so we got support equals media here media i do want to point this out folks this movement and tonight's of that was not covered by corporate media at all right but i do want to give a big shout out to any of you who are watching me right now let's just acknowledge you're watching it on people's media wherever it is they you're watching me right now some unpaid volunteer took the time to record thank you some unpaid volunteer took the time to upload this to create the infrastructure for you to watch it lets build alternative people's media so that we can talk to each other and let's have those kind of conversations and let's build political power that is serious that takes ourselves seriously because we have to because a just world is its stake and frankly not only a peaceful and just world but we know that the ecology that we depend upon for life itself is in the balance so let's do our work joyously but let's also be serious about it peace we have a system of medicine that's broken by itself is killing at least seven hundred thousand people a year some people are dying since they don't have health insurance but what about the number of people who are dying because of the current system for the puzzle yes the drug rep and this would be the lady in the high heel very short and tight skirt who comes to doctors offices and hands out goodies the companies are hiring reps that really have no science or medical background they are not doctors typically they are not pharmacists they are not nurses there are some there are oftentimes business majors and music majors and drama majors and they're telling your doctors how to prescribe drugs to use a patient and they are given sales goals they are to call in doctors to explain the drugs and how the other drugs might not be so helpful to get the doctor to take the samples and to prescribe these drugs now when a doctor writes a prescription th prescription is entered into a database this information sold to the drug companies who then use it to give to the drug reps and so if you are draw a doctor to prescribe in a lot of the drug that drug rep is instructed to give you expensive gifts if your profile falls off it's also a drug rep that is sent to your office to give you a dressing down so then you had a drug rep as disciplinary and i was being told to minimize side effects that i was disseminating misinformation and disinformation campaigns i knew that i was not giving fair balanced information to doctors therefore doctors couldn't give fair balanced information to their patients so i started being disheartened while i was still in the industry about the industry itself because i knew that the job that i was a riginal a tax to do that that wasn't what my job was anymore that my job was a marketing job that i was there to to build the bottom line of the company that i was there to grow market share and influence physicians prescribing habits while i was a pharmaceutical sales representative when we were interacting with physicians we were constantly trying to downplay side effects minimize side effects if those questions were raised by the physician and we were trained to skillfully sidestep those questions and to not provide full disclosure about the potential devastating effects of certain medications many medications do not have severe long term crippling side effects but what others do and unfortunately and ironically that's what happened to me i've been suffering from disabling symptoms now for many years from an antibiotic called level in which is a floor quite alone antibiotic that has a black box warning associated with its use and despite that warning it's still being prescribed indiscriminately and without warning to patients and many people or are losing their jobs or losing their homes family because of the devastating and crippling side effects of le should be reserved for serious and life threatening infections i was very grateful that i had the experience and knowledge that i did about the psychiatric drugs that i had sold because i identified these were drug reactions so i knew that as my mental state was deteriorating that it wasn't me that i wasn't crazy you know this was not this was mediated by the drugs that i had taken and so i just kept clinging to the fact that i had to have a washout that i had to detoxify the body from the drug and so i begged my husband and i begged several of my closest friends to not put me in a millan's to touche and because i had visited them in my career and i knew that once that i got behind those closed doors of that mental institution that they could do anything they want including electroshock therapy so i knew that my recovery depended on the detoxification of my body and i knew that if i got into the hospital a detoxification would not be offered to me i would be pumped full of any kind of drug that they needed in order to you know keep me why it was to restrain me so it actually took me a period of twelve years to completely detoxify my body and to get back to some semblance of normalcy to where i felt like i was before i had the adverse event the other thing that happens with drug reps is that they present they did to the doctor that may not be entirely truthful and this was seen with oxycontin the pain drug where my wife has had t m j her front teeth did not actually come together and she had a lot of pain we went to her primary doctor he started giving her bike in for pain control we didn't want a drug intervention but cocktail of drugs and of course our experience is that in the process of finally discovering that the drugs could be the problem we tried to start a taper program at home because i couldn't get the doctors to do it for me we learned about half life we learned about the potency of these super bins those now that are many many times stronger than value ever was we learned what it was like to try to relate to the medical community they keep wanting to tell you that you have an underlying problem they never want to look