John Stewart: ‘Corporations Now Have More Rights Than Gay People.’

I would argue fascist oligarchy playing a hand it wanted to play when they tried to assassinate Roosevelt, but failed at, because General Butler threw a monkey wrench in to their plans. Pesky patriots.

I think it's significant that the only thing F.D.R. didn't get to complete before his death, was his addition to the Constitution of an "Economic Bill of Rights" that protected average people from this kind of corporate hackery. (And of course he was succeeded by that failed haberdasher Truman, who not only dropped the A Bomb, but signed the National Security State into law - in essence creating a Praetorian Guard that would protect the Industrialists/corporatists who SHOULD have been prosecuted following WWII for their collaborating with the Nazis.

Incidentally, Martin Luther King started talking about an Economic Bill of Rights as a part of his Poor People's Campaign towards the end of his life as well. To me, racism had less to do with MLK's death than the fact that he pissed The Powers That Be off by attacking their twin projects of the military industrial complex cash cow that was Vietnam, and their general desire to treat the American worker as little more than a wage slave.

It's one thing to agitate for voting rights for black people that TPTB can just pull an end-run around via election fraud circa Florida 2000 (and literally hundred of other examples), it's another to begin to threaten TPTB's bottom line with the finances. That gets the oligarch's VERY testy.

PS. For an entertaining take on this, I highly recommend the film "Executive Action". It stars Burt Lancaster, and was written by Dalton Trumbo (who was himself a target of the machine, having been blacklisted by McCarthy's House UnAmerican Activities Committee) and the movie predates the revelations of the Church Committee Hearings in 1975 which concluded that the JFK assassination was in fact a conspiracy in which it was PROBABLE that there were two shooters at least. The first 25 minutes of the movie, when a group of corporatists get together to plot the assassination, and review Oswald's history is worth the viewing.

Collectivism is not the exclusive domain of the left. If corporations are given the same rights as individuals, yet are freed from responsibilities and criminal penalties that individuals are subject to, that is a form of collectivism. If corporations are given the same rights as individuals, yet employees are stripped of individual rights when on company property, that too is a form of collectivism. In both cases individuals have fewer rights than groups--specifically, groups with money.

What we're seeing here is not libertarianism but de facto plutocracy.