IT IS REMARKABLE how many times a day right now we hear about the danger of lies in the mass media and in social media and no one figures there is anything to be done about it. How Putin controls Russia with lies in the mass media, how lies he promotes in the United States as carried by FOX promotes his invasion and war on Ukraine, how his puppet, Donald Trump almost destroyed American democracy . . . .
Everybody's talking about lies and how dangerous they are BUT IT IS HELD ON THE BASIS OF "THE FIRST AMENDMENT" THAT WE ARE NOT TO BE PROTECTED FROM THOSE DANGERS, NEVER, EVER, FOREVER, NO MATTER WHAT OUR EXPERIENCE OF PERMITTING LIES LEADS TO. Which is totally crazy, it is the mass delusion of our time. The idea that even if they didn't know that c. 1787 that we are never, ever to learn even the most terrifying lessons of subsequent history and govern ourselves on our present knowledge because of words a bunch of rich, white men from more than two centuries ago wrote is even stupider.
The impotence of the United States government to protect democracy from lies proves that things, as they were set up and developed, have functioned to force the United States government to be unable to do what the Constitution claims are the first reasons for setting up the government and, so, the first responsibilities of civil government,
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
As we are seeing in the lie-fed People of Russia, you can't have a "more perfect Union" if People are successfully lied to. Being fed lies through the modern mass media will prevent that.
You cannot establish Justice, as we certainly can see over and over again if a majority of the population are fed lies in the mass media.
Domestic Tranquility is certainly not a product of lies.
A common defense is certainly not produced by lies, those permitted by the Supreme Court in our country have left us vulnerable in the most dangerous ways to some of our worst enemies.
The general welfare is more than just endangered through media carried lies.
The Blessings of Liberty are certainly lost through lies because People who have been fed or bought into lies can't be free.
The lies of the oil and gas companies, the coal industry and others whose lies appear all over our media, the lies of the pharmaceutical companies pushing addictive drugs through lies, and a thousand other corporate lie campaigns are not only endangering our posterity but may ensure it will be cut of.
If the Constitution as written in the late 18th century cannot produce and, indeed, prevents what it was sold as delivering then it is a flop. The only thing to do with a flop is to stop using it and to find something that works.
We are as endangered by the lies permitted to flow out of the American media as the People of Russia and Ukraine are IF YOU HAVE TO BE REMINDED, TRUMP IS STILL A POLITICAL FORCE AND EVEN IF HE ISN'T THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS HAVE A GOOD CHANCE OF RUNNING THINGS AGAIN SOON.
Our Constitution is a failure because of the language of the First Amendment and others, and as the Supreme Court has been allowed to amend it through the power grab we've become so dangerously accustomed to. Pointing out that Taney used the Bill of Rights to deny Black People their full humanity was to only state the truth of it. HE SAID SO IN HIS SUPREME COURT DECISION IN THE DRED SCOTT CASE. The words of the slave-holder Madison and his fellow members of the First Congress were dangerously vague in several instances, clearly even the Fifth Amendment could be used to turn an entire race of People into property or, in the case of Black People into non-persons by a racist, white supremacist, slave-holder "justice" of the Supreme Court and a majority of his fellow racists. And in the coming days we will see racist, white supremacist "justices" on the Roberts Court return us to something closer to that than seemed possible after 1965.
------------------
I have slammed Jemmy Madison for a lot of things, figuring all of the friggin' founders need to be taken down a peg and several of them many more than one. He was a slave-holder who never freed slaves he could have, that alone damns him as a hypocrite, though unlike Tommy Jefferson, he didn't rape and have children with a slave girl and as his enthusiasm for slave breeding and holding increased after he declared that "All men are created equal" endowed with inalienable rights by God. Never lose a chance to point that out.
But, as over-rated as I think Madison was, one thing that Madison proposed for the Bill of Rights that the other members of the First Congress took out may have prevented the Supreme Court power grab I've been going over at such length. He proposed this amendment:
The powers delegated by this Constitution are appropriated to the departments to which they are respectively distributed: so that the Legislative Department shall never exercise the powers vested in the Executive or Judicial, nor the Executive exercise the powers vested in the Legislative or Judicial, nor the Judicial exercise the powers vested in the Legislative or Executive Departments,” he said in the last part of his proposed Bill of Rights.
Under that the Taney created power for the Supreme Court to nullify duly adopted laws by the Congress and President would have clearly been unconstitutional. Though it may not have stopped them from doing it their chances of getting away with it as long as they have wouldn't have been as great. But it may have stopped them from doing it.
I can't remember where I read or heard someone saying that the practice of letting the Supreme Court amend the Constitution through clearly illegitimate means, not only taking on the role of the Congress and the President but 2/3rds of State Legislatures as well, was done because of the extreme difficulty of amending the Constitution through legitimate means spelled out in the Constitution. That is one of its major defects and one which the "founders" fetish forces us to be quiet about. The slave-holders and rich white men who wrote the Constitution were amateurs without any experience of how to set up a then novel form of government - that they thought the evils of the Roman Republic were a good model for that only serves to prove that in the experimentation of the modern period, we've got better examples of how it can and can't work than they had available to them. While I take the dangers of making major changes to the United States Constitution seriously, while so many of us are addled by lies promoted by billionaire and millionaire oligarchs, Republican-fascists, the corrupt cabloids and networks, I think things are devolving to the point where we will have no choice but to risk it.
Since rules are all important, ridiculously so when the rules can produce shit such as is flowing out of the Roberts Court these days and people figure they must follow it, maybe some of the dangers could be lessened by setting up strict rules to prevent such influences. The first one would be that there is a basic standard of equality SEPARATE FROM FINANCIAL STATUS which the results cannot violate. And that nothing that gives a higher status to those with great wealth can be considered to be part of the basic Constitution of the United States. In all cases to be adjudicated no party should be able to rig things through their wealth as the law has always been rigged.
I remember the day about twenty years ago that I realized the most basic value of democracy wasn't "freedom" it was total equality and that any legitimate freedom would come from that equality, that we are to do to all others what we would have done to ourselves. I still had silly notions about even that proximity of religious morality to government was too uncomfortable to express in such language. Now I think it's the separation of government from that truth, that expression of The Law and the Prophets, that was not only silly but one of the biggest mistakes that the ideology of modernism foisted on a suckered world. There, I said it.
No comments:
Post a Comment