The Supreme Court says so:  Corporations have the same free speech rights as flesh and blood human beings!  What's next?  Will Exxon, Verizon and Pfizer get voting rights, too?

On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission with a ruling that smacked us with both injury and insult.  

The injury in decision opening election funding to corporations is legitimizing a flood of corporate funds into the election process.  In reality, corporations have always been big players in the process, hiding their iron fist in various velvet gloves—so-called 'issue ads”,  “personal contributions” by corporate officers and managers, and so on.  The injury is real, but not new.  Our assailant just has a larger club now to bash us and the electoral process.

The insult is much more damaging:  what was a legal metaphor, a  fiction—corporate personhood—has been translated into a legal reality.  Corporations are created by government, to serve public purposes.  We created them and defined them:  they do not have a life of their own beyond the terms of the legal paperwork that created them.  They are a stack of legal paper.  The Supreme Court gave those stacks of paper the rights of flesh and blood people.  

Cut through the propaganda around national health care policy and it comes down to this:   younger people are paying for the Medicare system--why shouldn't they have its benefits while they need them to stay healthy and in the workforce?

Medicare is an effective, efficient single payer system.  It works.  It is the best available U.S. model for universal coverage.  It eliminates the private bureaucracies that block access to care,  continually raise rates, discriminate against people with existing health problems, and swamp patients, doctors, druggists and hospitals with tsunami-scale paperwork. 

If the profit-gouging insurers must be placated, let them compete with Universal Medicare;  we'll see whether public or private payersserve us best

Discrimination based on a person's age is costly, several times over.

Gray Panthers has always favored and supported intergenerational connections and working together, without regard to age, to fight injustices and systems which waste human potential.  Regardless of when our birthdays fell on the calendar, we can ALL work for peace, we can all work for affordable housing, we can all work for the right to universal health care and much more.  Thirst for social justice has no age limits.

In our country and in our culture, many are NOT aware of the costs of ageism-the loss of perspectives and strengths that results when some are shut out by systems in the workplace and the community.  Some employers, for example, prefer younger workers based on stereotypicalassumptions about productivity, health and adaptability.  Those employers lose the strengths of experienced workers, their get-it-done ethic, and their ability to take on new tasks.  Usually, the harshest effects of ageism fall on older adults- the young who experience discrimination have time on their side, but seniors may see their opportunities decreasing. 

At the other end of the scale, Ageism also limits the opportunities of new workers, young tenants, and aspirants to public service.

Gray Panthers can and do work to identify and solve the problem of Ageism in our workplaces, communities and institutions.  One way that you can help is by sharing information about age discrimination and successful ways to combat it.  Use this blog to tell what works-what happens when the problem in named and intergenerational efforts work toward a solution.  If you know of employers, for example, or unions, or community organizations which have taken a stand against ageism, honor them with a brief comment on this blog.

Those clever folks who crashed the banking system and the stock market and retirement funds and millions of paying jobs now tell us that now the problem is that Americans are saving rather than spending!!!  If only we'd forget about rainy days and put our pennies on the counter, prosperity will return in a heartbeat.  Well, without jobs and with a huge credit crunch...that just doesn't seem realistic.  So, we have Government spending to provide the stimulus while us stubborn, timid consumers sit on the sidelines.  What are the best targets for government spending in these times?  What will create jobs, soon?  What will leave a lasting capital investment to build communities and infrastructure?  (Remember those Depression-era sidewalks, trails  and parks?  What else was successful? What could work now, too?)

Working on the premise that each of us is responsible to 'be the change' that we want, what are you doing that contributes to healing of the effects of 60 years of conflict in the Middle East?  Raising money for humanitarian relief?  Conducting educational programs in your community about the conflicts and efforts to solve them?  Writing U.S. and other government officials and expressing your views?  What can each of us do to make even a small difference?  Post your ideas and experiences on the blog.