by Unilever.

If Ben & Jerry's were a person, wouldn't make Unilever a slaveholder?

Ben & Jerry's would still have to exist as an living entity and not just a name.

and continues to own them and profit from what they produce. That's slavery.

Slaves don't usually sell themselves to a mega corporation.

I cannot say for certain when the preservatives got added though. I know only that it used to meet my standards for both ingredients and flavor and now it doesn't meet my standards for ingredients. Tough on me, because I really liked Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia.

Why use them? Henry Ford was a person, Ford Inc. is not.

Corporations cannot vote - they can just spend money. All we have to do is ignore the ads.

I think that personally, and for people with whom I associate, the gazillions poured into advertising by the RW rich are wasted. I think the impact of advertising is overrated.

However, what ultimately matters is not what I think, but what the politicians think. It is evident from the amount of time they spend fund-raising that they think money is important. Hence, their willingness to prostitute themselves to the guy waving the most lettuce does have an impact in real terms, not just theoretical.

-- Mal

unfortunately money does persuade

us to think or feel a certain way about government and other people, positive or negative, the people with the money can depress one group to not vote or not be active, to cede their power. At the same time they inspire another group to be active and to vote. And it s not just at election time, it's the steady atmosphere of manipulated feelings all year round. It sinks in.

I was talking to someone without insurance, her first words were "Obamacare Sucks!" even knowing I support it. That knee jerk reaction doesn't allow for deeper thinking, but hearing it on media makes it seem to be the truth.

I talked a while and she said the cheapest plan was too high, as she had to drive to work, etc. And although she said she makes good money and everything... but what it really boiled down to was her take that she shouldn't have to pay anything at all for it and it should be free, like "other places."

Other places, I commented, have high income tax rates that Americans don't want to pay. Did she want to pay higher taxes to get UHC? "No," she admitted.

I told her that Canadians say it took 20 years to get to their current UHC, with fights with the insurance companies, etc. That Social Security took the same amount of time to get the bugs worked out, and it ran over half a century without a website. And Medicare also took a long time to get worked out.

She said she felt eventually, she would get what she wanted, but wasn't going to do anything about it, as she was too busy. Finally she said, "We have to vote those damn Republians out!"

To which we agreed. But look what the meme did, made her spit and snarl about something she didn't know about, and I'm sure that wasn't the first time she said that to someone. It's just the popular meme from media and pundits, so many people repeat it.

What YOU think and say do make a difference, the politicans are all temporary.

Treestar said "we can ignore the ads." My response boils down to "we can ignore the ads, but the politicians believe they are effective, and so prostitute themselves to the people who provide the money for the ads."

It is a common meme -- promoted by advertisers -- that advertising is tremendously effective and we are all more-or-less in thrall to the words of Mad Ave. I think the effect is overrated, and would submit that DU is evidence of this. We hear a lot about the importance of money and propaganda in politics. We don't hear enough about what creates the exceptions to these supposedly iron-clad rules.

-- Mal

product of the Koch brothers and their shills in media. It was wholly created and nurtured by programming it daily into all venues of media, televised, broadcast and online.

I saw a lot of Democrats upset with Bush who joined them and were no longer Democrats. Your experience may be different, but IRL, I hear people parroting the Koch agenda all the time, and I live in a blue area and don't hang out with obvious Teabaggers or Libertarians. You know, the kind that won't shut up about this stuff and insist one agree with them. It's affecting us.

But I don't buy that the politicians want it that way, at least not the ones I know, who do not advertise hardly at all, just get the word out person to person. They don't get money from PACs, they do it the hard way. But they get drowned out by big money, and less informed voters are fooled.

We had very deceptive advertising here in 2012 with flyers in the mail purporting to be from firemen and police officers, but from out of state and unlisted or from the GOP in Washington, D.C., with emotional appeals of how Democrats were going to steal their jobs and how a party that looks to get rid of all of that would save them. There were other obvious falsehoods. New voters saw that and didn't know it was a lie, but it had them upset.

There were also candidates in our voter pamplets, who were GOP and backed by Rove, but they ran on other party labels, and said how they cared about everyone, etc. That's that dark money, in fact one of the campaigns came out of a boiler room in Idaho.

That's how the big money buys elections, by F.U.D. created against good people running honest campaigns. I've seen some great new liberal people running that the local Dems supported, but they were unable to combat the brainwashing and dog whistles from the right. Also, the messaging such as we see here on DU, is here in order to F.U.D. and not get any positive action going. Just to hold us in place.

I know no one IRL I would recommend reading DU. This is often the most anti-Democratic Party site on the web, and it's not going to stop being that way. Any given day or topic, a string of unsubstantiated stories and vitriol is posted, one post after another. It has an effect.

We'll just have to disagree, as it's not the politicians in charge of the messaging. It's the money and people are buying what they sell. They don't even think twice.

Thanks for your comment.

and he wmay have been addressing Vermont voters on the issue?

They did do lots of good things. I met a woman who worked at the original Burlington place where they started before they made the ice cream in Waterbury. She loved working there.

They would agree.

No point to the ad industry making all those billions of dollars, is there?

"All we have to do..."

