the financial and social future of your nation in the hands of bankers then how will how can it how can you expect any response other than an explosion against this sort of oppression and feudalism yeah and on on the worldwide basis charles you spent the oil imports of iran are cut off to greece what impact do you expect on the greek economy in light of the fact that iran was the only nation willing to send them on the oil on credit it's hard to imagine. the tragedy that's unfolding in greece where these dominoes one after the other you know that the government is ceasing to function certainly has a democracy and it seems to be ceasing to function as an organization that it can serve its people and so having a construction of oil supply is almost. like a i don't know whether you call it the death blow or certainly yet another domino

that's. disrupting and impacting negative we do lives of average greek people and of course does anybody care about that other than the greek people it doesn't seem to be registering you know at the higher circles of power and wealth in the world right it's a snuff film the folks in the i.m.f. the c b a the troika and in berlin they get off on watching this for the whole country die speaking of go back to energy here for a second it's not just we know that gasoline consumption is tanking also energy across the board is dropping off in terms of demand not tell us about gasoline and other energy consumption data in america and what this is telling us well the few track like master card sales at gas stations those sales have been declining for forty seven weeks straight. and in terms of gasoline consumption it's been it's

like kind of fell off a cliff in the last few months and energy consumption has been dropping since you know the housing bubble popped in two thousand and seven so the who energy complex is showing you know unprecedented declines in the u.s. and yet we're being told by the standard you financial pundits and you know financial media and our political class that the economy's growing and we're adding jobs and everything's great and it's all like well wait a minute those two things i can both cannot be true because in an expanding economy people use more energy i mean that's that's common sense and it's the data proves it and the contract ing economy people use less energy so somebody is lying and i don't think it's the energy statistics well we were talking earlier about the role of the rise of the the spy agencies in america living particularly in the washington area they can walk to work they don't need to drive they can get their

instructions on how to spy on people illegally they can go to a neighbor's house and spawn each other they can concoct new stuff film scenarios for countries around the world so they don't need a car there it's energy independent there are so tightly clustered into a cluster or a nest of spying and larceny which is washington now how much it looks like there really are banging the drum for war with iran. is it is that pretty much that the motivation there is again to secure energy supply even though the energy consumption is falling off they still want to can control supplies to spawn the iranian war drums i wonder also if it's just to just to keep prices at one hundred bucks a barrel so everybody in that energy complex and the saudis and everybody's benefiting from it and. because the rule of law. used to be awash in oil in terms of like the storage capacity for for full and with the u.s.

dropping from twenty one million barrels a day to eighteen million barrels a day and other nations showing similar declines i mean those are significant declines in demand and so we'll shouldn't be a hundred dollars a barrel and so you wonder if this constant like the political tension is in practiced a way to make sure that the profit margin say stay immense you know for everybody involved in the petroleum complex now as a countervailing force in all this and the economy in the u.s. it did have this sudden emergence of pop if you well and social networking stocks on nasdaq. facebook's about to go public apple computer new all time high worth five hundred billion dollars now this is i think where a lot of people point to and they say look look at this this is well who we are this is a this is the growth story where where do they get that wrong to get it right in

their revenue model facebook and zynga and to social media which is basically advertising in other words facebook is worth because illian dollars based on three billion in basically advert revenues. and so is that a model that is related or similar to intel which pulls in you know twenty five billion in revenues making real things are apple with revenues fifty billion plus based on making real things in china so i think there's a total miscalculation on i mean how much revenue can be generated from adverts you know advertising is a small part of the global economy and so yeah it's a visible part but is that a revenue model that's going to construct trillions of dollars of value i don't think so apple of course does this man for many facts are products. now they've come under fire recently for the labor conditions in their chinese plans and if you

saw the new york times story but they're talking about how steve jobs the late steve jobs when he was putting the i phone together he was saying you just can't build something like that the united states because you need you don't have in china they can put together five thousand workers overnight practically and he says those jobs are never coming back so is this basically even though of apple's got one hundred more than one hundred billion dollars in cash and if they made the phones in the united states it would add something like a hundred bucks per one thousand dollars phone it isn't can they really get away with that justifiably that they're sitting on one hundred billion in cash they don't employ anybody united states on the manufacturing side and they're trying to sell us this idea that you know intellectual property which is coming under fire itself from all the anti people and sup a crowd is somehow going to sustain the economy going forward to see that i think

we're what we're really seeing and other people are coming in the same thing is the hollowing out of the u.s. economy and the replacement of actually producing goods and services with financialization so and the propaganda that this is a wonderful thing a lot of people did drink the kool-aid because they saw their house rising by one hundred grand a year and they took out fifty grand in a you know home equity line of credit and they were living the high right fender and everyone said it was going to you know keep going forever so that's kind of a metaphor for the whole u.s. economy good that the big money is made in financial izing things and just that the basis of a strong economy when you when you no longer make anything and there's no incentives to make anything and i think that's where steve jobs was making a point that he he failed to make to carry through to the next step was why are its why are the incentives to ship the. obs who receives why are there so few incentives to create anything and produce anything anymore in the states now

