Given how reactive hard right snowflakes have gotten in response to a — Thom Hartmann

"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.”"

"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 Lockes 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."

"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)... todays new corporate "person" is... endowed with many of the rights and protections of human beings. The modern corporation... can live forever, doesnt fear prison, and cant 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 Americas founders gave humans ..."

"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 didnt 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."

"[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] ."