Another Step in the Sinking of the United States

And a step that has been going on for decades now, very successfully.  It involves an ongoing campaign by Republicans to cram down the throats of the Senate, Supreme Court nominees who are bought and paid for by the rich and who enter the court with an unacknowledged commitment to rule in favor of corporations and the rich, no matter what the law says.

An opinion piece by Eric Lewis in the New York Times today dances around this fact, without, of course, ever daring to state the real truth:

"The direction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the past decade has been anything but consistent. As the court readies itself for another term, it may not be possible to speak of a Roberts court jurisprudence at all. 

But we are not completely in the dark about who is likely to be granted legally enforceable rights and who is not...The Roberts court has already charted a course in which rights are extended to those who have real clout in American society and denied to those who are more marginal. In two critical cases, Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, the court decided by a 5-to-4 vote that corporations had broad rights of speech and of religion, which left corporate owners in a position to trumpet their political and religious views while diminishing or even silencing other voices."

But of course, the direction of the Supreme Court, led by the twisted, corrupt reasoning of Antonin Scalia has been entirely consistent.  Granted, it is not consistent with the history of American jurisprudence, nor with any known ideology, either right or left leaning.  What consistency it most decidedly displays is a determination in every case to twist the law to the benefit of the rich.  And it need not even be American rich people.  The article continues, in a warning that I made on this blog the day after the Citizens United decision:

"The Supreme Court’s decision said nothing about the interests of the corporation or the identity of its stakeholders. Chinese or Russian shareholders could gain control of an American corporation and use shareholder funds to influence elections in the United States. According to the court, money is speech, and once it is corporate money, it is laundered of its foreign taint."

Here is a similar article recently published in the Los Angeles Times, that recognizes that something is wrong with the Supreme Court, but again fails to muster the courage to point out what is obviously going on:

"The Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. showed again this year that it is playing a long game, writing opinions that move the law in small but steady steps in a conservative direction.

Many rely on well-established rights, such as freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, but extend those rights for the first time to corporations, wealthy donors and conservatives who bristle at what they view as liberal government mandates, from paying union fees to offering birth control to female workers."

I want to reiterate that it is not Conservative, nor is it part of any ideology, to mindlessly favor the rich, and to continue to fabricate patently lirrational arguments to justify that favoritism, knowing that there is not a damned thing that anyone can do about it.  This is not ideology; it is corruption.

This corruption was revealed in all its ugliness with the Bush v. Gore decision which, in its essence, ruled that it would be too mean to the Republican candidate to let the Democrat win simply because he got more votes.  And the ability of Republicans to get away with this behavior was sealed when not one single Democrat had the devotion to our country to point out that the five Justices who gave us that colossal disaster had just committed the worst act of judicial corruption in the history of our country, and must be removed from the court for their high crime.  Now we have a judicial majority on the court that doesn't care at all if its decisions rely on any rational argument at all, or if they are in any kind of accord with over two centuries of settled American jurisprudence.

So, while the mainstream press is fixated on the far less consequential issue of who will control the Senate for the next two years, until the inevitable Democratic landslide in 2016, no one dares contemplate the fact that five corrupt judicial appointees are working every single day to destroy the country that has existed since the eighteenth century, and replace it with a place where unrestrained greed and avarice are the only rules- a place in which maybe a thousand or two thousand people are winners, and the other three hundred million of us are losers.


A Little More:  Thinking about this, I have a little more to say- I don't think I was blunt enough.  What is going on in the United States today is not an ideological battle between left and right.  It is a slow motion coup, and at the present time I can't figure out how it will ever be stopped, as long as Democratic leaders refuse to confront reality.

Comments

Poll P. said…
Do you think younger people are less ignorant than their elders? Will we age out of the Age of Stupidity?

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