A Word (or Two or More) on The Supreme Court's Decision to Unfetter the Corporations in Elections
Above: Criss Angel and Lance Burton, Masters of Misdirection

It doesn't really matter. The Corporations already rule this land. There are few politicians who are not already in thrall to them. People elected Democrats last fall expecting robust change. We got a herd of weak-kneed "moderates". The Bush Wars go on. Private Corporate Armies (er, security services) grow like cancer. The banks go unregulated. Real wages fall. Unemployment increases. The People grow in poverty while their money goes to the bankers.

A consistent 60% of the public responded to polls all year supporting a single payer government run health insurance system in this country as the only way to actually gain efficiencies in the huge amount of money (highest per capita in the world) going into paying for American health care. We know much of this money is wasted on executive salaries, bonuses and perquisites, stockholder profits, duplication of services, palatial buildings, byzantine record keeping, gatekeepers whose job it is to prevent you from getting health care, and last but not least, lobbying politicians and hiring them when they retire from Congress. The people clamor not for a government option. Nor do they wail for taxpayer subsidies for the corrupt profit motivated insurance companies to provide a crappy health plan to people without one.

But true reform of the Health Cartel (which would be Government provided insurance as practiced in most of the advanced democracies in the world) was not even discussed in the halls of what Fox News would have you believe to be a Congress controlled by a "liberal" Democratic Party. The "reforms" discussed would have ended up costing more money than the disfunctional system now in effect, involved the government even more in health treatment, and maintained the health insurance establishment as the gatekeepers to health care. Everyone senses that something smells vile in Washington. No one can deny that.

If a supposedly liberal party representing the people with large majorities in Congress and the Presidency cannot truly reform such an obviously corrupt system without introducing more corruption benefiting Corporations, then you know who rules the roost. If the Financial Institutions representing the Super Rich who rule this country are the only interests that receive significant government get-well money after crashing the economy into a tree at the end of a drunken decades long thrill ride (first ensuring that all rules of the road were abolished or ignored and that no police would be on duty to notice the spree) then every politician in Washington is nothing more than a slick gibberish-spouting corporate flack man. (I'm sorry for the long sentences; I really am.)

Corporations were granted person hood status in the United States as a result 1886 Supreme Court Case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394. Earlier, in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518 (1819), the Supreme Court settled that, for our purposes, corporate contracts were private charters that superseded government attempts to alter or control them as public charters. Corporations were invented to pool capital for a specific purpose. Historically they were strictly controlled by public entities (government) to limit their activities and longevity. In the United States corporations were unleashed by these decisions of a Supreme Court composed predominantly of corporate lawyers. Corporations were granted by their Supreme Court servants all of rights of individuals and very very few of the responsibilities. The road to Fascism was thereby open and the rich have ridden their armored corporate buggies on it ever since. The Corporation became a tool to increase the power and influence of those who already had too much of both; it also shielded these craven creatures from responsibility for the misdeeds, debts and crimes committed by these fictional "persons" for their profit.

Once the corporate culture of irresponsibility was born, the Rollerball world we now endure could built on the Lie that individual freedom depends on greater Corporate Freedom. Corporate freedom and individual freedom are incompatible. Individual freedom is compromised by the unfettered Corporation far more than it is by Big Government. In our case the government has become merely a rump government rubber stamping corporate policy.

The people theoretically have a say in who runs the government in a democracy. Only a few major stockholders have any say in the way corporations are run and how they influence the governments they have corrupted. We know where the government is and we know who runs it; and we know who to pursue in a revolution when that becomes necessary. The families and individual hungry vampires behind Corporate Power are more resourceful, anonymous, amorphous, shape shifting, and ephemeral, therefore, far more dangerous to the people on whom they prey than the pathetic government bureaucrat who is their functionary. The next revolution, before it begins, must learn the lesson of identifying the true enemy and who is to blame for this world of trouble and suffering before the proscription lists are drawn up.

So, this decision to institutionalize corporations as speechifying persons just makes obvious what is already a reality. Perhaps this will make the identities (or at least the tools) of our true masters a little more apparent. Corporations have been successfully promoting "Big Government" as the problem for a long time in a gigantic misdirection campaign worthy of world class illusionists like Criss Angel or Lance Burton. Maybe we will more clearly see who has hijacked "Big Government" and just how feeble "Big Government" has become.

This representative Republic has been totally compromised. If you think electing a Democrat or Republican will improve things you should check your programming. If your enjoyment of freedom is the vicarious enjoyment of observing the antics of the super rich then you have succumbed to the Patty Hearst Syndrome. When the system only serves the needs of those who have no needs, We need a Revolution.

Quotes of the Day

"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."- Thomas Paine


Tao Teh Ching
Chapter 53

With but a small understanding
One may follow the Way like a main road,
Fearing only to leave it;
Following a main road is easy,
Yet people delight in difficult paths.

When palaces are kept up
Fields are left to weeds
And granaries empty;
Wearing fine clothes,
Bearing sharp swords,
Glutting with food and drink,
Hoarding wealth and possessions -
These are the ways of theft,
And far from the Way.

Lao Tzu
(tr. Peter A. Merel)

Another translation:

Tao Teh Ching, Chapter 53

If I were suddenly to become known, and put into a position to conduct a government according to the Great Dao,
What I should be most afraid of would be a boastful display.
The great Dao is very level and easy; but people love the by-ways.
Their court yards and buildings shall be well kept,
But their fields shall be ill-cultivated,
And their granaries very empty.
They shall wear elegant and ornamented robes, carry a sharp sword at their girdle,
Pamper themselves in eating and drinking, and have a superabundance of property and wealth;
Such princes may be called robbers and boasters.
This is contrary to the Dao surely!"

Lao Tzu
Translated by James Legge, 1891

"She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the 3rd or 4th night I began to lose interest and didn't go back. But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes." -Charles Bukowski, Post Office, 1971