Democracy Theme Park

Supreme Court

  • Put the Demos Back Into Democracy

    There are two kinds of activist groups, equally (in)effective. Which are you? And why? Pop-up activists tend their topiary and anguish over bathroom fixtures until… a Big Bad Issue pops up and invigorates them. Permanent Waves—the second kind of activist group—inhabit longstanding, institutionalized power zip codes nestled among other shrubbery in the nonprofit landscape.

  • Decommissioning Corporate “Magic”

    Would you like to neutralize corporations’ ability to get so many GOOD laws declared unconstitutional? There’s an “app” for that—-an approach, that is.

  • Can Pluto Help Us Understand “Free Trade”?

    If we used Pluto’s new celebrity status as an opportunity to see Earth—from afar—as part of the solar system and part of a Galactic Trade Organization, would we gain any new insights? Pluto is a trip-and-a-half. The word pluto means both wealth (plutocracy) and hell (Pluto as god of Hades), so, already economics, myth, and…

  • Corporate Law Secrets Exposed By Anthropologist (1998/2015)

    A Short Preface: The View from 2015… The piece below, once available as a pamphlet, was written in 1998 to try to induce “activists” to pierce the invisible force field that seems to keep them from reading the history of corporate law. Whether or not it succeeds in that sense, it offers a perspective on…

  • Wrinkle in Ancient Corporate Code Reveals Democracy Remedy (Not for the Faint of Heart)

    Crumbling pages in the rare books room of the Wisconsin State Law Library may hold the key to breaking the corporate stranglehold on the democratic promise so long dormant in the heartland. I’ve read those pages in that cool, dim room. But you can find the same info in the well-thumbed regular stacks that are…

  • Groundhog Day for Obamacare: Back to the Supremes

    Like small-town mayors across the nation on Groundhog Day, the Supreme Court will get to make the call on whether Obamacare casts a shadow. The Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare) is again on its way to the Court for further review, as they say in the NFL. Its future is on the line, but…

  • Making a Federal Case Out of It

    “Don’t make a federal case out of it.” I used the phrase countless times without understanding its origin. But it turns out it’s full right up to the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc with historical significance: lessons about corporations, democracy and local control—what you might call community rights. Take the train-hits-cow cases. Railroads began a rapid expansion in the…

  • Is Citizens United Focus a Good Use of Our Time? (2014)

    Such a comforting thought—that overturning a single court case can resolve some of society’s biggest problems. With Citizens United, the idea seems to be that huge strides could be made by reversing it, thereby “getting the money out of” elections. It’s our current version of the “silver bullet” myth of old. Kind of like thinking…

  • State “Laboratories of Democracy” Threatened, Overlooked (2007)

    How to be sure that toy under the holiday tree has no lead paint? With only a month of shopping days remaining, the public depends—more than at any other time—on our federal regulatory agencies’ ability to protect us from health and safety risks from toys, clothing, and other goods. So when an appointed regulator asks…

  • Why a Green Future is “Unconstitutional” and What to Do About It (2008)

    Working in tandem with a cooperative Supreme Court, corporate lawyers have insinuated themselves into the US Constitution like retroviruses, rewriting Constitutional code so that instead of protecting human persons from an oppressive government, the Constitution has been twisted to shield corporate persons (corporations) from control by the governments that create them.

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Jane Anne Morris