Businesspeople From The United States

"The “new” war on conservatives on the internet is the same old attempt by desperate liberals to shut down their competitors in the marketplace of ideas. If you can’t beat ’em, deplatform ’em. That’s the progressive way. The right-wing solution is not to lie down, but to win over more converts, find new ways to disseminate our news and views, and turn up the heat. I’ve been doing it for 25-plus years and have no intention on cooling off, giving in or shutting up. Speak for those who have no voice. Support those speaking for you."

"We live in a self-defeating culture that pays lip service to heroic action in times of crisis, yet brutally punishes the very kind of snap judgments and instant security profiling that make such heroism possible in the first place."

"I absolutely have made mistakes, and some of them are very grave. I think people are owed that story and should make a decision based on the complete story."

"Beneath their costumery of progressive benevolence, liberal Hollywood “helpers” and global do-gooders exhibit a cold indifference toward the actual wants and needs of their supposed beneficiaries in the Third World. They’re raising hundreds of millions for abortions, not for food, water and education."

"Ted Cruz doesn’t have an office anywhere near El Paso. John Cornyn doesn’t have an office anywhere near El Paso. Presidential candidates don’t come to El Paso. Gubernatorial candidates don’t come to El Paso. People who are focused on power don’t come to El Paso. And I was saying that in front of the crowd in Tex­arkana, and this lady in front of the crowd said, "That’s how I feel!" That’s how a lot of Texas feels—they feel forgotten, left behind, unrepresented, unimportant to the centers of power and the system as it currently works. It doesn’t work for them. A lot of the state feels like El Paso feels, and a lot of the state wants their state back and wants to be recognized and represented and served. I think this campaign is all about that."

"No necesitamos el muro. Si queremos asegurar nuestras comunidades, necesitamos tratar gente con respeto y dignidad. El ejemplo es el ciudad de El Paso donde nací, donde crecí, donde están mis hijos en las mismas escuelas donde yo estaba. Somos una de las comunidades más seguras de los Estados Unidos ahora, y no necesitamos un muro. No necesitamos la Guardia Nacional. Necesitamos reflejar la fortaleza de nuestras comunidades, incluyendo los inmigrantes."

"In focusing their anger on the likes of Wayne LaPierre, the survivors are distracted from the likes of James Debney, whose company actually designed, produced and marketed the weapon that killed so many innocents at their school. Debney knew it was a weapon of war. He also knew, or at least should have known, that M&P15 fires bullets of such velocity that when it hits flesh the accompanying shock wave extends the damage considerably outside the path of the bullet, shredding tissue, destroying entire organs, disintegrating blood vessels. He also knew that the M&P15 is a virtual twin to the Bushmaster AR-15 used with horrific effect on little kids at Sandy Hook. And yet he had kept selling it. Debney earns more than $5 million a year in what the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High survivors would no doubt consider blood money."

"A quick Google search shows that P. James Debney is the CEO and president of American Outdoor Brands, which until last year was named Smith & Wesson. By whatever name, the company Debney heads manufactured the AR-15 assault rifle that Cruz used to kill 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and three staff members.... Debney kept selling assault rifles as if he were just selling more plastic after a madman with a Smith & Wesson assault rifle murdered 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater....The company’s profits came to include the sale of the M&P15 that was used in the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino. Fifteen were murdered.... Smith & Wesson did experience a modest bump after a madman used one of its M&P15s to murder 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High on Valentine’s Day."

"What we get excited about is that expanded user base and the level of social acceptance that we see now out there. It is socially acceptable to carry a firearm, more so than before—to carry a firearm for protection, have one at home for protection, go to the range to shoot as a pastime, as a hobby."

"It certainly has been a fantastic time at Smith & Wesson...We are true believers in that and defenders of that and we are very closely aligned with the NRA. The time had come to step up and do the right thing."