at the drugs as a possible cause of it we had an argument with the final doctor is to the speed at which you've got to come off these drugs i went ahead and said ok that's fine if you think you can get off in eight weeks that's fine but i think you're gonna crash or well he crashed or she probably was twenty four hours from dying we took her to the hospital and she was whisked off to a psych ward that point they just introduced side for three months and i made sure she saw me every single day sometimes several times a day so she would be afraid and i just watched this horrible deterioration process i went in talked to the doctors i said you need to give her a drug holiday she's been on drugs for three years now i know it's the drugs we were finally able to get her released got a homeopathic doctor we finally got her off drugs completely a year ago so now today we're about thirteen months off the drugs we're seeing a stock market recover it's up and down and you can you can think you're making progress one week the next week you know she's back in a particularly agreed just drug that the f d a allowed to come into the market was called key tech k e t e k it was supposed to be used for antibiotic resistant infections unfortunately it promoted liver failure it turns out that the studies that were done to validates the safety weren't done in fact the doctor who was overseeing these studies received four hundred dollars per patient and it rolled four hundred fictitious people into these studies and showed that of course none of these people had any adverse effects from key tech because of course these people didn't exist and here's where the story really gets bad even after the f d a discovered that the data submitted to them by the company was fraudulent they still presented it to the congressional investigative committees the result was the media picked up on this and proclaimed that this drug was shown to be safe and all these studies studies that never occurred so the drug he took when it first came up by the way was selling for over one thousand dollars for sixty tablets and it's now come down to two hundred eighty five dollars the companies reduced the price the f d a allows that drug to stay on the market bear has known for years that it's drug trade as saul had all kinds of complications involving kidney shutdown and bear did a study was sixty seven thousand patients bear failed to give their own internal data to the f d a and before that bear manufactured a blood product called factor nine that drug was contaminated with h i v and an entire generation of hemophilia x will die of aids and h i v they went to skid row to b blood to use for the manufacture of this product this company positively absolutely knew they had a medication that was infected with the aids virus they took the product off the market in the u s and then they dumped it in france europe asia latin america so they made a huge profit by the way joe government officials in france did a loud that they haven't actually had to go to prison for it in america now one corporate executive for this company is a myth indicted or even criminally investigated by our justice department not i filed to the f d a what's called a freedom of information act request and i receive from the f d a these reports for levac when there's been over one thousand deaths associated with the drug i've also filed one for several that shows that there's been over a thousand deaths associated with soprano the pharmaceutical industry and the f d a know that these drugs have been crippling people for months years or permanently and they do nothing about it the f d a actually had to be sued by a consumer advocacy group called public citizen to put the black box warning on these drugs it was known in certainly by ninety eighty five that all cases of polio in mexico united states in canada were exclusively due to the vaccine that's stopping the use of the oral polio vaccine in early one nine hundred eighty five when i prevent all the polio cases that have occurred since so what happened even though this was known oral polio vaccine continued to be given why well the company still had the news polio vaccine in bowling for columbine we never really came up with the answer in terms of why this happened all the reasons that were given were a bunch of b s you know marilyn manson caused them to do it this this or that cause them to do it and none of it really made any sense that's why i believe there should be an investigation in terms of what pharmaceuticals prescribed pharmaceuticals these kids were on it's an extremely legitimate question to pose and it demands an investigation aspirin kills about fifteen hundred people a year glucose the mean and convoyed and sulfate kill zero people per year nonsteroidal antiinflammatories kill a minimum of twenty five thousand people a year when safe effective inexpensive alternatives are available that actually promote health why would anybody use deadly chemicals that are expensive and sure to cause bleeding and other serious side effects and even death because the information is demonized and suppressed on an economic basis let's tell you margaret it is a profit making operation scientifically ill based and women are being sold a bill of goods no one mammogram on the other hand is zero point two graphs which is two hundred million records in other words it's two hundred times the dose of a chest x r so what this amounts to is a pre menopausal woman getting to mammograms over a ten year period will be getting roughly the same radiation dosage as a japanese woman one mile away from the where the hiroshima the atom bomb exp the misery every over one billion dollars in the last decade has been spent lobbying the congress of the united states by the pharmaceutical industry that money has gone to republicans and democrats alike people can still end up with insurance policies that leave them with huge deductibles and huge co pays they end up either deterred from