of natural persons humans like you and me. when did that start to break down or before. well you know it is a. in my view it's constantly blurry and if we're not careful and so this has been a struggle in the american our american story back to the beginning of the revolution of course the tea party from my hometown of boston was about throwing the india corporate she is a corporate tea into the harbor exactly they had a special privilege from the british crown and the you know the settlers the colonialists wanted to be able to trade with whomever they chose and not have to deal with the corporate monopoly that the british were imposing on us at the time and that is a refrain throughout american history andrew jackson was fighting the first bank of america i know you can talk more about the current iteration of bank of america but

that idea that corporations get special privileges from the government and then use special privileges to leverage that advantage leverage the wealth and try to get more power i think it's a constant story it's one of the things that go with a corporate charter is a threat and i think we always understood that and ok surely we forget it or we lose some battles like with santa clara in the gilded age took away our constitutional rights because we didn't keep an adequate eye on corporate power but we pushed back with the progressive era the new deal again in the sixty's and seventy's we had to push back and now we have to do it again i think this idea that there's a line gets blurred it will happen if we don't manage what in the book i call corporations are there a tool that's not a person nothing more exotic than a tool and they're like gasoline or guns you know they have purposes but if you

don't keep an eye on them they get out of control. i don't think most people understand what a corporate charter is or why the state charter laws even what state charter laws are setting aside all the. oddities of things like the charter mongar in the air at the end of the nineteenth century or something but what is a corporate charter and and out of that i guess doesn't that define what is a corporation i think yes and so the corporate charter is quite simple actually you can incorporate without government permission and in fact there is no such thing as a corporation exist in nature a group of people cannot get together and form a corporation without government rules and the charter that comes from government anyone is free to associate you're free to start a business you can form a partnership we can do all kinds of activity we can organize as a church or a religious institution or a nonprofit but if we want to be

a corporation you have to go to the government by definition under the law and all of our states have state incorporation laws and i'm sure you know many many people know when you want to incorporate you actually go down to the secretary of state so you do it online now and you get what is it a corporate charter and it's. perfect and i'm going to put it that way because there are people of course exactly you get you get what the state what the people of the state have decided are the privileges and benefits that come with incorporation and we used to remember they come with responsibilities and duties back to the public to and that's what we are losing well and i mean what's the reason why we would even have corporate charter laws why would why would his state in the first place the corporations that are very different than they were in the era of jefferson and washington. we didn't have i mean the early. corporations

were created in the early nineteenth century to do things like dig the erie canal i mean the they were not you know it wasn't until after the civil war we were so so why would in the modern sense why would we even. have a corporation well there's there's good policy reasons for it and i do. before i go there let me say that i have some debates with my libertarian friends about citizens united and corporate power and so forth and i tease them that you know no self-respect in libertarian would go down and ask the government for all these privileges and some of them actually are saying you know you're right maybe we should abolish corporations and take you know you shouldn't have limited liability and all of the government favors that come with a corporate charter basically and so i actually don't agree with that though i think corporations do serve a useful purpose limited liability is that sounds like oh that's not good people

get limitations on their liability but it does help bring capital to places where we need it to bring investment where it might not happen otherwise it does it is useful to have perpetual life so that when a president of a company is is fired or moves on the company doesn't have to disband and you know lay off the workers and return the money to the investors and start all over again that has some continuity which is useful so there are good policy reasons for it. but that's certainly open to debate that's that's what we should that's the kind of debate we should have if we are going to give limited liability should we give it to coal companies that are taking five hundred mountains and in them an appalachian dump in the mountains into the streams for twenty five hundred miles of streams are gone now that kind of limited liability maybe is not such a good idea should be p. shareholders really be exempt from the disaster in the gulf of mexico no liability

for when they got the profits for years of safety cut in there's a good debate to have and we maybe should we should be exploring if we are going to have corporations what are the rules that we the people write for them and it seems that they've been writing the rules. for themselves for a long time i think that's right through through lobbying and through corporate through influence of both politicians i think that's right and the worst thing about citizens united in this constitutional speak to corporate speech corporate rights is now when we try to write some rules they get struck down by the of the century the corporate takeover of our bill of rights so even when we're stepping up to say well no we're going to put some controls and and balance in the system we have this sort of corporate theory that allows the courts to strike those laws down i want to get into the the modern iteration of this you track it back to lewis paul i think it's

a brilliant analysis and let's get to that right after the break ok we'll be right back more conversations with great minds with jeff clements coming up right after this break. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. well. we never got the says they're going to keep you safe get ready because their freedom.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you. see some other part of it and realized everything. i'm tom or welcome is a big. welcome

back to conversations with great minds i'm joined by jeff clements co-founder and general counsel of the group free speech for people and author of the new book corporations are not people let's go back to a brilliant book with a forward by bill moyers i should add and a blurb on the back from tom hartman. i find myself in good company who was lewis paul lewis powell was really the father of the new corporate rights movement he was a lawyer in richmond virginia in the one nine hundred sixty s. he joined the board of directors of the philip morris tobacco company the cigarette company he was on the board of about a dozen other big corporations

a corporate lawyer and in about one nine hundred seventy after witnessing twenty million people twenty million americans come out into the streets to demand better controls on earth day april nine hundred seventy to demand better balance. about air pollution reverse catching on fire toxic waste dump basically corporate corporations externalizing everything poisonous and toxic and keeping the profits american said enough and we got a wave of environmental reform the first e.p.a. clean water act clean air act endangered species act and so on the incredible wave of reform with richard nixon in the white house with lewis powell the corporate lawyer in richmond virginia looked at this and was appalled democracy was working he called it the attack on the free enterprise system and he wrote a memo to the chamber of commerce outlining a multi-year corporate funded organized corporations to fight back

and to fight back really against democracy work and put in some kind of balance into our into our system of economic system and in the amazing thing about this memo i talk about in the book how explicit and detailed it was from using activist minded courts he called it to create corporate rights to change the political legal and economic structure of america that was his goal and the amazing thing is six months after writing this memo to the chamber of commerce president nixon appointed him to the supreme court and he got his chance to do just that did did nixon in your opinion no the paul was all about this kind of stuff you know let's because it causes so many things came out of this away from heritage and cato and all these think tanks and federalist. or did nixon just think he was a good because he had been asked before to be on the supreme court he turned it down yeah and at the time nixon actually had two nominations that had gone south.