Come on, treestar. You can do better than that.

it's already too late. That person is an idiot (or has political reason to hold that view).

The whole personhood thing is highly misunderstood. If they didn't have "persons hood" how could they be sued or held liable for their negligence? They don't have a vote. The Citizen's United thing was about their spending money - so individual persons could also spend money. The issue is the money having such effect, not the form of who does it.

An estate or guardianship has personhood, so does a bankruptcy estate. Nobody worries about that. Or others forms of businesses, trusts, partnerships, LLCs. It's not quite the issue people make it out to be.

And still isn't.

For example, a corporation is not a person for purposes of registering to cast a ballot in a Presidential election (yet). It is not put to death for murder, either. Even corporate death. Involuntary dissolution by government is not one of the things General Motors has to worry about when it decides how many deaths are "acceptable" to G&M before a recall of a vehicle known to be unduly dangerous.

So, the personhood of entities has never been all or nothing and still is not.

Making a corporation a person so it could be sued for wrongdoing is a far cry from making it a person for contributing to political campaigns. Every employee and every shareholder of the corporation is capable of contributing, as well as every human affected by the good or evil acts of the corporation.

The SCOTUS even deceived about precedent. A mistake by the court clerk who prepared a syllabus is not Supreme Court precedent for the Citizen's case, especially when every written opinon of the SCOTUS these days specifies, in effect, that the syllabus is not precedent.

Your explanation also shows the faults using indirect means for establishing laws. Saying a corporation is a person is as silly as saying a fetis is a person. Say what you mean. If you wish that people and corporations may be sued, say so. To paraphrase Lincoln, calling a tail a leg doesn't mean you can walk on it.

precedent.

Typically, the issue arises like so: A statute says something like "No person shall do the bad conduct of XYZ." A corporation is sued for doing XYZ, then tries to defend on the basis that the statute applies only to persons and a corporation is not a person. Then, a court says, "A corporation is a person for this purpose, so you are indeed liable to the plaintiff for your bad conduct."

Then, if the case comes to the attention of the legislature, it well may enact a law that says flat out that a corporation may be sued. Why didn't they do it originally? They didn't think of it, especially in the early days. Like us, legislators are fallible.

That is a very, very crude example on my part, but I think you get the picture.

I take it you have no problem with a corporation being a person for purposes of a statute that says a person who has done something bad can be sued, right?

I also take it that you were referring to the Citizens United decision, right? Lawyer or not, you're right: the decision was RW evil and not dictated by any former SCOTUS decision about whether a corporation was a person.

Yup, this is what they're currently doing!

http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/founders-ben-jerrys-campaign-finance/


Ice Cream Makers Ben & Jerry Take on Citizens United
Monday, March 10, 2014


Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, holds up a one-dollar bill he stamped with the words 'Not to be used for bribing politicians' as he advocates to get money out of politics. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty)


Four years ago the U.S. Supreme Court made a blockbuster decision that dramatically changed the way political campaigns are funded.

The decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruled in favor of the conservative lobbying group and gave corporations and unions permission to pump unlimited amounts of cash into the political process, effectively removing government restrictions on spending.

Following the ruling, outside money flooded into House and Senate races and the presidential campaign, as politicians from both sides of the aisle embraced the support of big money funneled through super PACs.

But there’s a growing movement to overturn the 2010 Supreme Court ruling.

With the midterm election season about to get underway, The Takeaway speaks with the founders of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s—Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield—about money and politics in the post Citizens United era, and their campaign to reverse the Citizens United decision. Today Ben and Jerry give us the scoop on their campaign to literally stamp money out of politics, dubbed "Stamp Stampede."

Here's info on the campaigns:

http://www.stampstampede.org/pages/the-28th-amendment#.Ux0V2T9dXE0

http://www.stampstampede.org/

And, no, I don't think he's too old to run for President. In fact, I don't care how old he is. He just might be the only clean and honest politician in DC today.

Hillary or Warren for any practical purpose.

I say that only because it's true, not because I back--or oppose--any of them for the Presidency at this point. My only position now is that I want a real primary, not kabuki or an anointing. You know, something actually, well, democratic.

Don't get me wrong. I admire Ben and Jerry, both for the ice cream and for certain of their political moves. But, I don't think they made much ice cream, even for years before the sale, if ever. Ice cream tycoons, maybe.

for almost 15 years now.

similar crimes.

To be guilty, I practically have to hand a U.S. Senator a check with the notation, "In payment for helping pass a law that helps me." It's not quite that extreme, but not very far from it either. I believe Bernie has also pointed that out in the past, too.

So, there are several ways of approaching Citizens. One is to put pressure on lawmakers who look to us every two, four and six years to get elected or reelected. Ask them when they are going to broaden the definition of corruption to include behavior we--and they--all know is corrupt.

Also, when are they going to turn a deaf ear to lobbyists who lobby for for profit corporations and their associations?

Sure, speak up to your elected officials if something weighs heavily on your heart/mind, but don't make a career out of shilling for big business.

(Reagan is not the only reason things took a very bad turn in the 1980s. It's also the time when lobbyists in D.C. began to increase exponentially. And that was not the fault of Citizens United, but of our dear elected officials of both of the largest parties.)