My reading of Wendell Phillips compilation of the notes of Madison and some other things from the various Congresses that established the United States as a country and wrote the Constitution, providing us with not only the guarantee of a Civil War but things such as the Electoral College, undemocratic constitution of the Senate, and myriad other avenues through which egalitarian democracy and justice have been thwarted, has led me to believe that many of those things which I was educated into believing were abolished have been maintained all along in other forms and under other names. The inherently and explicitly anti-democratic features were the product of the wealthy class of slave masters both bribing and blackmailing the wealthy class of businessmen - who pretty much comprised all of the various congresses that formed the United States embedded the means of inequality, privilege and the perpetuation of the theft of other peoples' labor and livelihoods and concentration of wealth into the Constitution and other laws of the land. And their descendants, in the form of mega-wealthy businessmen, oligarchic families, and racists, with the help of hired legal and technical expertise and the media are perfecting the suppression of the few, other less malignant aspects of that Constitution and those laws to perfect their control of the country. The social and intellectual rot that has led to the diminution of moral restraint or the wisdom that moral restraint requires in the form of respecting other peoples rights and lives has ebbed and flowed in our history, it's at a very low ebb, today, thanks in no small part to the fact that media and entertainment, movies, TV, pop music, hate-talk radio and cabloid TV which are always most profitable when appealing to the worst and least wise parts in us, have supplanted pretty much everything from schools to churches* to just basic human decency.
Anyone who denies that things are seriously wrong and that they have never been right under the United States Constitution, even as reformed with the Civil War and other amendments, after the Constitution as read by the Supreme Court gave us the losers of two elections as president, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump, the later so bad that some people long for the days of Bush II, rightly seen as among the worst presidents in our history, proves how terribly bad things have gotten as the oligarchs and the billionaire boys club have modern technology, modern mass media and scientific research methods to aid their efforts to corrupt The People and so the vote, to rig elections through means that even the alleged protector of rights and freedoms, the ACLU have one of the largest hands in creating.
To ignore that our corrupt 18th century Constitution doesn't still have exactly those corruptions placed in it by that corrupt bargain between slave masters and corrupt business interests who blackmailed the less corrupt among them and in state legislatures with promises of catastrophic disunion and vulnerability into accepting and tolerating the sheer evil of even slavery, the means of the perpetuation of slavery, in fact or merely by other names and extra-legally, not least among them the federal system which gave the slave states the means of dominating and controlling things, are what has enabled the opponents of egalitarian democracy, justice, even, as we can see, the maintenance of the biosphere and planetary survival - who must be counted as among the most criminally insane human beings to have ever lived.
This started with Charles Pierce expressing understandable nervousness about the havoc that could be made by the billionaire gangsters who have bought off or hoodwinked state legislatures into calling a Constitutional Convention but, really, the thing is an ongoing disaster just as it always was for slaves, for Native Americans for poor people, for people who love democracy and justice and who can see that a sustained environment is more important than any principle of law taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago or Stanford. The Constitution, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, etc. gave us Donald Trump because it gave us the Electoral College. It gave us FOX news and Breitbart and the means of those with the most money to rig elections through doing exactly the same thing that we know Vladimir Putin did through Facebook, Twitter and other artificial flowers of "free speech, free press". The de facto slave power of racism has done that all along, through an appeal to regional pride and resentment and, with the advent of movies, mass propaganda. We haven't had Pierce's justifiably feared Constitutional Convention and things have already gone to hell and with such evil men as Neil Gorsuch - son of a criminal from the Reagan administration - on the Supreme Court and such others as Trump and the Republican Senate putting there, things are already in the process of going from worst to levels of bad we couldn't have anticipated before. And it's done so with the aid and abetting of the "civil liberties" industry and such liberals as Earl Warren and, yes, even Thurgood Marshall.
