Most of you know that Disney owns ABC. ABC, of course, owns the ABC Radio Network. Finally, ABCRN owns KSFO, a hate-radio talker in San Francisco. Common to every level of the corporate chain is an abiding affinity for Republican rule and a willingness to use hate and deceit in furtherance of their political objectives. Most recently, ABC set themselves up as the arrogant peddlers of the propaganda hit piece, "Path to 9/11" that blatantly lied about the path to 9/11 in ways that glorified Bush while smearing Clinton's role. The ABC Radio Network is home to Sean Hannity. KSFO? Well, you'll see (and hear).

But this is our moment. Progressives control both Houses of Congress. They pass the laws that govern the boundaries of what can be broadcast over people's airwaves.

If you read the diary I posted a coupla days ago, you’ll have some idea of what this is about, but if you haven’t, start there and come back here. For those of you that skipped the click and are in the dark, the short version is that a blogger, Spocko, recorded audio of some KSFO radio shows. He blogged about the startling nature of the rancid hatred on display and eventually began to contact advertisers. Soon, advertisers signed off. KSFO wasn’t pleased. Spocko found his photo posted on KSFO’s web site and was threatened by their management with a myriad of consequences. Finally, on Christmas Eve last, Disney/ABC served Spocko’s ISP with a Cease & Desist Notice which resulted in the silencing of Spocko. We won’t let this stand.

First, allow me to speak to the goals of this action. Primarily, we want to raise awareness of the hate that is broadcast over our airwaves every single day. To that end, it’s useful to highlight clips like this one, in which the KSFO host ponders, “the day will come when unpleasant things are going to happen to a bunch of stupid liberals. It’s going to be amusing to watch, [cohosts laughter] very amusing to watch.” Or this one, in which Melanie Morgan, speaking of Nancy Pelosi, claims to have “a bull’s-eye painted on her big wide laughing eyes.” It is our hope that by shining the disinfectant that is sunlight upon these advocators of violence, we will give Congress reason to take a closer look at what has happened to political discourse since the evisceration of the Fairness Doctrine.

A secondary goal is to begin a dialogue with the advertisers that may still be ignorant of the horrible things uttered by the hosts at KSFO. For instance, does it make sense for Match.com: to pay for advertisements that run immediately after Melanie Morgan suggests that Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, should be dug up and so that she could be killed again? How romantic do you feel after that visualization? Does it make sense for Denny’s, a company with a, how shall we say... less than adequate race record to advertise on Brian Sussman’s show when he agrees with a caller that all mosques in Syria should be blown up by cruise missiles when they are most likely to be full of praying Muslims?

Another of our goals is to encourage corporate responsibility. Disney allows their subordinate companies to engage in this kind of hateful behavior because it is profitable to the Disney parent. As long as Brian Sussman makes KSFO money by demanding that a caller prove he’s not a Muslim by saying “Allah is a wh*re,” Disney will not intervene. Of course Winnie the Pooh, The Little Mermaid, Mickey Mouse and Snow White’s hearts are broken, but no matter...

While the etymology of company stresses the illicit aspects of the corporation, the word corporation itself stresses the higher aspirations of the entity. Derived from the Latin corparæ, it means to make corporal, or physically embody. For the first half millennia after the fall of Rome, the world's most powerful corporations were all trying to embody the Christian God. The idea took hold so strongly that by 1534 St. Thomas More could speak of Jesus Christ as the ultimate corporation: "He [Jesus] doth...incorporate all christen folke and hys owne bodye together in one corporacyon mistical."

A century later, Roger Williams, Freethinker and founder of Rhode Island, likened the church to a "company of East India or Turkey merchants," while English philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw those same joint stock companies as lesser -- possibly parasitic -- creatures within the larger creature of the state. In Leviathan he wrote, "Corporations... are many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man."

God, demon, servant, master, parasite or provider -- what exactly is the corporation? A good starting point is probably Chief Justice John Marshall's definition in the 1819 Dartmouth College case: "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law," Marshall wrote. "Among the most important [of its qualities] are immortality, and if the expression be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons may be considered the same, and may act as a single individual..."

In a general sense, this definition fits every corporation from St. Benedict's to Michael Milken's. All are invisible, for although they may be mighty, they have no form unto themselves; all are individual, with identities and personalities distinct from their numberless human workers; and all can outlive and replace those same workers, just as the higher animals replace their individual constituent cells as they die or lose their effectiveness. Although corporations are themselves not made of flesh and blood, they display qualities of biological life so strongly that both Hobbes and Marshall remarked upon it.

Some modern writers, like W. David Kubiak, have argued that corporations actually constitute an entirely new class of being. Kubiak notes that corporations "appear to fulfill all the definitional requirements of a complex 'organism.' All of them, for example, share basic organizational processes, structures and energy needs: generate psychic membranes that divide their membership from outsiders; take in and process information and nourishment from the environment; specialize, control and outlive their human/cellular constituents: can reproduce, spawning subsidiary bodies..."

The main human attribute that corporations lack is a soul, as Roger Manwood, chief baron of the Exchequer, noted as early as 1592. Since the corporations themselves, and not their souls, were immortal, they were not held accountable to the moral standards that applied to individual people. "Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed," wrote the great English legalist Edward Coke, "for they have no soul." Or as English lawyer Howel Walsh put it, "a corporation cannot blush." Thus the corporations' moral inadequacy amounted to a significant legal advantage, one of many they have accrued.

In fact, special dispensations, exemptions, and privileges of every kind imaginable are the life's blood of the corporation. Corporate members enjoyed various privileges during Roman times, such as curial immunity, and organizational privileges are evident as early as 628 A.D. in the ecclesiastic orders of the Catholic Church, the first great corporations of the post-Roman era. Modern English and French law traces the secular corporation to the concept of "franchise," which is the French Norman word for privilege.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw those same joint stock companies as lesser -- possibly parasitic -- creatures within the larger creature of the state.