Answer to Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is right in his recent Salon piece that the Paul Krugmans and Robert Reichs aren't going to save The People, that the educational elite and the media are not going to save us with their solutions from on high to solve what is always presented as the puzzle of "inequality".   Those well intentioned folk, with their Ivy League class educations where they learned the economics that give them the language with which they can discourse of these problems within the boundaries acceptable to their milieu won't touch the real problem.  Franks correctly says that we need something they aren't going to bring to the problem.

Here is my answer to him.

The word you are looking for is contained in the Omaha Populist Platform of 1892 you quote "INJUSTICE"  but it is injustice as understood in Biblical terms, in not doing justice to the poor by impoverishing them, of creating the conditions that impoverish them.  And I'm afraid that the very mechanisms that do that, that have done that from the beginning of the United States, are contained in the sacralized Constitution that we are all taught, by the enriched establishment, to worship as a sacred object.

The Senate, set up by the aristocrats of the Constitutional Convention at the behest of the slave power,enhancing their power through unequal allotment of power based on artificial political boundaries instead of population, originally not even directly elected.

The election of the executive through the similarly corrupt mechanism of the Electoral College, again established to enhance aristocratic corruption of our politics.

And, perhaps most of all, the Supreme Court,  created as a body that could safely attack the poor on behalf of the rich without worrying about their position, appointed to a lifetime tenure by the corruptly chosen executive and confirmed by the anti-democratically created Senate, which has used its position to make corporations persons.  And, in the Rehnquist and Roberts courts - perhaps the most corrupt in our history - given corporations full reign to entirely corrupt the vote by giving them and their media the full power to deceive and lie to  The People, preventing an informed vote.

And it all started by the very Constitution making a mockery of the idea that all political power is legitimately derived from the JUST consent of The People through those corrupt mechanisms adopted to protect the aristocrats who wrote The Constitution from The People whose demands for justice would always pose a problem for the aristocrats primary goal, making the product of their labor the property of the aristocrats.

I'm not optimistic about the prospects, The People have been sold the absurd notion of the infinite wisdom of the very aristocrats who used their blood to break away from Britain and to steal this continent for their massive land appropriations to the West, who set up the corrupt Constitution.  The mass media, the free press has used its absolute free speech to feed The People on lie after lie in order to make them the duped accomplices in their own fleecing. Until lying in the mass media is banned or, at the very least they are forced to keep their part of a bargain that they get to be free of other regulation ONLY if they serve their only important function of accurately informing The People of what they need to know to cast an informed vote, it won't get better.   And, as implied in the article, the corrupt public broadcasting establishment, PBS, NPR, even MSNBC, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.  It's a really corrupt media when it's a commercial station that has a tiny handful of programs that represent the least bad of the bad.

But I think the real key to the problem will make our educated class blanche, that is  the metaphysical foundation of the concept of justice and injustice, the real belief that inherent rights are equally endowed by The Creator to all people who are also endowed with a real obligation to respect those rights equally.  I don't think there is any other workable or real foundation to democracy and it is, inevitably, a matter of that particular belief that those things are as real as the physical entities that science studies and those objects bought and sold by commerce.  Unless The People believe that they are different from objects, that their very existence makes them rightly beyond questions of utility and so aren't commodities, then they will be corrupt.   It is no mere coincidence that it was exactly those people who denied the person hood of slaves and the native population, their rights, the obligation to respect those rights that are the source of the corruption endemic to The Constitution.  That is the historical fact that proves the truth of what is needed to create a real democracy.

That it is today's elite and would be elite who find those religious ideas distasteful and vile is just an updated version of what corrupted things then. Looking at the unfashionable  language and ideas of those Omaha Populists, taking the foundation of their ideas seriously wouldn't be a bad idea.  Those and similar movements for justice - the political manifestation of equal rights, the act of respecting those by the political and judicial institutions, were not the product of materialism but of religious conviction.  That is what they meant by "governmental injustice"