After 34 Years, a Plainspoken Justice Gets Louder – New York Times

John Paul Stevens is the longest serving Supreme Court Justice and he will probably retire after this session.  He is almost 90 and he is not happy with the direction that the Court has taken in recent years. In an article entitled After 34 Years, a Plainspoken Justice Gets Louder we learn how frustrated he is with what he considers to be “ringers” for the Conservative cause on the Court.  Here is a quote from Stevens:

“The rule announced today — that Congress must treat corporations exactly like human speakers in the political realm — represents a radical change in the law,” he said from the bench. “The court’s decision is at war with the views of generations of Americans.”…

And here is a further explanatory comment from the article:

“A theme ran through these recent opinions: that the Supreme Court had lost touch with fundamental notions of fair play.”

I should say so. 

We are now well within an era in American History that will be talked about for hundreds of years.  Old power bases are entrenching themselves however they can in order to stem the tide of new power bases being born and taking over control of the country.  That is really what the latest Supreme Court decision is about. More will follow in years to come.  The Old Guard is dying hard.

But why is this?  Many reasons, even hundreds of reasons, but here are a few of the big ones.

The Internet now allows anyone with computer access at the local library to research common government dominated issues for himself.  One no longer needs to turn to government to “explain” the issue to the citizenry.  This alone is a threat to central control.

And generally speaking, this data and cluster of information was controlled by the elites in our society until the rise of the personal computer.  That is no longer true.  So laws have to be put into place to make sure that desired outcomes of the elites are achieved, no matter what contrary data or information is found by the working class on universally available data mining searches.

But it goes even further than this, i.e. further than the era of the PC challenging the control of the elites.

Community colleges allow even a working class mind to obtain adult education at the highest levels, if only on a part time basis.  This allows the differences of opinion that emerge from mature discussion to be framed inside of an eduated person’s paradigm.  Quality education is no longer the purview of the elite.  And therefore the power that comes with the elites being the sole interpreter of events for the citizenry is gone.

And then their is the economic freedom of having portable benefits packages.

The ability of Americans to leave any particular job and move on to the next one and often carry their benefits packages with them (i.e. health insurance, 401(k) and sometimes other benefits) dilutes the power of any particular employer in a worker’s life.  If in fact one has a job, one can often move on to the next one without selling one’s soul to the company store, as it were.  So the power of the employer to hold a serf in a sub-par position is gone.

This is the reason Amerika has been born again in its latest incarnation of unthinking, unfeeling conservatism.  It has nothing to do with abortion rights or the character strengths of conservative politicians winning out over “those dirty liberals”.  That is the facade that has been constructed to keep the “foot soldiers” in line with the elites pulling the strings.

In the end this new Amerika has nothing to do with a “moral majority” or “strict constructionist constitutional beliefs” or any of that nonsense.  That is camouflage.  The real story is much grittier than that.

It is a last ditch effort by the powers-that-be that was born among our earliest landed gentry to hang onto power long past any reasonable time frame for nobles to exist within our Republic.  The voters that are being used for this charade have no idea that they are being used.

And that is what Stevens is talking about.  Fair play and concern for the opinions of the American electorate are now gone. 

This is a vicious and ferocious attempt by the far Right to pre-empt any discussion of fairness by simply making unfairness the Law of the Land relative to financing elections and by extension, enhancing their ability to use their wealth to stop the loss of their control over government from slipping into the hands of ordinary Americans.

Ultimately it won’t work.  Americans are slow, but not stupid.  And one more thing we need to consider. If anyone can finance an election now with money, what is to stop foreign governments with mountains of money from setting up phony fronts here in the USA and buying elections themselves?

Revolution is an option here.  We all need to see that.

This is a giant mess that we will regret for generations.  Justice Stevens sees that.  But I doubt that his views will make a difference to any of us once the violence starts.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)