One of Jeffrey Sach's most important points is in the first few lines:
The Israeli Lobby by the way which is this strange amalgamation of rich Jews to an important extent and evangelicals who have their own biblical literalism. You know looking for the Armageddon which they think depends on Israel holding these lands. It is simply very powerful in the US and has been powerful for a long time/ And has a lot of financial resources and America American democracy is $1 one vote. You know it's a basically a completely corrupt political system [based] on raising money for expensive campaigns so the Israeli Lobby has long had a high influence.
I will apologize in advance because I based this on the auto-transcript at Youtube instead of my usual transcription made from listening to it, I don't have time for that right now.
I would ask you to listen carefully to the rest of the video because what he says is extremely important but I'm going to focus on what he said makes the Israel Lobby, one among many, many such lobbies which are such a corrupting force in American politics and is so destructive of American democracy.
The Congress and, if you can believe such a thing is possible, the Republican president, Ford, in the wake of the Nixon scandals involving huge amounts of campaign money funneled by rich Americans to his campaign, passed some sweeping campaign finance reforms into law only to have a legal case brought by those who had a vested interest in such corrupt money deciding our elections, supported by the goddamned ACLU and other "civil libertarians" who waxed on piously about the First Amendment so as to make American politics ever more corrupt, something even some of the "liberals" on the Supreme Court went along with in their general idiocy in the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, the first in a series of ever worsening "First Amendment" cases that has led directly to the elevation of Trump in 2016 with the help of the dictator of Russia (a cleptocratic Musk level billionaire, himself) with the full knowledge of John Roberts and his Republican-fascist colleagues.
If you want to know why someone as generally moral as Joe Biden got drawn into such criminal support for the Israeli government's genocide and Lebensraum campaign in Gaza, it was because such rulings making the Israel Lobby so powerful is a practical reality for any Democratic politician who knows they have to hold office to do anything, in his case trying to keep Trump from regaining office - WHO WILL GIVE THE FASCIST GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL AND ITS STORMTROOPERS A FREE HAND - his family probably hoping to snap up some property deals in the annexed Gaza.
All of this is a direct result of the Supreme Court-ACLU doctrine that the First Amendment - in their interpretation of it - trumps everything, even keeping foreign domination out of American government and politics, even at the expense of American democracy.
It's no small thing that the biggest, fattest promoters of "free speech" right now are America's fascists, the white supremacists, and the neo-Nazis. I expect that if or when, after the catastrophe that Trump II will be, there is another attempt at cleaning up our politics that the ACLU and other "civil liberties" groups will be fighting to keep our politics as dirty as Jeffrey Sachs RIGHTLY says it is.
Rich Wall Street idiots, such as Sachs says funds the Israel Lobby without knowing much of anything other than the knee-jerk support for Israel which, as I pointed out the other day , you didn't have to be Jewish to be inculcated with in the post WWII period, should have been removed from such influence in the mid-1970s. That they were not is a direct consequence of the really bad drafting of the First Amendment and its dishonestly fundamentalist reading as promoted by the ACLU in line with the Holmes-Brandeis reading of it. That reading of it is directly the source of almost all of the corruption of our government, ironically, it has been one of the most effective tools of our own indigenous fascists, the white supremacists.
I am afraid that the pale chance of finally ending the corrupt influence of money and millionaires and billionaires, foreign and domestic, will need to come before we get free of being led by the nose by a Putin or a Netanyahu and that will require drastically altering the idol of American secular piety, the First Amendment. As the courts from Warren on have proved, any such sloppy, corruption and lie enabling language such as is contained in it will be exploited by the most anti-democratic branch of the government, the Supreme Court generally for the benefit of those with an interest in corrupting American society and, so, our government. In a way, I don't give the greatest fault to the Israel Lobby because they are just taking advantage of the corruptions that the Court has allowed to flourish, I would say in the Rehnquist and Roberts Court, the corruptions they have not only encouraged but facilitated. But it goes back to the stupidly drafted First Amendment which doesn't even make it clear that there is no such a thing as a right to lie, not even the most deadly and corrupting lies such as comprise most of what our "free press" produces daily.
The rest of the horrors that Jeffrey Sachs discusses are a direct result of that and their prevention will be impossible as long as that terrible fault in our Constitution is not fixed and made Court-proof.
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