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great confrontation between the public mandate of social justice and the leftover dregs of the ruling class who had destroyed our country out of greed--their legacy Supreme Court Justices.
The U.S. was flattened by the Great Depression--an economic era that our own bears haunting resemblance to. Millions out of work, millions homeless, millions starving. In 1932, the country elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to handle this great crisis. He started immediately with desperately needed relief programs--some of them initiated by Herbert Hoover, who was not quite the heartless bastard he is sometimes made out to be, but was, rather, just hapless in the face of the staggering ruin that his own class had brought upon the country.
FDR, from the same class, however, had the largeness of vision to understand that fundamental, structural change in the economy, and in the government's relationship to the economy, was needed, or the country would never recover. It would go on being the "banana republic" of the super-rich and financial predators.
And, one by one, nearly every program that he proposed and got passed in Congress, to restructure the economy with supports for workers, farmers, the elderly, poor families and middle class families suddenly in poverty, against the outsized advantages and irresponsibility of the rich--were declared unconstitutional by the Hoover-Coolidge regime's Supreme Court appointees.
The Constitution does not specify nine as the number of Supreme Court justices. Congress determines the number. FDR asked Congress to increase the number of justices, to add younger, more liberal justices, who would have more sympathy with the downtrodden, and more understanding of the failures of government that led to the Great Depression. All hell broke lose in the rightwing press. They said that FDR was "packing the Supreme Court" (rather than balancing it to suit the times). They called him a "dictator" and every other thing (--much like Bushites and global corporate predators call Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, a "dictator"--but the only people he actually "dictates" to are the CEOs of Exxon Mobil and other bad actors who have been stealing from the South American poor for decades). In the end, FDR had to back down. (The rightwing press got to Congress.) But the pressure that he brought to bear on the Court resulted in one justice changing his mind about the "New Deal." Thus, Social Security was saved.
We would not have Social Security today if FDR hadn't waged that battle with the Supreme Court.
FDR's "New Deal" government had to try every which way to get around that dinosaur Court. The New Dealers were very innovative. The battle was on-going. But, ultimately, the "New Deal" won, in establishing the principle of "the commons"--that we have responsibilities to each other as citizens of the U.S., to educate the young, to prevent the penury of the elderly, to regulate the economy for everyone's benefit, to protect workers, to attend to the "health and welfare" of society as a whole, to create common spaces and build common infrastructure (schools, libraries, hospitals, roads, parks), to spread the cost of electrification--and also telephone service, and bus and train service-- evenly over the nation, so that rural areas with low density population would not be neglected (--which they would be, and are being today, by private corporations), and these great equalizing ideas were also concurrent with the rise of the black civil rights movement, in particular--the equality and dignity of every citizen.
It was a welding of some principles of socialism and communism, with capitalism, that worked out very well, enabled the U.S. to win WW II, fighting on two major fronts--against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan--and set the stage for general prosperity in the 1950s through the 1970s, until the Reagan era, when the Reaganites began to dismantle the "New Deal" (by, among other things, a re-write of the tax code, that ended the progressive tax, and began to favor the rich inordinately, and attacking the labor movement).
The Democratic Party leadership soon became complicit in this dismantling of "the commons" and abandonment of the "New Deal" and its championing of ordinary people. And we reach today, a party with many leaders who are bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists and global corporate predators--those who would have been called "robber barons" in the New Deal era--and a countrywide grass roots movement to reclaim the Democratic Party for the people who made it great--the poor and relatively poor majority and enlightened professionals.
In looking with horror on the Bush Junta's Supreme Court, think of it like this: Where there's a will, there's a way. And, FDR's most famous line: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
We do not have to accept a Supreme Court that dismantles our Constitution. We can impeach them. We can put a special prosecutor on them to dog their every hunting party, until we have the goods on them, and then haul them before Congress and throw them out. We can "pack the Supreme Court"--add liberal justices to balance the Bush dinosaurs--probably the easiest way to deal with the situation, since it does not require a Constitutional amendment. We can change the Constitution to shorten their terms (currently life terms) and make it retroactive, or subject them to election by the people (as many judges are in lower courts). We can devise innovative legislation to get around their rulings. We can promulgate changes to state constitutions, to strengthen our rights.
We need to throw out all these Bushite-corporate controlled electronic voting machines, with their "trade secret" code, and restore transparent, slow, careful, PUBLICLY VIEWED vote counting as a start toward achieving a truly representative Congress, which will fight this fight on our behalf (and a strong president, of course). Election reform is most doable at the state/local level, by local citizen pressure. That movement is well under way. We have a lot of work to do--but so did the New Dealers. They had a country to literally put back together, piece by piece. So can we.
I envision a time when our global corporate predators have been chased from our shores, beginning with a movement to elect and appoint judges who will rescind corporate "personhood" rights, which have been an assault on our sovereignty as a people. Corporate entities have no "right" to do business here, no right to profit, and no right to exist at all. We the People have all the rights. We charter them to do business. We can require anything we think is in the common interest as the price of that charter. We can disband them at will, and seize their assets for the common good. And we can do all of this while building a vibrant, non-monopolistic, fair trade economy, with the strongest component of social justice that we can pay for and think wise and for the good of all.
This is OUR country. We individual citizens are the inheritors of its great traditions, of its great founding principles and of its many social justice struggles, and we are the beings through whom this democracy will be passed to the future. Exxon Mobil has no right to acquire property and massive wealth and power in perpetuity here. We say what goes here. And we can join with like-minded peoples around the world--indeed with almost all of South America--to throw these bad actors off our backs, and off the backs of others, and to send them to Mars. They can go try to terraform a green world there, since they have nearly wrecked this one.
This is the heart of the matter. This is what this fascist Bushite Court was appointed to protect--CORPORATE PROPERTY RIGHTS, WEALTH AND POWER INTO PERPETUITY, over against OUR rights as the Sovereign People of this land.
It is not a small fight. It is a fight for the survival of humanity itself. And it will not be easy. So start thinking: How do we do it? Not, how do we barely hang onto what few rights we have left? But how do we re-structure our economy and our laws, to address the heart of the problem, and fix it at its foundation, to achieve centuries of stability and flexibility, as our Founders did for us. To do that we must mount an all-out assault on global corporate predator power. It doesn't need to be bloody, unless they make it bloody. It can and must begin with something as simple as counting all the votes in public view. Our vote is the method by which we exercise our sovereignty. It is our main power of self-determination as a people. That must be our first priority.
In the FLA-13 case--the Florida Congressional election dispute from 2006, that our traitorous Democratic Congress just washed its hands of--electronic voting machines, manufactured by a far rightwing-connected corporation, ES&S (related also to Diebold-Premier), 'disappeared' 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic areas, in an election "won" by the Bushite by only 369 votes. When the lawyers for the Democrat (Christine Jennings) took the matter to court, and asked to review ES&S's "trade secret" code--to try to determine what happened to those 18,000 votes--ES&S REFUSED , and argued that their "right" to profit from our elections TRUMPS the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted. And the Bushbot judge agreed!
Our sovereignty as a people took a serious blow that day. Congress later (this week) kicked our sovereignty in the head, and gravely wounded it, by failing to defend us from these foul predators who have stolen and corrupted our election system. It's time for us all to join those who are fighting fights like this one, and restore democracy in the United States.
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