Help -- Getting Started

[Les Squires]

Things You Can Do Today

• Contact any Member by clicking on their photo. Every photo is one-click access to any person you want to contact anywhere in our community. Welcome them, remembering that each person carries a unique spark capable of warming and enhancing our whole community.
• Greet each other! -- volunteer to show newcomers around and answer their questions.
• All-Transition Search -- Top, Column One -- Find what you need across all Transition social networking sites, world-wide. Try "Container Garden", party, or your name. Where in the world is Beau Horgan? Create your own custom search: Track changes specific to your interests.
• HopeDance Film Library -- more than 500 films that deal with sustainability, spirituality, social justice, 911, peak oil, drama, farming, gardening, permaculture collected over 7 years
• Browse Miltonics Video Collection -- 1200 item video library on everything Transition. Thanks Milton Dixon/Transition Illinois. If you don't see your favorite here, tell Dixon!
• Drop in for a visit to Colorado US -- prototype for all 50 U.S. States.
• Invite others to join Transition US -- paste in emails one per line and a brief message of encouragement.
• Update your Transition Resume -- Keep your Resume up-to-date. It's your way to make yourself findable when people are searching.
• Find out where Transition training is taking place -- registration will come a bit later.
• Contact Transition U.S. (Carolyne Stayton)
• Upload your best photo -- ask the guy with the camera if you need assistance photoshopping. We can crop, fix, enhance!
• Install skype from http://skype.com/download -- conference calls, workgroups and tutorials. A centerpiece in our community building. Add LSquiresSkype to your Contacts and he'll greet you at the door!

Reply to This You are invited to help the help be helpful. Using Reply to This below, record your comments, questions and suggestions for improving this online help. Over time, your suggestions will be incorporated into the descriptions above.

[Deborah Phelan]

I cannot begin to say how thrilled I am about this notice, Les. Tonight, I am attending a local meeting in San Rafael, California. I am hoping Transition California can come up with a way to quickly publicize our local chapters, speed up training and engage those of us who are currently unemployed in projects at the local level.

[Pat]

No one is against corporations, and all recognize their importance to economic prosperity.

But, for too long, corporations have been playing both sides of the fence - claiming themselves as persons under the Constitution, and excusing themselves as persons under the Constitution in order to acquire special privileges that no other persons under the Constitution are permitted to acquire, or to rely upon in the debate over rights.

First, if corporations were "persons," they would have the obligations as well as the privileges; but the obligations they deny, and the privileges they claim. This is enough to consider whether equal justice is possible with such an elitist view.

All consumers recognize their obligations as well as their privileges, and few are allowed to escape that reality. That isn't so with corporations who regularly trample consumer rights and privileges by their size and their resources.

The fuzzy appearance of such an outcome is that the consumer is nothing less than a corporate victim that is excused by society if corporations choose to mandate it, or can seductively make him a victim. Because it is at their choosing, the power imbalance forecloses equal justice, and most corporations can hire expensive attorneys to do their fighting, then write off the charges. No so for consumers. Consumers don't usually file Schedule C's which means they cannot write off litigation losses - destroying the principle of equal justice for everyone.

Corporations, if persons, are nothing less than multiheaded Medusa's if they are persons because of the nature of the entity, and the creation of LLC's and LLP's merely consolidates both the views and the practicalities of any inference of equal justice between the corporate person and the individual citizen person. There is no equal justice, just as there is no practical justice with respect to the impact of that fiction.

Unless corporate persons are reduced to individual persons under the Constitution as individual consumers are individual persons, there is only compound persons (corporate gangs) and individual persons, long know to be an unequal battle that can produce only unequal justice.

That America can use the Constitution to validate gang warfare vs the individual is preposterous, and unheard of in the annals of legal history. Balancing of the equities is what legal justice has long been about. It is insulting to the courts to introduce such litigation and ask anyone, including the Judge and jury, to believe that both are equal in appearance.

The cure is that corporations must be reduced to the persons who create the corporation or corporations must be defined by non-person status, and therefore, unable to secure the advantages of being taxpayer-citizens. In fact, most don't pay taxes any longer because of government concessions, already discounting them as individual taxpayers who do taxes as other consumers do. The corporate fiction person is devastating to the philosophy of Constitutional integrity by obscuring its principles, thereby, denying Constitutional protection to every taxpaying citizen.