LET ME DIRECT you attention to the masthead of my blog, first the statement by that great painter, my beloved Jack Levine* and then my addition "LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE"
I subscribe to what Jack Levine said, I mean what I said about making it impossible for there to be billionaires. When I said that I really, truly meant it, it is among the soundest bases on which ANY DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT will have to rest, from now on. Once billionaires and their whores, the lawyers and judges and "justices" and, perhaps most of all, elite law school faculties have created the legal fictions through which such enormous wealth can be concentrated into so few hands, which then go on to further corrupt any legal and political system they can, those fictions stand for all time until they are explicitly abolished. There will be no going back to the status quo of the Eisenhower years, when the admittedly great financial and political reforms of the Franklin Roosevelt and Truman administrations came to flower and then fruit in LBJ's greater Great Society reforms. There won't be any going back to those because the Supreme Court, starting with Earl Warren's Court undermined them even as it sought to support them, such is the idiocy of the secular, civic law and, especially, the elite level of that such as staff the Supreme Court.
I don't think you understand just how radical I am. How radical that stand that egalitarian democracy is the only legitimate government, anything less than that, the vaunted "liberal democracy" which is crumbling under the grinding weight of economic and social inequality, helped along by the billionaire and multi-millionaire oligarchs which have corrupted liberal democracy around the world. The liberal democracy which our free press, the freest press in the history of history, is the overt tool of destruction of that liberal democracy as it has been for most of the history of the United States, those few exceptions around such issues as the superficial de jure abolition of slavery quickly give way to the bascklash such as in the de facto slavery of American apartheid which has actually been in power in most of the Southern states and, in fact, many of even those states which comprised the Union side during the Civil War.
I really and truly mean that the First and Second Amendments in the so-called "Bill of Rights" are the tools of our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and the billionaires and multi-millionaires. That's as obvious as the catalog of liberals in the legal profession and professional journalism who have been bemoaning and wringing their hands at the deadly effectiveness of lying, in the mass media and in the social-disease of social media especially the automated, algorithmicizied direction of lies and the attention of the vulnerable to them by search engines. What jumped out at me last year was hearing famous civil liberties lawyers seriously say that there is a "right to lie" even as the catastrophic creation of such a "right" by the corrupt civic priesthood of the Supreme Court is among the most glaringly obvious of all obvious lessons of the past three decades. These lawyers aren't stupid but they are certainly given professional training into being so stupid as to assert that there is such a thing as a "right" TO DO WHAT IS CLEARLY WRONG, AND NOT ONLY WRONG BUT DEADLY TO LEGITIMATE, EGALITARIAN SELF-GOVERNANCE.
On top of that there is the largely media created "virtue" of stupidity, of ignorance, of gullibility, which is a topic that could take up a years worth of lengthy posts, in itself. That much of that is peddled through the eroticization of male supremacy could take up a decade of such posts.
I have not given up, as Noam Chomsky (who I disagree with about much) rightly said, someone in my position, a working class (and so affluent by world standards) white male, LGBTQ+ as I might be, has no right to give up. I will only rightly give it up when I am dead or physically unable to continue. I have no intention of giving up. And when I say that equality is the basic and most vital foundation of real democracy - not the notion of "freedom" which means affluent people getting what they want to most of those who talk "freedom" - and that equality means economic equality, no more ultra-super-rich, no more super-rich, certainly no more rich who are rich enough to corrupt everything through hiring lawyer after lawyer, buying judge after judge, ultimately buying that most elite of legal whore houses, the Supreme Court. That corruption is as old as the Court itself, certainly dating from the Marshall Court which started the practice of Government by Judiciary (see my many posts on Louis Boudin's great work in that area) which was wielded most effectively for the wealthy planter class of the South and the northern financial interests who made enormous wealth from slavery. Recent financial analysis has shown that it was the American (and other) slave -holders who were the richest class in the world, something which I would guess continued well past the so-called "Emancipation" as they effectively ruled the United States ever since, a few brief and far too superficial years excepted. They are who John Roberts and his pack of robed gangsters work for as certainly as the Taney Court and the later Jim Crow Courts did.
Until the Constitution, including the corrrupt Bill of Rights is explicitly emended, until the Supreme Court's Government by Judiciay is overturned by stripping the Court of its self-created Marbury power and the extensions of that which later corrupt courts instituted, UNTIL "CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERTISE" IS NOT A MERE SECULAR EVANGELICAL STYLE REGURGITATION OF THAT DISEASED VOMITUS BUT GENUINE SERVICE TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, America's so-called democracy will be a sham, brief periods, such as the FDR, LBJ and Biden presidencies mere punctuations into oligarchic, white-supremacist fascism. The hopes of such liberal democrats that the overturing of Roe would seal the deal for America's traditional democracy certainly didn't come to fruition. Under the First Amendement regime of mass media lying, even an effective margin of those who stood to lose the most were gulled by the "legacy media" and the even worse lying machine of social media into voting for a Trump-Vance ticket over one of the best presidential pair in the history of American elections THAT AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC TRUMP I REGIME.
I can barely stand to listen to even the best of the MSNBC style lawyers and most of the media, these days, because all I hear are the same old promises that the Constitution, the law, the "norms" were going to save us. That has all been a lie. As long time readers will know, I loathe the ACLU because it has been in the forefront of furthering those lies, largely through its "First Amendment" litigation but not only because of that. I see no rational reason to support such institutions which have played such a role as to give us Sullivan, Buckley v. Valeo and so on to Citizens United and further, they were the co-creators of the "right to lie" they have repeatedly and proudly sandbagged good government, never mind effective egalitarian democracy over and over and over again. I once said they were like the little boy who put his finger in the dyke to plug a leak, only one who was drilling even more holes in it with his other hand as he did that. The "free press" of the anti-Trump side is as bad. I don't trust any institution, any Constitutional provision, any "Bill of Rights" that undermines egalitarian democracy, I don't much trust the educational system that credentials such lawyer-liars and "journalist"-liars, dupes, fools and idiots useful to oligarchy.
I am an egalitarian democrat and a Christian, nothing else. There is nothing more radical than that combination and it has no room to be a conventional secular, liberal democrat.
* You probably won't find it in a web search, I transcribed it from one of the segments of the Robert Hughes, PBS series "The Shock Of The New." I was very careful to get it exactly as Levine said it. I adored Jack Levine and the other Boston School painters.
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