going and seeking appropriate treatment of early time when they can really manage a in a more cost effective way or save their own lives if it really is a troubling troubling way to handle the system why do we do that essential because the health insurance industry is so powerful at the level of lobbying in the in the united states there are so many lobbyists up to four lobbyist for each member of congress related to the health care industry of this country it's big money and that big money talk every now and then with a thought of a body is some outspoken and angry family that says hey you know what i'm saying the drugs kill them i think he died there so what happens in a pressure run for their political leader and says hey i think my loved one has been harmed and this has gotta stop well lobbyist has already been there now lobbyist as amazing as  change because you have giant health insurance companies that make an enormous amount of money out of the privatized dysfunctional expensive system that they that they benefit from and you know pharmaceutical companies also big very big contributors to political campaigns also with a vested interest against change why it is that every attempt on the part of political leadership to get something better going in health care even funding children to get health care and things like that and it's always turned down is because we have an extraordinarily powerful lobby system in washington the best way to describe the power that the lobbyist wield in congress is to look at what happened with the medicare prescription drug act this is so significant from the standpoint that drug companies are overcharging for their medications to the extent that they're charging the public one hundred times more than what it cost them to make it so the lobbyists go to congress and they write a bill literally the prescription drug act that was passed was written by the pharmaceutical industry they presented to various members of congress and they say please pass this bill so that we can use tax dollars to pay these outlandish prices of these prescription drugs unfortunately the impetus behind passing that bill was were lobbyists and it is outrageous that legislation of that importance as well as most other legislation passed in washington is influenced to such a degree by the lobbyists whose only objective is for the big business who is generally behind most of the important and w sweeping legislation that is pas he used to be the case that many of our washington politicians came out of the legal profession and i'm sure people have noticed that nowadays they seem to come out of businesses and that's no accident so today if you want to know who's in control of the system you have to look at who are the people at the top of the pharmaceutical industry you have to look at the people who run the who come in and out of the federal government for example who becomes chairman of the c d c who becomes chairman of the department of health and human services and where do they get these people from so the question is not so much who is in control but what is the system that they created because now they have a revolving door of people who come in and out of the system pretty much agree with how the system is working and they're not going to really change or do anything to the system that might offend  most politicians in fact i would say all politicians except maybe for unique few here and there are trapped inside a system where their ability to hold their jobs hold their office depends on having the support of the system that's creating all the problems that we have there is a belief that the legislative and judicial process that we have that creates our laws is there to protect the public and that's not correct that isn't why they came into existence that's not what they're designed to do at the end of the day politicians have their constituents hopefully but certainly themselves and their reelection in mind when they are receiving funds  issues for entities that have a role to play in terms of determining legislation as it relates to health care and so congress has become really a threat to the health and the safety of the american people this may sound radical but in america people are concerned about terrorism and they're concerned about threats from abroad those threats pale in comparison to the threat that is posed by our own congress working in conspiracy with the pharmaceutical industry to deny us access to real health to real truthful information about the natural remedies and cures that can turn our health around and save our nation from a medical bankruptcy i want to go back to the premise that we've got to get public decisionmaking into public hands that is into listening to the citizen and therefore as far as we move is that might sound to talk about doctors and medicine from this angle i would say that a very direct health concern is the influence of private industry over all of our public decision making and there is a way to to we move that through elections that are funded publicly by citizens not by corporations one of the principle challenges as i see it is in the context of education the educational system for health professionals has been so mechanistic so deterministic so reductionist that we have lost sight of the integrity physicians are encouraged to use with their individual patients all the way through to the social political scale where we find the drug companies are able to make an enormous contributions to health care system drug companies literally monitor what is taught and influence of not control what is taught in that school drug companies also sponsor much medical school research and the research budget a lot of it is derived from try to companies the federal government used to fund research at medical schools but now more and more that means for his that's who funded directly by medical school themselves and this has definite repercussions we know the big pharma spend sixty billion