Before I get into this week’s episode, I want to discuss a couple of news events everyone should be watching. They really started to ramp up over the last week. Both are closely related to the corporate theme we have been chatting about.
The first is the train derailment in Palestine, Ohio. This story highlights two points that I have been making since the beginning of this podcast. First: corporations only care about profit. Second: politicians will spin anything to benefit themselves over the people.
There is still a lot of information to come about this incident, I am sure. So far, Norfolk Southern (the rail line) has provided reluctant assistance. They wouldn’t even attend a community town hall to answer questions. They also refused to provide protective gear during early cleanup.
One of the concerns is that the train was too long. Since 2019, Norfolk Southern has increased train length to reduce operating costs. Longer trains reduce the number of trains needed, which also means fewer employees. This leads to savings, and subsequently, bigger bonuses for executives.
Since I first wrote today's episode a second Norfolk Southern train has derailed in Ohio.
In 2021, the Government Accountability Office investigated Norfolk Southern. What they found was not encouraging. Their accident rate had hit a ten-year high. Records show they spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying to block safety reforms. Also in 2021, their CEO was rewarded with over $14 million in bonuses after hitting their budget goals.
Unfortunately, this incident wasn’t tragic enough on its own. Political elites had to add their input. The right wants to blame the President for not visiting Palestine. The left wants to blame the previous administration for cutting regulations. The truth is that the federal government was mobilized and on the scene within hours of the crash. Also, so far there has been no indication that the cut regulation would have prevented the crash.
It's just politicians playing politician games, and we are all buying into it.
My heart goes out to the People of Palestine. I hope they can cut through the politics and the corporate propaganda and resolve this issue. I truly hope it is as benign as the authorities are claiming.
The second story I want to highlight is one that is only starting to heat up. It is the court case of Dominion Voting Systems versus Fox News. In case you don’t remember, Dominion is the company that makes voting machines. After the 2020 election, the 45th President proclaimed that Biden stole the election. He insisted that the voting machines were instrumental in the theft. Fox repeated these claims. Dominion sued Fox for defamation.
This week, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox, sat for a deposition in the case. This means that Dominion’s attorneys questioned him under oath. The deposition provided some startling realizations. Murdoch admitted that Fox hosts knowingly embraced the stolen election lie. He admitted that they made decisions to support the lie based on money. He even admitted that Fox News has been a propaganda outlet for the Republican party. This collusion went as far as sharing Biden’s campaign ads with the Trump campaign before they aired.
Discovery has also shown that former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan begged Fox to stop pushing the lies. (He’s a member of Fox’s board of directors.) Through all this, Fox is claiming this lawsuit violates their first amendment right.
There is a lot (and I can’t emphasize ‘a lot’ enough) more information to come out on both of these incidents. We must wait to see how they work through investigations and court cases to understand what is going on. But even right now, it is obviously corporations playing corporate games .
Both stories are still developing, but they are both extremely important. We are watching the Corporate Political Agenda play out in real-time. Will the corporations be held accountable for their greed, or will the People’s rights be ignored?
Who knows what the results of the train derailment will be? Unfortunately, we may not even fully know the toll on the People for years to come. If things get bad enough, will Norfolk Southern file bankruptcy and avoid accountability? Will there be justice for the People of Palestine? Will freight trains be made safer through regulations? The answers to these questions matter.
The same thing applies to Fox News. They have now admittedly spent YEARS misleading their audience in the name of news. They have taken advantage of the public trust to spread lies for profit. Will they be held accountable? Will the People see justice?
The answers matter . That’s why I wanted to take a few minutes and mention these stories. What happens here matters. We cannot forget or ignore how these investigations play out. We must pay attention and insist on accountability.
Keep an eye on these unfolding stories, But for now, let’s move on, and let me tell you a story.
It was 1982 at the University of Texas at Austin. A nineteen-year-old college sophomore turned in a paper for his government class. The assignment was to prove he understood a government process. He received a ‘C.’
That paper would go on to change the United States Constitution forever.
What was this ‘average’ paper that affected our Constitution so dramatically? During his research, he came across a list of amendments sent to the states but never ratified. This means that they were never passed by the requisite number of states to become the law of the land.
