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In a sign that the United States judiciary is now as corrupt as its government, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that U.S. corporations can engage in unlimited campaign spending. Plainly and simply, this means that corporations can now openly “buy” elections, and by implication, the candidates running in those elections.

This travesty of “justice” was supposedly justified on the basis of “free speech”, and the United States' First Amendment which protects that right. However, the same judiciary which has remained blind, deaf, and dumb as the U.S. government trampled all over the (supposed) rights of its people, was able to put aside the objections of the minority, and strongly assert the rights of corporations.

The dissenting minority argued, quite rightly that you could not interpret Constitutional rights in a manner which gives corporations equal status to people. There is no legal basis for simply passing along all the fundamental rights of human beings to corporate entities – beyond what has been bestowed upon them through the decisions of judges. In fact, however, corporations are not being given rights equal to those of human beings, they are being given superior rights to human beings – especially in the United States.

Individual rights now exist in the United States only at the whim of its government. Should it wave its magic wand, and utter the words “Homeland Security”, all those rights instantly vanish before our eyes. The same government which has severely restricted human rights has been expanding the rights and powers of corporations in any and every way.

Decades of pro-corporation governments in all levels of government in the U.S. have virtually annihilated trade unions (with a very similar trend in Canada, as well). Here the people have no one to blame but themselves. They have allowed themselves to be duped into believing that the same (and only) entities which exist to protect and promote the rights of people in the workplace were the economic villains of our society – supposedly being responsible for inflation, unemployment and every other economic problem which governments lacked the fortitude to address (and so found a convenient scapegoat).

The principle “crime” of the unions: they helped working people make “too much money”, and this was supposedly the primary cause of both unemployment and inflation. However, the same, stupid sheep who allowed themselves to be “outraged” by the fact that union members were earning more than they could have negotiated without unions remained oblivious to the unions for professional people: the “associations” which have consistently, year-after-year, decade-after-decade awarded themselves salaries many times the amount of most working people.

While the average person has seen their real wages, and standard of living falling every year for the last three decades, the members of these “associations” have seen their own wages and living standards rise every year over those same thirty years. The politicians who were the architects of destroying the rights of the working people, while pampering the professionals have been at least as lavish in determining their own salaries and benefits.

Meanwhile, the management of corporations, whose only contributions to profitability (over those same thirty years) has been to “down-size”, “out-source”, or “relocate” as much of their business as possible (with the specific purposes of reducing what they give to their own employees) have awarded themselves compensation packages which make even the generous perks and entitlements of the politicians and professionals seem like mere pittances.

Corporations (and their management) were not satisfied with simply stripping all their workers of unions, and the protection for workers which came with it (and the lower wages which came with that). What they lusted for was access to infinite pools of the dirt-cheap labour of under-developed nations, and so “globalization” was invented, a scheme with one, solitary purpose: to make the world a better place for large corporations.

For U.S. corporations, that still wasn't enough. So the corporate lobbyists passed along their decree to government: open the southern border, to allow in a flood of migrants from the same economies which had seen their agricultural sectors ravaged, through being flooded with heavily-subsidized, U.S. agricultural exports. Corporate America drove millions of these people off their land, then opened the U.S. border – so they could be serfs for those same U.S. corporations.

This is why they were not allowed to legally immigrate to the United States. Legal immigrants have the same rights as other Americans, and what Corporate America wanted was slaves. So the “illegal aliens” were forced to “sneak” across the U.S. border – supposedly able to infiltrate the U.S. border at exactly the same time that the individual rights of Americans had been stripped away.

Follow the logic here: the rights of Americans had to be taken away, because there were supposedly large numbers of “terrorists” who were supposedly doing everything possible to sneak into the United States in order to “attack” Americans. The human rights of Americans were considered expendable, but the “right” of U.S. corporations for a steady supply of slave-labour was not.

As a side note, this raises another very interesting point. Either the U.S. government was willing to recklessly gamble with the safety of Americans by allowing its southern border to remain wide open for most of the last decade, or there never was any threat. However, that is a discussion for another time.

In the United States (and, to a lesser extent in Canada), we now live in societies where the apathetic sheep who snooze through their lives have endorsed the philosophy (through their own choice of governments) that only corporations, politicians, and professional people deserve to prosper. For the “little people”, it is apparently right and just that their own standards of living deteriorate a little more, every year, forever.

The human rights which countless millions have fought and died for around the world (in prior generations), apparently mean so little to today's sheep, that they utter nary a whimper when those rights are arbitrarily stripped away at the whim of government.

The “salvation” for the sheep will ultimately result from the actions of the “elites”, rather than of the sheep's own volition. Accustomed to decade-after-decade of always getting more for themselves and totally desensitized to rapidly rising poverty, a rapidly widening gap between “have's” and “have not's”, and rapidly increasing human misery, those on top will continue to take more and more for themselves until so little is left over for the sheep that they can no longer survive.

At that point, corruption and institutionalized elitism will be so deeply and thoroughly entrenched in our societies that reform of those societies will be utterly impossible. Only “revolution” will depose the aristocracy that has appropriated all the wealth of our societies. History tells us that the chances are at least 50/50 that it will be violent revolution.

