CREW FEC COMPLAINT AGAINST MZM AND MITCHELL WADE RESULTS IN $1,000,000 PENALTY – SECOND LARGEST IN FEC HISTORY
Contact:Naomi Seligman Steiner 202.408.5565 nseligman@citizensforethics.org

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CREW FILES FEC COMPLAINT AGAINST MZM, INC. // 21 Jun 2005

31 Oct 2007 // Washington, DC – Today, as the result of a complaint filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) announced the second largest fine in FEC history — $1,000,000 — has been imposed against MZM and Mitchell Wade.

In June 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that MZM, Inc. and its president, Mitchell Wade, violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. CREW’s complaint was based on an article appearing in the San Diego Union-Tribune and alleged that Wade had used corporate funds to reimburse employees for contributions made to members of Congress who Wade believed could be helpful to MZM.
MZM and Wade have entered into an agreement with the FEC admitting that MZM made corporate conduit contributions to the campaigns of Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and former Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL) and agreeing to pay $1,000,000 to settle the matter.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, “We are gratified to learn of the FEC’s disposition of this matter. As the presidential campaign season progresses, a fine of this magnitude should serve as a warning to all political donors that violating federal campaign finance laws has serious consequences.”

The FEC release can be found here: http://www.fec.gov/press/press…..__________

Some here may remember that Mitch Wade was at the forefront of the Duke Cunningham scandal in California a few years back.

Cunningham also had ties to Abramoff.

Both Cunningham and Wade did prison time.

Mayhap corp.s can be prohibited from lobbying,i.e., individuals can use their 1st Amend. Rights on their own dime, but cannot be legally reimbursed or paid by a corp. as a deductible [from taxes] expense by the corp. of doing business.

You want a remedy? Just locate a demonstrated, truly brilliant person and give him/her the problem. Nader et al are available. It will be elegantly resolved.

In his spellbinding Chapter 6 — “The Deciding Moment” — Mr. Hartmann tells how corporate personhood was achieved.

Orthodoxy has it the Supreme Court decided in 1886, in a case called Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were indeed legal persons. I express that view myself, in a recent book. So do many others. So do many law schools. We are all wrong.

Mr. Hartmann undertook instead a conscientious search. He finally found the contemporary casebook, published in 1886, blew the dust away, and read Santa Clara County in the original, so to speak. Nowhere in the formal, written decision of the Court did he find corporate personhood mentioned. Not a word. The Supreme Court did NOT establish corporate personhood in Santa Clara County.

In the casebook “headnote,” however, Mr. Hartmann read this statement: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Here, anyway, corporate personhood was “provided” — in the headnote, instead of the formal written decision of the Supreme Court. But that’s not good enough.

What is a “headnote?” It is the summary description of a court decision, written into the casebook by the court reporter. It is similar to an editor’s “abstract” in a scientific journal. Because they are not products of the court itself, however, headnotes carry no legal weight; they can establish no precedent in law. Corporate personhood, Mr. Hartmann discovered, is simply and unequivocally illegitimate.

The court reporter for Santa Clara County was Mr. John Chandler Bancroft Davis, a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Mr. Hartman has in his personal library 12 books by Davis, mostly original editions. They display Davis’s close alliance with the railroad industry, and they support persuasively Mr. Hartmann’s argument that Davis injected the personhood statement deliberately, to achieve by deceit what corporations had so far failed to achieve in litigation. …

Can a corporation run for President?

The first step is to get corporate money out of the electoral process. There are folks at http://www.youstreet.org lobbying to do just that. Check them out.

We should carry this idea that corporations are more like foreign governments than persons and “citizens” a bit further. We certainly don’t allow foreign states to contribute to political campaigns. So how is it that a corporation, with foreign share-holders, executives, and even large-scale state ownership…can donate to political campaigns? Or a corporation with vast overseas empires which certainly would impact who it supports in terms of foreign policy (think Henry Ford and the Nazis), tax on foreign investments, contracts etc.

In terms of real human beings, in the biological sense (which I’m sure was “original intent” we restrict political contributions to citizens and, in some cases, legal residents. But can a corporation be “born in the United States or of a citizen parent”, are they naturalized/naturalizeable? Do they reside in a home? Go through immigration, have visas? Get passports? Are they subject to the “PERSONAL INCOME TAX”.

To allow a corporation to contribute to political campaigns or activities makes about as much sense as allowing ones pet dog to launder a contribution to them. Actually worse, since a dog is a biological “thing” with boundaries. Corporations are endlessly boundless and infinitely divisible. You can have a corporation of two persons, which can, by adding a third, become another corporation, which can be subdivided into two more that are not the same in composition as the other two. In addition, simply by giving these collectives different “purposes” they can, with the same members, become a different corporation.

Thus the individuals within these gain vast influence over the electoral process over “citizens”. It’s money laundering, pure and simple.