dollars a year on medical research and we know that the national institutes of health only spends twenty five billion and they have a close relationship with one another which is why you're seeing research being directed towards technology and towards drugs you're not seeing it directed towards natural things that don't cost much that don't provide much profit so we have a huge conflict of interest there  this research is going on and a lot of f d a approval is are based on this research a lot of medical practices are based on this research explains why these drugs that look so good on paper with such good research behind them have such a devastating effects even deadly when used in human beings they're making their point of view from their perspective and it's a very biased point of view that sometimes just outright lies and sometimes written by ghost writers so they may pay people to be involved with the study they may have little to do with that it may be a very prominent person in the medical standing and it doesn't change the fact that if they're paid enough money the ghost writers come in and write what they want to and slander the way that they wa produce a huge change in the outcome melts down here and it's going to firm up over here and when it's in the process affirming or over here that's when you can meld with a little bit for better or worse try to after being taken off twenty pharmaceutical drugs sixteen months ago shown might is improving show continues her recovery with the help of her husband a in washington state i just someone's actually that kind of response or that comment because i'll tell you another thing you know i think that i would also be obliged to tell you that i also will personally tell you that i consider myself a political progressive american and as a political progressive i think that we have made a mistake by allowing the tea party to claim some sort of monopoly on political anger i do i think it's in the stakes and i'm angry about the fact that the economic institutions of this country and in this world are basically destroying the planet that we depend upon for life it's now causing a global climate crisis and creating a racist sexist c oppressive society with the plunder and i damn sure don't hear that anger expressed the tea party rallies thank you for that response and and because because i genuinely believe that we are in a crisis in fact we are in a series of crisis let's call it a crisis a number of crises and i ecological crisis it's an economic crisis it's a social justice crisis these crises are so acute i think the most important thing that we can do is tell the truth to each other and so in my time with you i will make this pledge to you tell the truth as clearly as i can as accurately as i can and will invite you during our discussion period for you to tell your truth we may not agree on exactly what to do we may not agree on all of the strategies on how to approach but at the least let's admit that we're going to tell the truth about what we're up to and what we're up against and what is up against us because i believe that by telling the truth it will reveal to us where our commonalities are what our strategies ought to be and what we ought to do to actually transition away and away from what i believe is a suicidal death march and transition us into the peaceful just compassionate world that we're carrying in our hearts and is within our grasp if will just reach out for you see we want to live in liberty justice and equality of the you one better we deserve to live in liberty justice and equality and man i say that it is true that american children want and deserve to live in liberty justice and equality but we do not want those things because we are americans we want those things because we're human beings and yes american children want liberty justice and equality and so to iraqi children and afghan children and israeli children and palestinian children and mexican children you know the point i'm making is that this if we do it right and if we open our hearts and we really talk about it in the right way we can be participatory in helping to create a genuine human rights movement a worldwide democracy movement that's really where i'd like to be getting and you know what if really this is an airy if we're really honest and if we're really courageous we might even start talking about not only the human rights of our sisters and brothers across the nation states but we start talking about the rights of the forests and the streams and of deer and of birds and we start to actually imagine a global new movement that recognizes the interconnectedness of all things and that we are going to  in an entire new social political and economic system in which we recognize salute and celebrate life itself in that wonderful can we do that that's actually what i think we ought to be about and so that's a tall order and so i recognize that it we really need to learn to be persuasive so i try to persuade you that we can actually succeed i'm a tell a story on how it came to be that large transnational corporations are not merely exercising power today i'm a tell a story about how it came to be that these unelected and unaccountable corporate c e o s are ruling us they're not just exercising power corporate seals are ruling us because they are making the public policy decisions that affect all of our lives they're deciding how much poison will be in the water that we're all drinking or the air that we're all breathing corporate c e o s decided what your transportation choices will be corporate c e o s decide what our energy policy will be in this country corporate c e o s decided whether or not this country went to war and we the people were left to choose between paper or plastic at the grocery store we can choose between coke and pepsi we're allowed seventeen different types of toothpaste we have thirty one flavors of ice cream we are constantly given barrages of consumer choices provided