Hightower - Why are we letting corporate Supremists steal our democracy from us?

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-are-we-letting-corpora-by-Jim-Hightower-110905-992.html



Roberts. Alito. Kennedy. Scalia. Thomas. Memorize these names!

Bill Watterson is Mark Twain -- with a drawing pen. He is a master cartoonist, but also a sharp-witted observer of the absurd, with an impish sense of humor. From 1985-1995, Watterson penned "Calvin and Hobbes," the truly marvelous comic strip that featured six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In Calvin's inventive and iconoclastic mind, Hobbes was a genuine tiger (and his best friend) and they shared boundless adventures that challenged conventional thinking and defied authority, often crashing right through the prescribed social order of the "real" world.

A recurring theme in the strip was a two-player baseball competition in which both the kid and the tiger simply made up the rules as they went. In one strip, Calvin has hit the ball thrown by Hobbes, and he's scampering toward home plate:

:snip:

That exchange between a six-year-old and a stuffed tiger pretty well sums up the nonsensical political gamesmanship being played out today by the five-man lineup of corporatists on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. They are on an unrestrained ideological tear, making up their own rules to score big points for corporate power. Reasoning? Try twenty-third base! Precedent? Throw it out! History? Rewrite it! The Constitution? Slide by it! Judicial restraint? Only for liberals! Logic? That's a secret! The rule of law? The law is us!

More at the link --

[Warpy]

1. The Lumpenproletariat have always been the problem

Ignorant, apathetic, apolitical most of the time, they go about their business quietly until some charismatic figure comes along and is able to convince them they're the victims of the best and brightest--or of the poorest and least powerful.

These days, they're following a media machine the likes of which the world has never seen before and this is where the corporatist support is coming from.

I don't know what it will take to counteract this monolith of admen, hucksters, media outlets, and manufactured paranoia. I just know we'll have to find a way if this country is to survive.

[GliderGuider]

2. The legal system is one of the primary guardians of the globalized power hierarchy

From http://www.paulchefurka.ca/GuardianInstitutions.html">The Guardian Institutions of Hierarchy:

One inevitable effect of social hierarchies is the consolidation of power. As new power comes into a hierarchic social system it flows preferentially to the top. As the system develops, even the small amount of power available to those at the bottom of the social pyramid is removed and ends up concentrated at the top in a power elite. This becomes a positive feedback loop: the more power is consolidated at the top, the easier the consolidation becomes.

What drives social power from low to high concentrations? And what keeps the membrane of class boundaries intact so that the whole process can function?

These mechanisms are provided by what I call the Guardian Institutions. These are the corporate, economic, financial, political, legal, religious, educational and communications institutions that form the structural skeleton of our civilization.

• Corporations and businesses cooperate with economic and financial institutions to set the value of work and control the money supply. In this role it doesn't make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core beliefs it guards are always the same: ownership and growth. In our Western civilization these institutions are the pumps that move power (transfigured into wealth) away from the powerless and to the powerful.
  
  
• Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to legalized violence to defend them, politics is the primary self-defense mechanism of the power hierarchy of civilization. In this view it doesn't matter if the political system is democratic or authoritarian, capitalist or socialist, liberal or fascist, feudal, monarchic or dictatorial. As long as the political system can make laws and use institutionalized violence (i.e. police) to enforce them, any political system will fulfill this core function. From this point of view the differences between them are largely cosmetic. Even the differences between parties in a democratic system are a useful irrelevancy – useful to those in power by giving the powerless a calming illusion of control. Politics as a social system invariably works to the benefit of those at the tip of the power pyramid.
  
  
• Legal institutions enforce the norms of the hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights. Along with the police force it empowers, the legal system is the tip of the spear that keeps the power-holders safe from the powerless. In the terms of our metaphor, legal institutions maintain the integrity of the semi-permeable membrane of social class.
  
  
• Religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that we should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural – as it has ever since the shamans of the early agricultural era. Like legal institutions, they guard the integrity of social classes, though in our civilization the role of religion has been handed over largely to the legal sphere with its more overt control mechanisms.
  
  
• Educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works. It gives those at the tip of the pyramid the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it. At the same time it trains everyone involved to see the pyramid of hierarchy as the only possible way the world can work. Those who do not accede to the top of the system learn to be content that the perceived order is natural, inevitable, beneficial, and unquestionable. An interesting twist in modern education is that we are now taught that the rights of the powerful are acquired through merit rather than birth (though many PhDs have learned otherwise).
  
  
• Communications media reinforce the message of the inevitability and beneficence of our social hierarchy by enlisting people in the power/growth/ownership paradigm. They do this through overt messages like advertising, covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment and of course the selective editing and presentation style of news programs. People who are programmed by this constant messaging come to regard any values that challenge the existing structure as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane.

So what can we (those of us who are egalitarian or simply powerless and have not swallowed the soma of our culture) do about this situation? It's a tough question, because as I said above, I don't think that directly attacking the organizations themselves will work over the long run. Getting rid of one of them would be like cutting out a skin lesion that is simply a visible metastasis of a systemic cancer. The body of our civilization is riddled with this particular cancer, and has been for at least the last few hundred years. Perhaps the only real solution lies in a civilizational death and rebirth, but that's a fairly ... ummm... unpopular notion, especially to those at the tip of the power hierarchy.

The reason Supreme Courts steal democracy is because that is their true purpose (at least now that they have been fully suborned by the power elite).

Note to mods: It's my own article, so I'm quoting more than 4 paras.