Banksters To The Left Of Me, Fascists On The Court, Here I Am, Stuck In the Radical Middle With You

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Stealer's Wheel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OJ7QQqaYKA&annotation_id=annotation_578474&feature=iv
Thom Hartmann http://www.thomhartmann.com

Corporate Personhood and the Roberts' Court
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/06-0
by Thom Hartmann

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

<snip> (This article is an important must read -- full text at link)

As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker ("No More Mr. Nice Guy"): "In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

And the only way the modern Republican Party can recover their power over the next decade is to immediately clear away all impediments to unrestrained corporate participation in electoral politics.  If a corporation likes a politician, they can make sure he or she is elected every time; if they become upset with a politician, they can carpet-bomb her district with a few million dollars worth of ads and politically destroy her.

And it looks like that's exactly what the Roberts Court is planning.  In the Citizens United case, they asked for it to be re-argued in September of this year, going all the way back to the 1980s and re-examining the rationales for Congress to have any power to regulate corporate "free speech."



The attempt of corporations (and their lawyers, like Roberts was before ascending to a federal court) to usurp American democracy is nothing new, as David Souter well knew. Fascism has always been a threat to democracy.

In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those... With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

"...Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."

But, he thundered in that speech:

"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

In just a few months, we may again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism," and "the free market" in a "flat" world.  The point of its spear is "corporate personhood" and "corporate free speech rights."

The Roberts' Court's behavior - if this prediction of their goal for this fall is accurate (and it's hard to draw any other conclusion) - now eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said: "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

[Laelth]

1. Wow! That man was Vice President of the United States?

Can you imagine Joe Biden ever saying something like that? :rofl:

We have drifted so far to the right that I can't even imagine a modern politician (save, perhaps, Dennis Kucinich) uttering the truth like Vice President Wallace did. It makes me sad.

Here's to Vice President Wallace. We need him now. :toast:

:dem:

-Laelth

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2. It's always amazing when a politician is willing to speak the truth. We must honor that.

:yourock:

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3. This is it, folks.

[Vidar]

4. Truman was exceptional, but I wish Henry Wallace had succeeded FDR.