Most amendments (since the proposal of the eighteenth) have had a sunset clause. This stipulates a finite amount of time for the amendment to be ratified. If it is not ratified by the requisite number of states before the sunset date, the amendment dies.
Gregory Watson found a proposed amendment that did not have a sunset clause. It had been sitting in a political grey area for 193 years. In his paper, Watson argued that this amendment was still active and could still be ratified.
The teaching assistant gave him the ‘C’, so Watson appealed to the professor. His professor upheld the grade, and Watson was not happy. He set his mind to show that he knew what he was talking about and embarked on a ten-year crusade to prove his point. The result? An amendment proposed by James Madison in 1789 earned its spot with its ten more famous brethren.
It was originally proposed as ‘Article the Second’ alongside eleven other articles. It finally became the twenty-seventh amendment.
That was the last time the United States ratified a new amendment. That was thirty-one years ago.
I want more than to tell you an entertaining story, entertaining being a subjective term. My point is that it has been more than thirty years since our last Constitutional amendment. More importantly, fifty years have passed since Congress had an original thought . It has been more than fifty years since a modern congress made an effort to protect the People's rights. We’ve had fifty years of partisan arguing and posturing, ignoring the People's needs.
You can’t tell me there hasn’t been a need to update the People’s rights in the last fifty years. Well, I guess from a partisan point of view , there hasn’t. Why protect the People's rights when you are trying to usurp the power of the People? Why enhance the rights of the People when the corporate elites pay you not to?
That’s not to say that there haven’t been proposals introduced to Congress in that time. Sadly, many of those proposals have been partisan in nature and not in the People’s interest. Most were designed to score partisan points but never designed to pass. The two parties will never agree to enhance the People's rights unless we force them.
To be fair, this is only the third longest gap between amendments… so far. But if you look at the history of those other gaps, though unforgivable, it is easy to understand why they exist. My father was a high school history teacher. He would say you must know the historical context to understand why events occur.
Too often we forget to consider the context when judging history. It doesn't make things right, but it does put things into perspective.
The twelfth amendment was ratified in 1804, and the thirteenth in 1865. This was a tense 60 years in the United States. We defended ourselves from the British, again. We waged an imperialist war on Mexico. Frictions over the institution of slavery were approaching a boiling point. By 1861, the boil had become an eruption and we were in the middle of our civil war. Congress had no motivation to address the People's rights. They spent most of their time fighting wars and arguing over slavery and how to nominate a President. They had little time to debate amendments. To be honest, I'm sure the issue of slavery made them more than a little nervous to address the People's rights. How do you protect the People's rights when you are ignoring the most important? All are created equal.
The next largest gap was between the fifteenth amendment in 1870 and the sixteenth in 1913. Again, those forty-three years were also a bit tumultuous. Congress was still dealing with reconstruction in the south. They argued over civil rights and the expansion of Jim Crow laws. They had to cope with two presidential assassinations. Not to mention, this was the age of the robber barons. Corporations and the wealthy held a tight grip on the government. There was no way they were going to further the rights of the People with an amendment. They were trying to take control; they were certainly not going to cede any.
Ignoring our current thirty-one-year amendment drought, the next longest time was twenty-one years. This was between the twenty-sixth in 1971, and Watson’s quest, the twenty-seventh in 1992. For those of us who lived through a good part of that time, it is simple to see why. Since the seventies, we have seen a growing era of partisan political discord. Partisan elites work with modern-day robber barons to wrest control from the People. Again, they are not going to cede any control when they are looking to take more.
The twenty-seventh amendment only passed because it was a historical fluke . Otherwise, we would be sitting firmly in the second-longest amendment drought.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Equal Rights Amendment here. The E.R.A. says that equality of rights cannot be abridged based on sex. It was first introduced in Congress in 1923.
This amendment passed the House in 1971, and the Senate in 1972. It passed bipartisanly, with more than 80% of both houses voting in favor. It included a sunset clause, with a ratification deadline of 1979. Between 1972 and 1977, thirty-five states approved it. That was only three away from the requisite three-quarters. In 1978, the deadline was looming, so Congress voted to extend it until 1982.