speaking of jobs thirty six billion. dollars in new airport security fees. for the these to basically tollbooths now what is going on here because the entire economy is becoming riddled with the is shakedowns. is that sustainable that's a that's a brilliant term for it because if you you add in like what i call the junk fees you know like now you've got a parking ticket that used to be twenty bucks now it's sixty five dollars so yeah the shakedown mentality. is is it's rampant and i know hundred people i mean i just saw statistic that u.s. airlines are flying the least number of flights since two thousand and one and you wonder gee is there a connection between people deciding they don't want to plan you more and you know they're going to shake down yeah i notice also that the report just came out that

the number of people americans who are renouncing their u.s. citizenship and moving to different countries because of the political oppression in the united states has never been higher says they started keeping records i mean would it make sense let's say for a country like iceland who got totally screwed by the global banking system to open up to economic citizenship for twenty or thirty thousand dollars anyone can be a citizen of ice like you know get the vote but you do get to have the that passport in place to there turn around and renounce the present state when it doesn't that good economic sense is not a good business model that would be a marketing strategy and they could open offices in like l.a. new york shanghai and beijing because you know china is not as stable as everybody thinks and people there are buying houses in vancouver british columbia you know to establish themselves so yeah you can get a very nice chunk of that market yet why can't citizenships trade on an exchange

like everything else if they're so keen on financial lies in every little fricken part of our lives why can't i buy some my own citizenship and go wherever the country is that's offering me a nice mix of civil rights and entitlements so-called program i don't have to be stuck in a frickin police state what these guys spying on me twenty four seventh's so that somebody in hollywood can get closer to scarlett johansson. i don't disagree. and you know you could probably get decent ball you get like a three percent discount or ten percent discount this one time your ice land so this is shipped and then part of the do as you said would be that we guarantee we're not going to spy on you and there has to be some guarantee of civil liberties in the deal well run time trials to smith thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you max george enjoyed it very much as always and that's how to do it for this edition of the kaiser report was made max kaiser and stacey everett our thank my guests charles who smith draw some e-mail please do so because the reported are t t v dot ru until next time x.

guys are saying by all.

hello i'm tom foreman in washington d.c. and this is the big picture tonight we take a look back at two conversations with great minds that are really worth revisiting today we begin with another look at my interview with jeff clements from just a few weeks ago is the co-founder of the organization free speech for people jeff is leading the charge against corporate personhood an issue that is now at the forefront of debate in america take a look. 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 it is an issue that 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. i really believe. that. 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 is someone who can help us is 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 the end of 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 canvas there with greenpeace. and i was going door to door in places 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 a 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 and i worked on the tobacco case in the mid ninety's in the a.g.'s

office there are that's great it was a great. you know in your in your own words what is corporate personhood this you your book corporations are not people yeah you know it was quite well i start the book with some acknowledgement that we really 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. to 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 and 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 the delaware corporate laws 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 the seventeenth 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 were. well you know. 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 and the revolution has of course the tea party from my hometown of boston was about throwing the india corporate corporate tea into the harbor exactly they had a special privilege from the british crown and the you know the settlers the cult colonialist wanted to be able to trade with whomever they chose the 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 and you can talk more about the current iteration of bank of america but that idea that these corporations get special privileges from the government and

then use those special privileges to leverage that advantage leverage the wealth and try to get more power i think is 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 occasionally 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 and i think this idea that the line gets blurred it will happen if we don't manage what in the book i call corporations or they're a tool that's what they're not a person they're 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 state charter law even what state charter laws are

you know setting aside all. the oddities of things like the chart of mongolia era and of the nineteenth century or so but what is a corporate charter and and out of that i guess doesn't that define what is a corporation i think so yes so the corporate charter is quite simple actually you cannot incorporate without government permission and in fact there is no such thing as a corporation existing 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 and there are 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. many many people know that you 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 just really difficult because i'm going to put it that way because there are people of course some of the exact 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 in full and i mean what's the reason why we would even have corporate charter was why would why would a state in the first place corporations today 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 degree

can now i mean the they were not you know was until after the civil war within. 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 in my view. 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 specifically and so i actually don't agree with that i think corporations do serve a useful purpose limited liability is it 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 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 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 the best 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 rated them in appalachia and dumped 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 piece 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 was a good debate to have and we maybe we should be exploring if we are going to have

corporations what are the rules that we the people right. for them right and 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 politicians i think that's right and the worst thing about citizens united on 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 louis 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. any much. to push for ever. so are these thinkable possible. do we old wants to see this on forever. wealthy british style. time to rise. markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on our.

culture is that so much different and there's a huge musician approach and find the mark left syria in a spiral of violence minus the west refuse to describe events being played out in syria as a civil war why is there such we. see .

welcome back to conversations with great minds have 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. if 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 corporate lawyer and in about 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 rivers 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 but 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 into the amazing thing about this memo. 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 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 of the .