Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The final dump on our democracy.

With the last load of rip rap dumped on” we the people”
the ship of state is now on it’s way to sinking. I am referring
to the recent coup de grace granted corporations recently.
With this seriously flawed ruling the Supremes have joined
the other branches of government in overstepping by a
country mile their mandate.

With the stroke of a pen our own Supreme Court has
kicked the supports out from under democracy’s
“equal rights under the law” provisions by allowing multi-
billion-dollar corporations to use their unlimited funds
as a weapon, either for or against, candidates in free
elections, It sounds like a strong defense of free speech
until you realize how easy it will be for the large corporations
to swamp the airwaves in support of their candidates.

One man one vote sounds terrific until you realize that
giving a public voice in our politics to the richest corporations
on the planet, not just US corporations, and expecting a
fair result is ridiculous. This is similar to putting one man
on one side of a tug-of-war rope and putting one man
in a D8 cat on the other. Sure it is mono e mono until
the machinery is figured into the equation.

Over the previous decade laws were written or changed
which favored big businesses like drug manufacturers.
Take the law that was recently passed prohibiting the
government, the largest drug purchaser in the country,
from negotiating prices with suppliers. I find it simply
amazing that our lawmakers can get away with a law
so patently favorable to the industry while sticking it to
the rest of the nation.

Now our politicians will officially become the nation’s
highest-paid prostitutes. (Not that they weren’t already.)
No politician will survive if he isn’t beholden to a fat cat
funding his election campaigns.

Incredibly, most of the people in our once great nation
could probably care less about this incredible threat to our
individual liberties. The threat to our liberty is not from
another nation. It will now come from the feckless fortunes
of morally bankrupt rich corporations whose loyalty is only to
money.

Congress was originally charged with the responsibility to keep a sharp eye on the purse strings of the nation. The presidential power to wage war was supposed to be curtailed when Congress, following the will of the people, refused to pay for wars. Instead they just ordered up a bigger rubberstamp. Rather than safeguarding the country’s cash they are shoveling it out as fast as the presses can print it (almost literally).

So now all three branches of the government are vigorously exercising an unrestrained assault on the middle class. The President is wasting lives and resources at an unprecedented rate. Congress, while rubber stamping the largest military budgets in the world’s history (remember what peace used to feel like?), can’t get a single social program which may actually spell relief to the ailing middle class passed. And the Supremes, not to be outclassed by the other branches, have decided they no longer must wait for an issue to be raised before weighing in. They now feel free to advance any cause that takes their interest like the issue of campaign funding. There was no case before the court; they jumped on this issue before Obama has a chance to reseed the court with democratically minded judges.

So now what?