Has anyone seen this movie before?

Apathetic masses allow themselves to be trampled upon, year after year, by the ruling class. The elites, in turn, never are able to restrain themselves from simply taking more and more for themselves – until the masses have nothing. The masses rise up, and many of the elites disappear. The wealth remaining in the rubble is (more or less) evenly divided, and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Roughly forty years ago, Pete Townsend of the Who, wrote these immortal words, in a haunting, rock classic – titled Won't Get Fooled Again.

...I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution

Take a bow for the new Revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again...

The change it had to come

We knew it all along

We were liberated from the “foe”, that's all

And the world looks just the same

And history ain't changed

'Cause the banners, they'd all flown in the last war

I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution

Take a bow for the new Revolution

Smile and grin at the “change” all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I'll get on my knees and pray

We don't get fooled again...

Meet the new “Boss”, same as the old “Boss”

How many times do we have to live out the words to that song?

Today, it is the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly endorsing the principle that it is acceptable for corporations to purchase the outcome they desire in elections. For anyone who would choose to dispute this proposition, I would point out the degree to which the media (and the politicians, themselves) obsess about how much money individual campaigns and political parties are able to attract, and the high correlation between raising the most campaign funds and winning elections.

A year ago, the minority Conservative government in Canada attempted to ram-through legislation that would have stripped all public financing from elections – 'stacking the deck' even more ruthlessly in favor of the candidate able to attract the most corporate donations. By remarkable “coincidence”, the Conservative Party is (by a wide margin) the preferred recipient of corporate, campaign-bribes – by both the corporations, and the Conservatives themselves.

Facing a revolt in Parliament, and the defeat of his government, Conservative leader Stephen Harper frantically suspended Parliament, and immediately launched a large (corporate-funded) advertising campaign – with the sole purpose of turning the Canadian people against efforts to depose his minority government. It was only after the polls showed that Canadians had been brainwashed against removing the Conservatives that Parliament was allowed to resume.

A functional democracy requires work. Not only is effort (and good faith) required of those chosen to govern, but some effort is also required from the electorate. The mental “couch potatoes” who form the vast majority of our electorate, have either meekly submitted to their own exploitation, or are simply so hopelessly brainwashed that they are oblivious to that exploitation.

People who take no responsibility for the state of their own lives, or of society itself, are not “citizens”, they are serfs. At the very least, taking responsibility must involve making informed decisions throughout the election process.

Instead of a society of citizens, we have masses of serfs – people far too lazy to make any effort to educate themselves. This is the natural consequence of an educational system which is clearly designed to produce serfs, not citizens (see “Doomed by the Moron Factor”). It is hard to believe that a pathetically docile electorate, and an educational system which actively and explicitly discourages people from even attempting to think for themselves is merely a “happy coincidence” for the ruling elites.

Instead of an educational system which seeks to elevate our status as human beings, and to maximize our potential, we have a system where the highest priority is to condition the “little people” to accept their “place” in society: gratefully thanking the elites for the crumbs of wealth which “trickle down” to them – and never seeking to challenge the status quo.

Today's “victory” for U.S. corporations is (in the grand scheme of things) nothing but an exclamation-point in this serial, human “drama” where the final outcome is already known – because we have lived through the same chapters over and over.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

        - George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

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written by Jeff Nielson, January 25, 2010

Hi JsJ. There are many thing scarier than that. How about this?

The SCIENTIST who was the supposed "perpetrator" of the "Anthrax letters", and who received the U.S.'s HIGHEST civilian award 6 months AFTER he became the "prime suspect" was supposedly so incompetent in mailing the letters that he put WEAPON'S-GRADE anthrax inside a normal envelope.

What makes that so absurd is that this scientist (one of the world's foremost EXPERTS on anthrax) would have known that the particles of anthrax were so small that they would fall through the "pores" of the envelope like a basketball falling through a 10-foot wide hoop.

In other words, whoever DID mail the letters would have either have had to wear a "haz-mat" suit while mailing the letter OR he would have been the most-likely person to be infected.

Also, instead of simply providing a "scare" - which was the supposed "motive" of this scientist, he would have known that the EXTREMELY clumsy manner in which he mailed the anthrax would infect the ENTIRE U.S. postal system.

Thus, the one thing we know for SURE about the "Anthrax letters" is that the (conveniently) dead scientist ACCUSED of that crime did NOT mail those letters...and wasn't it also CONVENIENT (for the Republicans) how those Anthrax letters showed up (in the mailboxes of Democrats) at EXACTLY the same time the Bush regime was ramming through the "Patriot Act" (in order to castrate the U.S. Constitution)?

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written by JsJ, January 25, 2010

The point about the ease with which illegal immigrants pour through the Southern border is especially salient (I'll paraphrase it): either the government has been hopelessly lax, or there was never a true threat.

Sometimes dichotomies are overly simplistic, but in this case, I think not. It's pretty scary to think about, actually.

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