The Hightower Report

Scoring a Point for Community

For me, the most significant statistic coming out of this year's Super Bowl was not the 31-25 score in the Green Bay Packers' hard-fought victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Neither was it the $1.3 billion cost of the new, monstrously huge football palace built by the Dallas Cowboys, where the game was played. Rather, the number that impresses me is 111,507.

That is the number of people who own the Packers – each of whom is an ordinary Green Bay resident and devoted cheesehead. Unlike all 31 of the other pro football teams, the Packers are not the personal plaything of some rich family or profiteering corporate consortium. Instead, they are a nonprofit community enterprise owned by local fans and managed by them as a project "intended to promote community welfare." Those 111,507 Green Bay citizens elect the team's board of directors, and this hands-on, community-minded board then hires and fires the team's administrators and coaches.

Public ownership means that no impulsive greedhead can sell the beloved Packers and move them in the dead of night to a cash-rich big city. It also produces unmatched fan support, even in years when the Packers do poorly on the field. In fact, if things aren't going well, fans don't have to whine helplessly about it on the shock jock call-in shows; as citizens of this small city, they can talk directly to team management, or as shareholders, they can vote to change managers.

Interestingly, in a time when politicos and pundits across the country are demonizing the very idea of public ownership, the good folks of Green Bay are showing that it works beautifully and adds immeasurable strength to the community. Not only are these Green Bayers Super Bowl champs again this year, but they've produced more NFL championships for their city than any other set of owners have done.

The Kochs Are Coming!

Recently, I was among the thousand-odd uninvited "guests" who descended on an exclusive, closed-door political retreat held at a posh resort. How rude of us riffraff to intrude!

However, America's always-fragile democracy often requires confrontational rudeness. This secretive gathering of the rich was organized by the now-infamous multibillionaire Koch brothers, bringing together their shadowy network of far-right-wing moneyed elites and political operatives. For years, the Kochs have been working behind dozens of political front groups to intrude on America's democracy with their own schemes to establish a corporate plutocracy. Now, that's truly rude! So we decided to knock on the door of their resort hideaway and say, "We see you."

We aimed not only to expose the Kochs' cabal of billionaires, but also to focus media and public attention on the need to repeal the Supreme Court edict in last year's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. The Supremes ruled that a corporation is a "person" entitled to wielding greater political power than us actual human-being-type persons.

To undo the damage, we need to pass a constitutional amendment that explicitly makes what should be an obvious point: To be a person, you have to have a navel. Passing any amendment to our nation's basic governing document is difficult, but it can and must be done if America is even to pretend to be a government of and by the people.

The good news is that Americans are up for it. A nationwide poll in January found that four out of five people support the passage of just such an amendment – including 68% of Republicans.

Two hundred and thirty-six years ago, Paul Revere supposedly rallied the people's resistance to democratic repression with the cry, "The British are coming!" Today, the rallying cry is: "The Kochs are coming." To join the resistance, go to www.freespeechforpeople.org.