Because You Never Asked

 

(2/10)

     I just got through watching this year’s Super Bowl, and, as usual, I feel emotionally raped. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get something straight here: the Super Bowl is much less an athletic contest and much more a massive, hypnotic act of cultural indoctrination. It is perfectly coordinated by Big Sports, Big Media, and Big Business into one, integral, seamless act of mind control any Minister of Propaganda would drool over. Joseph Goebbels must be struggling to get out of his grave. “Mein Gott, what I could do with technology like this. I’d have them eating manure burgers with turpentine colas, mein Gott!”

     Neo-liberal capitalism has managed to provide 1/3 of the world with a car, burger and TV, and it seems to be enough to keep the “molten mass” in line. The Super Bowl is its crowning achievement; 100,000,000 people, lured by just enough football (the minimal, really) to keep them glued to the “message” for almost 5 hours. Buy this, eat that, fuck her, marry him --- we are no longer a free people. We are the most emotionally controlled entity; the most mind polluted block of humanity history has ever known.

     I’ll give CBS credit for one thing: they kept the support-for-our-troops-protecting-our-freedom rhetoric down to a minimum. I suppose when Fox next does the Super Bowl, we can amp that number up again.

     What has just been said above has great relevance to this essay, but it is not about the Super Bowl. It is about corporate hegemony over American politics. It is about the end of democracy, a concept that has been languishing on its death bed for about a ¼ century now. With the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations unlimited ability to fund political operations, something resembling democracy may have finally passed to a better world.

American Democracy

July 1776 to February 2010

RIP

     The conservative Supreme Court justices that made this decision possible have so gone against their own well enunciated core values, it would seem the word “hypocrisy” was invented for this moment. These values include a strict construction of the Constitution and a repugnance for legislating from the bench or what they would call “judicial activism”.

     Before proceeding, I’d like to give the class a basic lesson in civics, a part of our public educational curriculum that has been underfed lately.

     The United States of America is a constitutional democracy whose concept of governance is set forth in the United States Constitution. This document is an elegant discourse which constructs a beautifully balanced form of government while granting its citizens their most cherished rights and freedoms. Slavery aside, it was way ahead of its time, so much so it could almost be considered radical for that moment in history. How lucky we are that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were not alive then.

     The government the Founders set up consisted of 3 branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, all with certain powers, all concocted so one could not act without the other. The first 2 branches are ideological in nature, elected by the people. It is their job to make the laws we live by. The third branch, the judicial, is supposedly apolitical or free of ideology. Its job is to not like or dislike a law but to decide if it is legal or “constitutional”, meaning the Constitution permits or does not permit such a law. The justices are to have no opinion on the law, other than its legality under the Constitution.

     An example: let’s say there is a town in Middle America where a group of people start a new religion based upon worshipping Yorkshire Terriers. They grow enough to buy a building on the outskirts of town which becomes their church. They hire a taxidermist to do up a dead Yorkie, put it in a glass showcase on an altar in front of their church and, voila, “Yorkyism” begins to thrive. The rest of the townspeople --- good Christian folk --- are offended by this, so much so that the City Council passes a law making Yorkshire Terrier worship illegal in the city limits. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

     If you are a judicial representative of the United States of America at any level of federal stratification, regardless of your repugnance for Yorkshire Terrier worship,  you must rule the law in question illegal because it obviously goes against the various freedoms of this, that, or the other guaranteed in the Constitution.

     In striking down laws that regulate corporate financial influence in our political process, today’s conservative Supreme Court justices have made a mockery of “apoliticism”. They have schemed and connived to read things into the Constitution that simply do not exist. They have legislated from the bench in a way that should make any “strict constructionist” faint. They have become political activists for the conservative politicians that put them where they are.

     They are the antithesis of what the Constitution expects from them.

     Let’s get more specific in explaining what the Supreme Court has done. It has ruled that any law meant to limit, or regulate, or referee the amount of money a corporation can give to a political candidate is unconstitutional (and that is where the MONEY is). Why? Because it denies such corporation its right to free speech as granted by the Constitution.

     Quit laughing. This is not a joke.

     A corporation is a fictional entity whose primary purpose is to organize money in a way that protects non-fictional people from personal liability. A corporation does not have a mouth. It cannot talk. I’ve tested this. Yesterday, I took a walk over to the Acme Corporation building.

     “Good morning Acme Corporation. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

     ---

     “Great day for a ballgame. How d’ya like the Mets this year?”

     ---

     “Don’t like baseball?”

     ---

     “How about that Supreme Court ruling with the corporate money and such? You must be very pleased.”

     ---

     “Not too chatty this morning, eh?”

     These conservative Supreme Court justices have ruled that an entity that cannot talk is being denied its right to free speech. I’m confused. Will somebody go find Socrates for me. I need some logic here.

     Excuse me --- a conservative friend is whispering something in my ear. Oh, really? I see. You mean, uh huh --- OK. My friend just told me that the conservative justices are using money as a metaphor for speech, like, you know, money talks.

     Wow, I had no idea how poetic these judges could be. It’s like Shakespeare or Cervantes were on the bench, what with such beautiful metaphors. But wait --- the Constitution is not a metaphor. It is a specific blueprint laying out hard core reality. “Money talks” is a fine metaphor for the influence you can buy with it, but money, like a corporation, cannot talk. To rule that a fictional organization like a corporation is being denied its right to free speech because it cannot donate all the money it wants to political operations, is a Byzantine convolution of reality that laughs at the democracy envisioned in our Constitution. Not only that! ---

     We are talking about free speech here and none of this is even remotely “free”. When the Acme Corporation contributes large sums of money to Senator Lackey’s campaign, it is not talking, it is making a business decision. To say that the legislative branch has no ability to regulate such practices is the same as saying it has no ability to make a corporation stop dumping toxic crud in the river. Such campaign contributions are investments. They are expensive. They are neither free nor speech. Depending on the political winds of the moment, the legislative branch might choose not to regulate such contributions, but to deny it such right based upon some tortured definition of protected free speech is an act of romanticism that makes Romeo and Juliette look like pot bellied, flabby assed examples of poor taste. It is an act of judicial activism that should turn Antoni Scalia’s face beet red. It is an act of legislating from the bench that should offend Clarence Thomas into a whiter shade of pale. It is an act of corporate fascism that spits all over the Constitution. It is a spectacular brand of hypocrisy for these so called “strict constructionists”.