Fight Back: Revoke Insurance Company Charters

by Stephen Fleischman

We have the mechanism—built into our system—to save our country.

Every corporation or limited liability company in the United States is chartered by a State.

A corporate charter is a document filed with a US state by the founders of a corporation detailing the major components of a company such as its objectives, its structure and its planned operations. If the charter is approved by the state government, the company becomes a legal corporation.

Health insurance companies are such legal corporations with state charters.

David Korten, author of “When Corporations Rule the World”, points out that “the basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands…”

Today’s American corporations evolved from that.

The corporation is a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members. The private-benefit corporation is just that—a corporation chartered for its own private benefit, but it has to provide some socially positive good. If the corporation, chartered by the state, fails to provide the function for which it is chartered, or misapplies the function, the charter can be revoked. The state giveth and the state can taketh away.

Over the years, the Supreme Court has bestowed additional blessings on corporations. In effect, it has made them almost human, granting them some of the same rights as US citizens, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for example.

Corporations can express their opinions in public and in the media as you or I can. This gives them enormous power. They can buy up commercial television time and print media ads and faux news coverage because they have the power and the money.

As Sarah Stodola says in The Brooklyn Rail, “The Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution in a manner that has allowed corporations to ascend to unprecedented levels of power. The phenomenon even has a name, and that name is ‘corporate personhood.’ And corporate personhood, friends, is why corporations are able to buy elections.”

There is a myriad of different, and overlapping, health care organizations generating a blizzard of paperwork in an administrative wilderness creating enormous waste—thousands, if not millions of people pushing paper around—forms needed to be completed in order to get paid, to say nothing of patients fighting their way through a jungle of obstacles trying to get the health care they need.

In the current situation—in the battle for health care reform—the health insurance industry is exercising its clout. They are spending whopping amounts of money in the mainstream media propagandizing against the health care reform plans being worked on in Congress.

The insurance companies are terrorized by the possibility of a “public option” being included in the bill that comes out of the legislature. Single payer, universal health care is, of course, off the table. Any kind of government plan similar to Medicare, they fear, would jeopardize their billions in health care profits.

Their fear is so great, they are losing their cool. In addition to the propaganda barrage, they are calling out the goon squads to disrupt civil discussion of the various health care reform plans being considered.

Members of Congress and the Senate, who have returned to their constituencies during the August break, and are holding town hall public meetings with their voters to discuss the health care plans are getting a taste of some poisonous medicine.

In addition to angry shouting and disruption, some legislators favoring liberal features in the plan are getting death threats, one even hung is effigy. One goon came to a town meeting with his gun showing.

The insurance companies’ misinformation campaign raises the bug-a-boo of “socialized medicine”. You’d think it was some kind of torture instead of the government’s granting a benefit to the people, very much like Social Security and Medicare.

Some of the behavior the insurance companies are exhibiting, moreover encouraging, is in obvious violation of their charters.

So why isn’t something done about it?

Revoke their charters!

Health insurance companies are useless, anyway. They make a profit, and an enormous one, on your health and mine.

End the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance industry, once and for all.

There are legitimate grounds on which to revoke their charters!

Make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Small businesses that have the burden of supplying health coverage for their employees will thank us for it. Let’s join the world of civilized, industrial nations that provide single payer, universal health insurance for their people. Everybody in. Nobody out.

With the misinformation dispelled, any candidate running for office will get elected on that platform.

Suicide Squad

by Stephen Fleischman

It’s out in the open now. They can’t work us over anymore. We know who they are.

Our own oligarchy is out to bring this country down. Global capitalism, feel-ing the pulse of socialism, is fighting to make the world safe for corporate hegemony—and corporate America is leading the pack.

It began with the destruction of our manufacturing base; off-shoring plants, outsourcing jobs to the lowest wage areas—a race to the bottom.

Will we let them continue the process? Who do we have to stop?

–the military-industrial complex that President Ike Eisenhower warned us about way back in the 20th Century. You can add the mainstream media complex to that…

–and the mighty corporate insurance and pharmaceutical industry that’s been keeping proper health care from the American people for over sixty years. When they hear the words “single payer”, they reach for their guns.

–and there is the rest of corporate America and its rabble of sycophants, the military contractors and their mercenaries to keep the wars going, the hordes of lobbyists, the propagandists that pervade our institutions, all of academia from grade schools to universities, radio, television, internet, print and new media.

Leading this parade is the custom made front man—POTUS—the President of the United States. It was originally conceived to be a front woman, Hil-lary Clinton. But along came a Chicagoan, Barack Obama, with a liberal and wishful thinker following, promising to end the wars and give the people single payer health care.

So the power structure dumped Hillary and gave the prize to Obama. (Oh, you thought the election had something to do with it?)

Obama fit the image of the POTUS they wanted, from his charm to the color of his skin —the Pied Piper of the South Side—his subservience guaranteed by the two major pillars of the oligarchy.

Hillary, of course, was pissed but she wasn’t going to break ranks. She gracefully accepted the position of Secretary of State.

The oligarchy’s strategy, the Ayn Rand sagacity of the 20th Century—attack “big” government, return to laissez-faire capitalism.

It goes with monopoly and war. One or two or more wars must be kept go-ing for the economy’s sake. Empire building is part of this game. Our empire is extensive.

“Obama is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding,” says Catherine Lutz in “The New Statesman” (7/30/09). She has made the count. “The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.”

Obama continues the surge of US troops into Afghanistan. Apparently, he hasn’t heard yet that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Hasn’t he read Kipling?

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

I guess Obama has never kippled.

He continues to spread the beneficence of America into what is now called Af-Pak, killing civilians indiscriminately in Pakistan with his new toy, the remote controlled drone.

While all this is going on, we are also leading this country and the world into an economic predicament. Employment is flopping, businesses are flipping and home mortgages failing.

Wall Street is being led by the same people who brought it to the ragged edge of disaster. Two of them, Gaithner and Summers, are rewarded by Obama, the former, made Secretary of the Treasury, the latter, top economic advisor to the President.

Legislation for the people is languishing in Congress.

“We have a system today that works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn’t always work well for you,” President Obama admitted in a speech to a town hall meeting in Raleigh, NC, last week, “what we will have when we pass these reforms, are health insurance consumer protections to make sure that those who have insurance are treated fairly and insurance companies are held accountable.”

What he hasn’t insisted on is the “public option” in the legislative package. Is he worried he won’t have the insurance industry’s bundle when he runs for re-election in a few years?

Corporate power stands in the way–antithesis of democracy. Corporate groups are joined together into a single governing body in which the different groups are mandated to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of the multiple groups. This is defined by Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, as Corporatism.

Now that we know what is happening and who the scoundrels are, what are we going to do about it?