you have the money to pay that's important but the point i'm making is for us to acknowledge and recognize that no matter how many consumer choices we are given that's not the same thing as actually meaningfully participating in  and so as i tell this story i want to make sure to cover for concepts together the first concept i want to make sure we cover is the word democracy that word gets tossed around a lot in this country so to make sure we've got some clarity let me ask what language is this from rule or govern so literally the word democracy means the people rule quick pop quiz how many folks believe we the people are ruling in the united states today don't be shy look around i look around at this universalist congregation there is not a single hand in the air right now i do this presentation all across the country i'll be doing a presentation every night for the next three weeks oftentimes i do an afternoon and evening event i've been i've done about  hundred fifty of these in the last fourteen months and almost nobody raises their hand to that question that's a problem and another way of looking at it though it's a good thing it's not a good thing that we the people don't rule no no it's a good thing that nobody is raising their hand to that question in other words i think it's a good thing that people are finally coming to a very hard truth that we the people don't rule in this country notwithstanding the creation myth that mrs armstrong taught me or whoever your mrs armstrong was not withstanding how beautiful that creation myth is in was i think it's a good thing that we're really finally able to start telling some hard truths about how this country operates because i think that the first step in actually building the movement that we need to actually have democratic control and power over our own society i like to say the most dangerous threat to democracy in the united states of america is the mistaken belief that we actually have one and i think that the fact that we've got this growing movement where people are willing to address the very sobering reality that it doesn't function the way we were taught it does that's a hard thing to admit but honestly folks once we admit that it becomes a relief to actually say i can now talk about how the world is actually operating i have personally found it to be a liberating experience and the next topic that i'll come to is directly tied because i want to talk about sovereignty now before i put up a definition let me ask this quick question if i just had the word the sovereign who or what would you think of the wayne's right and everywhere i go that's the first thing that pops into people's mind that happens of course because of the story that we've been told and our very culture and it's tied because the word sovereignty means the hoops the word sovereignty means the authority to rule and the reason that there is so tied is because five hundred years ago the king was the sovereign the sovereign it was the king those words were literally synonymous and by the way where did the king claim his authority to rule god you don't get more legitimate law is kind of a big deal and a really illustrate that we're going to do a quick little exercise together and this is always a lot of fun for me you'll see in this quick little exercise i will invite disassemble congregation to please close your eyes and repeat after me david cobb is the king i told you all this the son for me to go well let's try get up and therefore anything that david says must be obeyed because david is our lord and master right now normally in this presentation i would say ok you can open your eyes but to your credit spokane washington nobody has their eyes closed good on you get on  well because it's funny i mean and not funny is in david has just made a very witty and droll comment oh no it wasn't that sophisticated it's a kind of human that any comedian would tell you is absurd human i said something that was so ridiculous so absurd that your only kind of reaction was to laugh at it because it just didn't make any sense i mean to say that i get to tell this gentleman how to live his life because who my parents are i mean that's funny or even better than i get to say how all of society is going to be operating because of the divine right of kings i mean that's utter outlandish bhushan is of course that's absurd of course you laugh that at th and five hundred years ago human beings just like you and you and you and all of us not only said it but we believed it i want to take a moment to really acknowledge that the question of sovereignty who or what institutions have the authority to rule is a very important question it might be one of the most important questions that any people or society makes for itself right and i think it's important to recognize is that i have a long history of working in coalition with people and but i'm a green party member and i'm proud of that but i'm equally proud to say that i work very closely with democrats on a day to day basis and equally proud to tell you i work with republicans especially on civil liberties issues libertarians and republicans are very often the people who are on the frontlines of working with me point is i work with anarchists and socialist i work with people who don't even want to vote ever i have a long history of working in coalition with anybody where i can find common ground where i can find enough agreement to work with i have work with them i tell you that not so your pattni on the head i tell you that so you really appreciate the importance of it when i say in my twenty five years of efforts to make social change and looking for opportunities to work in coalition i have never had the privilege or the opportunity of working in coalition with and five hundred years ago that's all there were and five hundred years is the blink of an eye in human history i just really want us to take a moment to recognize that when people tell us that we can and then