"We looked back at the support we had given the NRA over time and decided, really quite honestly, that it wasn’t enough. It is imperative that we hold fast to the freedoms that the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights provide our citizens. Those freedoms cannot and must not be negotiated. So, I think it’s more important than ever that we come together in support of the NRA."

"There was some fear-based buying that would take place from time to time. There is no fear-based buying right now."

"Progressivism"

"Noblesse oblige"

"Liberalism"

"We received very fair coverage in our campaign from Thom Hartmann, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! The folks at The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, and a number of other smaller publications and blogs also worked extremely hard to allow us to convey our message to the American people..."

"Compassion"

"Economic inequality"

"[T]he Supreme Court determines how wealth can be earned, accumulated, and disposed of; it decides how far the rich can go in exploiting the poor and working people, and whether working people can fight back."

"America has ended up—mostly since around 1980—with one of the most corrupted political systems in the developed world, with billionaires and big corporations literally writing legislation to benefit themselves, from the federal to state to local levels."

"[T]he court has historically almost always sided with the wealthy, the powerful, and the corporate against the poor, the weak, and the individual. In many cases these decisions have struck down laws passed by Congress and signed by the president... [through] ."

"Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn't say that corporations are people. For America's first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, "No, corportions do not have the same rights as humans.""

"The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly abolishes slavery... The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly forbids any government within the United States to prevent Blacks from voting... The main goal of the Fourteenth Amendment was to reverse the 1857 Dred Scott... decision, which had excluded African Americans from access to the protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights... Given all this context and history, a reasonable person would probably conclude that the ... were designed to grant rights exclusively to human beings. There's no discussion at all of corporations in the Amendment... and nobody in that day would have dared propose that the Civil War was fought to "free" the corporations."

"American constitutional law is, in many ways, grounded in British common law... [where] there are two types of "persons": "natural persons," like you and me, and "artificial persons," which include governments, churches (and other nonprofits), and for-profit corporations... necessary so that the law (and taxes) could reach them. ...Knowing this, most laws having to do with just human beings used the phrase "natural persons"... The Fourteenth Amendment, however, does not draw any distinction... and twenty years later, corporate lawyers would seize upon that... [S]uch sweeping ramifications never occurred to Thaddeus Stevens or his colleagues who drafted the... Amendment. ...But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head..."

"Thanks to a century and a half of truly bizarre Supreme Court decisions (never bills passed by the elected legislature)... today's new corporate "person" is... endowed with many of the rights and protections of human beings. The modern corporation... can live forever, doesn't fear prison, and can't be executed if found guilty... It can cut off parts of itself and turn them into new "persons", can change its identity in a day, and can have simultaneous residences in many different nations. ...Nonetheless, today a corporation gets many of the constitutional protections America's founders gave humans ..."

"[I]n 1803, the Supreme Court set itself above Congress and the president with the power to review, strike down, or rewrite laws based on its own lone interpretation of the Constitution."

"Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who would run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. “American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he added in the next paragraph, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information...”"

"Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."

"This legal situation is not only bizarre but also quite the opposite of the vision for this country held by the Founders of the nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn't even include in the Constititution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War). The American Revolution... was in fact provoked by the misbehavior of a British corporation; our nation was founded in an anti-corporate-power fury."

"It's a bit difficult for some people to get their minds around the possibility that the Republican Party started out as a reform party that for nearly seventy years... had a strong progressive wing. But it did."

"Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary notes, fascism/corporatism is “an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state.” Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that Thomas Jefferson identified as the ones that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as “rule by the rich.”"

"Although Lincoln was... a "moderate" Republican... he famously said, "Labor is superior to capital because it precedes capital"—nobody was wealthy until somebody made something—and was the first president both to use the word "strike" and to actually stop police and private armies from killing and beating strikers..."

"Locke is the man whom Thomas Jefferson plagiarized, or was inspired by, when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the purpose of... government was to provide for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"... [H]e replaced Locke's repeated and varied mentions of different types of property with "happiness." It was the first time that word ever appeared in the founding documents of any nation."