When Barbara Jordan gave her speech about her faith in THE CON-STI-TU-TION I was as thrilled as anyone but the forty three years since she gave it, I have to say that the experience of subsequent history, the adoption of Buckley vs. Valeo, Citizens United, the Reagan, Bush I and II, the Trump regime, the flaccid Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the court which has steadily and relentlessly destroyed the progress made during the great Civil Rights struggle and the laws that Lyndon Johnson made to address the worst of the legacy of overt slavery and American apartheid, and all of that allowed by or made possibly by or explicitly attacked with the very Constitution that Barbara Jordan expressed her complete faith in, I've lost that religion, entirely. It's not an unrelated phenomenon to how I found out that my previous beliefs about so much of history and so many heroic figures from my past were not as sold. It required looking hard at the actual primary record and getting past the slogans that can cut both ways. When they are wielded by the powerful or on their behalf or the Courts - on a pose of even-handedness - pretending that a level playing field in which some people have everything and some have nothing will not always favor those with everything and crush those who had nothing.
The United States Constitution has a long enough history of producing evil, of allowing evil, of being the excuse for the permission of evil to last, even against the will of the large majority and as it murders them in epidemic numbers- gun violence, for example - to show that it is not a benign force. Even if its formation were not demonstrably a compact with evil, lawyers, other experts in the employ of the rich would have found ways to twist it into such and, as Wendell Phillips pointed out in his introduction to his book.
If, then, the Constitution be, what these Debates show that our fathers interned to make it, and what, too, their descendant, this nation, say they did make it and agree to uphold, - then we affirm that it is “ a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and ought to be immediately annulled. No abolitionist can consistently take office under it, or swear to support it.
But if, on the contrary, our fathers failed in their purpose, and the Constitution is all pure and untouched by slavery, – then, Union itself is impossible without guilt. For it is undeniable that the fifty years passed under this (anti-slavery) Constitution show us the slaves trebling in numbers; – slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government; – prostituting the strength and influence of the nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere; – trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. The trial of fifty years with the best of men and the best of Constitutions, on this supposition, only proves that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt, and responsible for the sin of slavery We dare not prolong the experiment, and with double earnestness we repeat our demand upon every honest man to join in the outcry of the American Anti-Slavery Society, – NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!
As I said the other day, the fact is that even with formal Emancipation, even with the Civil Rights amendments, Rutherford Hayes, who was made president through the slavemaster enabling provision of the Electoral College, ended Reconstruction and so started the period of unofficial, de facto slavery and apartheid under Jim Crow and, as I also pointed out, the apartheid state governments in the South and elsewhere reinstituted an enhanced form of the infamous 3/5ths rule under which, by depriving Black people their right to vote they counted for congressional representation and, so electoral votes only, then, concentrating 5/5ths, 100% of the power through counting Black residents into the hands of the white racists. The Supreme Court, under the vote suppressor William Rehnquist and now under John Roberts are the means of reimposing this system on behalf of the racist Republican Party and the oligarchs they serve. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" is nothing more than the commercial interests in the Republican Party choosing to renew the original corrupt bargain made by Northern commercial interests with the slave masters of the Southern States. No matter how much perfume the law faculties of Ivy League universities and their product on the Supreme Court want to pour on it, it stinks like a decaying corpse.
I don't see how this can be tolerable for those of us who are opposed to this or those states in which Republicans don't dominate. If it should lead to disunion, I don't know but I do know that this is not something anyone should tolerate any longer. Not when the results are a George W. Bush and then a Trump within two decades with a weak, Barack Obama separating them.
* The spectacle of people who profess Christian religions voting in large number for the epically immoral self-worshiping Donald Trump and supporting such as Paul Ryan and Roy Moore shows that Hollywood values have supplanted The Gospels, the Prophets and The Law even among the religious. That isn't unprecedented in history, nominal Christianity that accommodated its morality to the horrific evils of slavery, imperialism, uncontrolled capitalism, etc. showed that like every other human institution and creation, including the United States Constitution and the secular government it gave shape to, is susceptible to the same corruptions and that those always are.
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