David Seaton's News LinksI don't consider the title of this post hyperbole. Things are that bad.
The massive corruption of the American political system has been consecrated by the highest tribunal in the land. The modest fig leaf of McCain-Feingold has been ripped off the big swinging dick of corporate power and any pretense of maintaining the republic that the Founding Fathers intended has been summarily liquidated.
Think of the most sordid and benighted tinpot banana republic you can imagine, then add aircraft carriers and infinite atomic bombs and you will have a pale idea of what this Supreme Court of the United States has just solemnly and officially created.
Today Honduras is a shining city on the hill compared to the USA.
Church bells should be ringing and flags should be at half mast all over the land. Citizens (if that word is even still applicable) should be massing in the streets to protest... if they don't, that will be even worse news than the ruling itself. DS
5 comments:
I thought it was already "that bad"
since 1960 and so did Ike. The reality is that corporate entities in the US have had most of the political power for decades. There is
some hope in that it costs very little for third parties to get out their message on line. In fact, I'm thinking of returning to the US and establishing residency, starting a simple three item platform/party/campaign and when I get a few million followers and someone {oh at last I will be in contact with the mythical TPTB} calls me and offers to pay me to go away, I'll get the best deal I can and leave the country again.
The place is economically savaged
and no longer governable until after the 'inner Lenin' period comes and goes, so getting elected would only mean an actual salary and pretty nice health care. Having to be a Congress person, Senator or POTUS would mean I would have to spend all my time with the cretins they have in there now. No thanks, I'll take the money and not run.
Should be an extremely bizarre off year election. I welcome the entertainment.
Your comment is too mild. The corporate media here has hardly made mention of this decision. I see no one in the streets.
Cactus
At the bottom of this whole business is something very simple, something which we might consider the basis of our civilization, not just our democracy: protecting the many powerless, from the oppression of the powerful few.
It is in the nature of things, that if left to themselves, without regulation or restriction, a few people finally control almost everything, in much the same way that in a troop of monkeys a few alpha-males monopolize all the females. Monopolies are the natural state of things in a world "red in tooth and claw". Anti-trust legislation, seats reserved for the physically challenged on public transport, even very ancient institutions such as monogamy and the keeping of the sabbath, were designed to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
Many are not aware that today's huge corporations are actually controlled by a very small percentage of the equity... all that power is in reality concentrated in a very few hands. What the Supreme Court's decision has done is to convert the Congress and the Senate, in fact all elected institutions in the USA into a great smorgasbord for these men (mostly men).
There are some who think that this is how it should be: the "Darwinists", the followers of Ayn Rand like Alan Greenspan, the disciples of Milton Friedman and of course the former National Socialist Party of pre-war Germany. For all of the above, the weak exist to provide the strong with a living. What the Supreme Court decision has done is to empower this philosophy.
It looks really bad and one can only wonder at the little coverage it is recieving...
The reason there's not much squawk here is IMO that social darwinism and trickle-down has been the norm here since Reagan, and that most people now alive here ascribe their perceived prosperity to those notions. Since unions are now shriveled and neutered, There remain only government and the corporations to imagine and decide our fate. Neither of those define Thuggery and Theft as we do, the Court is packed, government is sold; Ken Kesey was right. (Politics is bullshit, just walk away) Also Tim Leary.
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