the constitution because it's too hard or that we can actually create a u s foreign policy that's not based on war and aggression or that we can't transition away from coal and oil and destructive fossil fuel energy consumption and transition to safe the stain of alternative energy practices when people tell me those things can't be done i think have you not been paying attention honestly these kinds of changes in these kind of shearson transitions have happened repeatedly not just in u s history but world history all it takes is enough people to think differently and act differently because frankly folks at the end of the day that's what reality is if enough people think that something is true if enough people act like it's true it is true and so if it is true that the united states of america is currently a racist sexist and class oppressive society and it is then maybe we ought to start thinking and acting differently maybe we ought to start at actually asking what are the strategies that we can use to actually transition into a different world into a different social institution into different economic political economic and legal institutions that will actually reflect the world we want to live then because that my friends is a nonviolent revolutionary movement and that's the movement i want to be part of is in the right place i thought i was in the right place so the next concept that we're going to cover is a legal person hood please note that i did not write corporate personhood on the board that's because the concept i want to cover is legal personhood and really that does that is actually in its nutshell only means the ability to assert rights specifically the ability to assert rights under law but understand that to be a legal person means that you have the ability to assert rights in fact let's acknowledge that the fight and the struggle over who gets to be a legal person has been one of the fundamental fights and political struggles in this country it has been a very important fight it's a very important question who is a legal person it goes deeper than corporate personhood but who has the ability to assert rights at all is a core part of what we're talking about it moved to a man and the last concept that i want to cover is the word corporation because i think this is just as important as the same question what language is the word corporation from it's from latin that's right let's break that one down corpus means body and now for extra credit points in the latin scholars the suffix t i o n in latin it means the inherent quality or to have or creates a literally the word corporation means to have or create body and by body i mean physical body actual literal physical body all right so if a corporation is a legal fiction that begs this question what does the word fiction mean seriously unreal not made up check it out in law school will talk we are taught that a corporation doesn't actually exist in the physical world so we're going to pretend like this group of people material resources capital money contractual obligations cultural assumptions we're going to pretend like this big massive concept is actually physically one thing so that we can treated a certain way under law and of course if enough people think that something is true if enough people act like it's true we just created a corporation point i'm making is that a corporation is a construct it gets created by our cultural belie our willingness to go along with it to pretend like it's just one thing and the word corporation is from latin because the first corporations ever created by the genius of human creativity were created during the roman republic not by the way during the roman empire and sometimes i wish we spent more time in this country asking what happens when a republic devolves into an empire because that might be an important conversation in the united states just say or as the great texas comedian bill hicks would say just plant seeds just plan seeds but really and truly i want to repeat that the genius of the idea of creating a corporation was created during the roman republic for a reason and it was a genius idea do not let it be said that david is anti corporation not true do not let it be said to move to him in coalition is anti corporation not true you see we have to dig a little deeper and understand what is a corporation well here's the thing the first corporations were created during the roman republic for a reason for example you all heard the phrase all roads lead to rome here is two thousand years later and we still say right check it out that road system was laid out built and designed by a roman corporation likewise the aquaduct system that amazing bit of engineering that moved water all across the italian peninsula that entire idea was conceived created by maintained as a roman corporation likewise the first universities the first hospitals can y'all gas corporation corporation quick pop quiz folks what does a water system what does a road system what does a university what does the hospital what do they all have in common they're all public works they're all public infrastructure projects each one of those things serve the public interest the genius of the idea of the corporation was to take private money materiel and resources and applied it to public use but before i go any further let's just acknowledge that there's another way that the government takes private money what's that called taxes now i'm not here to denigrate taxes at all in fact y'all might have heard that washington state is suffering from a budget crisis you all heard that y'all might have heard that the united states of america is suffering from a budget crisis ya'll heard that rumor check this out it's not true the united states is not suffering from a budget crisis washington states not suffering from a budget crisis we are collectively collectively suffering an allocation crisis the rich are getting richer our labor our work there is not a problem with the budget there is an allocation crisis in fact if we wanted to solve this so called budget crisis there is a simple three word solution that references taxes if you know it you can say it with me tax the ranch problem solved right so i'm not here to denigrate the idea of taxes a tall and we can debate what they should be and what things should be taxed and so forth but what i'm asking us to recognize this when the tax man shows up he or she does not say hey it's tax time or are you willing to pay or how much would you be willing to pay as that in your experience not mine you see my understanding is that taxes are mandatory and i think that's a good thing there ought to be mandatory ways in which finally the government finances projects you see the difference s that the corporations to private money for a public use but did so on a voluntary basis and folks this at its core as a concept was a genius way to think about how to go gather together material resources how to arrange things to do public projects that were beyond merely governmental projects corporations are not bad by definition right corporations are just instruments the problem is what we do with them right because frankly looking at this concept is not exactly the way the modern trends national corporation operates is it that's because the modern transnational corporation actually comes out of the fourteenth fifteenth and sixteenth century of europe you know the age of discovery i had to put discovery in those imaginary quotation marks because after all what did they in europe discover africa asia later north and south america newsflash there were people living there they were lost those people didn't need to be discovered and so in the interest of that truth telling in the interest of being courageous to actually acknowledge it let's just tell the truth that that age the fourteenth fifteenth and sixteenth century is the age of rape and pillage and plunder and murder for my money there's one word that sums that up and it's  that's what that means imperialism is brutal really is beating people down it means killing them if you have to been stealing their resources are making it's your own that's what imperialism means and it's brutal and it's horrific and it's ugly and stay with me here because the transnational corporation of today was not just accidentally created during the age of empire the modern transnational corporation was created as an instrument of empire the modern transnational corporation was created in order to facilitate imperialism in fact one of the very earliest and best known of the modern corporations was an outfit known as the east india company literally designed to partizan paid in facilitate the the absolute military conquering of the entire subcontinent of india and get this not only to conquer them in the material sense but also to destroy the existing institutions that those people had that had been meeting their needs before the british arrived to destroy those institutions and to make th people now dependent upon new quote proper british institutions to change their story no longer being a self sufficient self reliant proud and independent people but to subject them to the subjugation of the british empire and even deeper to create institutions that forced them to participate in their own oppression to force them into new legal political and economic models all together point i'm making is the british east india company understood that they didn't just need to colonize the people's bodies they had to colonize their minds and they i suggest that a big part of the problem in the united states of america is that we are colonized and i say we as a pronoun because i believe i'm part it i don't think that i heard you in this room are somehow exempt from that because we're coming to meetings like this let's just acknowledge that we've all been told a story over and over again about our is three operate and it's affected us and we've got to have the courage to actually confront the story of how the world has been operating how it's operating now come to terms with that so we can move forward now that we understand that the corporate charter describes the duties of what a corporation can or cannot do since we now understand that and i will submit we should only allow corporations to exist if they're actually serving the public interest isn't it obvious that a corporation should be on this side of the law and that a corporation should be under the proper democratic control of with the people isn't that just obvious and here's the payoff you all when the united states supreme court i supreme judicial activism says even though the word corporation is never used in the u s constitution we're going to say that we and our society must treat a corporation as if it's a person with rights and that perverts the whole framework see corporate personhood is not just an illogical idea which it is cooper person it is not just a stupid idea which it is corporate personhood i believe deeper corporations being able to claim constitutional rights is a lynch pan for how the ruling elite have hijacked our country from us me outraged as a lawyer is that they use our legal system to justify and legalize it they've stolen the legal institutions the place where we are taught to believe that we go for justice the idea is if you've ever been aggrieved if you have a if you have been wronged you should be able to go to court to go to the law because the law is blind the law is fair the law is just and it doesn't matter what color you are what gender you are how much money you make the idea that we are taught is we have respect for the law because these are the institutions where justice is fairly administered and it pisses me off that the government our society and culture that move to amend we have come together with the idea that we must amend the constitution to one must abolish in its entirety the ridiculous idea created also by the courts that money equals speech