This is where it may get confusing. By 1979, five states had voted to rescind their approval. No further states voted to ratify by 1982. The deadline passed. The (relatively) recent Me-Too movement shined a new spotlight on this amendment. In 2017, Nevada voted to approve the amendment (thirty-five years after the sunset). In 2018, Illinois followed. Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to approve the amendment in 2020. Technically, that pushed it past the threshold, if we don’t count the five rescinded.
The need for this amendment has been hotly debated over the years. Some say that we already have gender equality, so there is no need for an amendment. Others disagree. I won't try to convince you one way or the other. (I will say that the overturning of Roe versus Wade serves as an example that equality isn't universal.) There is also an argument over the right of states to rescind their approval.
So, what happens next? That is currently being decided. Some are saying that the sunset clause means it’s invalid now. Some are saying that’s up to Congress. Either way, two things will be decided when the final decision is made.
One: are sunset clauses valid, or are they only suggestions?
Two: can states rescind a ratification once they have approved an amendment?
Based on my own study, I would say yes, a sunset clause is valid. The Constitution leaves the language of amendments up to Congress. It only provides how to get the process started and the numbers needed to pass. This gives them wide latitude in determining how the amendment process works.
Again, based on my own study, the answer to the second question is no. Giving states the ability to withdraw approval is just asking for partisan meddling. If states can rescind, what keeps them from rescinding older amendments?
It will be interesting to see how The Equal Rights Amendment plays out. I do not believe that it will become the twenty-eighth amendment. We may not even see both questions answered. In my opinion, the easiest one to answer is the sunset clause. If they decide sunset clauses are valid, there is no reason to address the withdrawal of approval.
Either way, it has still been thirty years since an amendment has been passed.
I am talking about this because we forget that the Constitution was written to be a ‘living’ document. The Founders used very deliberate terms that could be interpreted for future generations. They included an amendment process so it could be updated for the modern needs OF THE PEOPLE.
The argument that the Constitution isn’t meant to be living is ludicrous. The lack of original amendments over the past fifty years shows serious disregard. It shows how little respect our political elites have for the People.
If you’re making a case for politicians not working for the People, you would have to look no further than this fact.
I have seen the arguments based on propaganda, and I reject them. Some say considering the Constitution a living document only benefits those in power. Treating it this way gives political elites the ability to interpret it any way they want. This is true to a degree, but that is the very basis of our government .
Americans too often forget how our government was designed. I don’t mean this to be insulting. We have become jaded when it comes to politics. This is a sentiment I understand. As I have been saying now for 18 episodes, we don’t pay attention to politics. It has become tribal and divisive. We accept the company line from whichever party we have chosen. We ignore agendas and we no longer hold them accountable when they lie or mislead.
We as voters deserve a truthful agenda from our elected representatives. We deserve to know what our parties and politicians plan to do with our power. We deserve politicians that work for the People’s agenda and not their own. We must hold them accountable when we get none of these, because we deserve the politicians we get when we don’t.
Our government was designed with three separate branches of government for a reason. If one gets out of line, the other two are there to press them back. Let’s say the legislature decides to interpret a section of the Constitution in a wildly new way to pass a law. The President is the front line of defense to determine whether it is constitutional or not. If the President doesn’t veto it (or his veto is overridden), it is then up to the Judicial branch. The Judicial must then determine its constitutionality.
If we get past that point, we can only blame ourselves. We elected them without understanding their agenda. We allowed the partisan takeover of the courts. Getting to that point isn’t something that happened overnight, but we can still do something about it. It is in our power, after all.
We can ensure that we do not re-elect anyone responsible, so their successors know we want it repealed. This is the disconnect. Instead of holding them accountable, we let them spin the blame. We let them convince us it’s not THEIR fault, it’s the other side’s. We end up with a stagnant government. Or worse, we end up with a government actively working against the People.
Welcome to 2023.
We must demand politicians act to protect the People's rights. We must demand they put aside their partisan agendas and work for the Peoples'. We must demand amendments that protect our children's and their children's future.
We must remind them who they serve.
We the People are the Power.
Oh… In case you were wondering, Watson’s professor accepted that he had proven his case. In 2017, she changed the grade to an ‘A.’
Today, I highlighted the Corporate Political Agenda's crusade to limit the People's rights. Next week, we will continue the discussion of the Constitution as a living document. We will discuss the propaganda denying it and the reasons they are wrong.