"As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”...Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled “The Doctrine of Fascism” he wrote, “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.” But not a government of, by, and for We The People—instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation."

"For people who are freaked out about Trump and freaked out about the world... and everything else, meditation is like a really, really good thing. It's a way for us to kind of ground ourselves."

"A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America. And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump."

"This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism. This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews."

"All of these social ills come out of a small group of people... literally just a few thousand people in the United States or a few thousand families in the US owning something like 70 -80 percent of the entire wealth of the country. Three guys owning 50% of the wealth of the entire country... Wealth inequality in the US is worse than it's ever been, even worse than it was in 1929 which brought about the great crash...I think it's a mental illness... these guys have obsessive compulsive disorder, they're hoarders.""

"And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two “made” senators — there’s a very good chance that today’s cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade. But this isn’t as much a story about Sinema as it is about today’s larger political dysfunction for which she’s become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child. Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of American values, it’s become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them.... While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what’s far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court. In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written..."

"When Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they’d never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they’d be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even faced serious problems if they betrayed the syndicate. Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema. For a republican democracy to actually work, average citizens with a passion for making their country better must be able to run for public office without needing wealthy or powerful patrons; this is a concept that dates back to Aristotle’s rants on the topic. And Sinema... Apparently... she decided that if you can only barely beat them, you’d damn well better join them. Sinema quickly joined other Democrats who’d followed the Citizens United path to the flashing neon lights of big money, joining the so-called “Problem Solvers” caucus that owes its existence in part to the Wall Street-funded front group “No Labels.” ... Political networks run by rightwing billionaires and the US Chamber of Commerce showered her with support... She’d proved herself as a “made woman,” just like the old mafiosi documented by RFK in the 1960s, willing to do whatever it takes, compromise whatever principles she espoused..."

"GOP & Trump Are Using Fear & Rhetoric Because They Have Nothing Else to Run On - Even republicans know the tax cut is a scam & want Medicare-For-All"

"Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it."

"Inequality fuels social problems like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, teen and unwanted pregnancies. The only people it's good for are the Billionaires and morbidly rich. *The greater the distance between the very rich & the very poor, the more unequal a society is... the more, the higher the rates you have of diseases of all kinds, of drug addiction, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, of unwanted pregnancies, and abortions as well... of crimes of homicide and suicide... high higher rates of mental illness, depression, lower rates of social engagement, lower rates of civic participation, including voting."

"Given how reactive hard right snowflakes have gotten in response to a few truth-based jokes from Michelle Wolf, and that Mick Mulvaney has confessed to running a pay-for-play operation out of his congressional office, and Trump is daily breaking the Constitution’s emoluments clause, now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing business/government model known as “fascism.”"

"If something isn't done about the climate/carbon crisis, people... today might be living in the last generation to experience a stable atmosphere, and thus a stable form of governance, for any foreseeable future. ...[B]ecause our Constitution doesn't mention the rights of nature (or even the environment), the Earth's biosphere is getting short shrift of our legal system..."

"When we include and listen to diverse ways of thinking, we make the impossible, possible."

"No legislature, governor, or president has ever suggested that corporations should be considered "persons" for the purpose of Constitutional protections, particularly under the 14th Amendment's equal-protection rights."

"No federal or state legislature, no president, and no state governor has ever... suggested that billionaires and corporations have a First Amendment "right" to unlimited political bribery. Congress has instead criminalized such behavior repeatedly."

"Both doctrines, corporate personhood and money as speech, were simply invented by corporate-friendly Supreme Court rulings (in... 1819-86... for... personhood, and in 1976-2013... for money as speech). Their combined effect has been to hijack America's democratic experiment, concentrating power in the boardrooms of faceless corporations and the summer homes of reclusive billionaires."

"... the ultimate lesson of the Liberty attack had far more effect on policy in Israel than in America. Israel's leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal. If America's leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything."