The question was already being asked, even before the Supreme Court decided to unravel the Bill of Rights, which it did when it ruled that corporations in America have the same rights as do human beings: When do we break out the pitchforks and torches?
I got the question from a blue-collar worker about those crooked bankers and their obscene bonuses. I heard it from a small-business owner regarding conservative media that won't stop obsessing about Barack Obama. It was asked by a trans-national tech guy upset by GOP-managed state budget cuts that are aimed strictly at those on the bottom rungs of society.
They're asking me because, hey, I care about this stuff. I pay attention. I stay involved. I shine this cyber-flashlight into the dark corners that they don't dare notice. They figure I would know... When? Soon?
My answer has been, until this recent emasculation of century-old campaign finance laws, "Not yet". There's always got to be a better way, I have supposed, than to go dragging out the powerful and reducing them to fertilizer. Now I don't know.
The tea-baggers have shown us all that it's okay to get as riled up as we've been since the Civil War. Guns at town-hall meetings? That's acceptable behavior today. Screaming down elected officials? Just playing the game. Punching your ideological foes in the mouth to the point where they feel compelled to bite off your fingers? It's all good.
Five Supreme Court Justices who were appointed by Republican presidents have stepped into this imbroglio. Rather than merely ruling on the merits of a case involving a Hilary Clinton hack film, Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Thomas and Scalia decided that corporations have First Amendment protection allowing them to give as much money as they like to political campaigns.
Given the types of judges that Republican presidents have been keen to appoint, this day was predictable, and may be irreversible. Their actions are worthy of impeachment by Congress; fat chance. Whatever the case, these five are never to be taken seriously again when they claim to care (or even know) about the Constitution of the United States.
The decision is as ridiculous as it is subversive. Simply put, corporations are not people. They aren't born. They have no life span. They can't be imprisoned or executed for the crimes they commit.
In the past few years, many of them have received billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. We pumped their profits into our gas tanks. That money will be turned back on us in the form of campaign contributions which will be used to squash anyone who opposes them. Anyone.
Republicans, of course, have no problem with this because Big Business generally throws the money their way. That's what happens when they know a Party can be bought and sold for a mere pittance. Everyone else is calling it the end of democracy. Some are even comparing it to Mussolini's Italy - where the fascists also wore black shirts.
Maybe it is. If so, one can take solace in the pages of history, since Il Duce's grotesque experiment didn't last more than a few years and, anyway, it all ended quite badly for him:
http://www.pierretristam.com/images/110606-mussolini.jpg
Have we been driven that far? "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God," said Thomas Jefferson, and he meant it. But we don't have Jefferson's gumption. Not yet.
Can't we simply use our magnificent social network technology - Twitter, for instance - to organize a punitive boycott of, say, Home Depot if that corporation uses its profits to wipe out a pro-union candidate (as it surely will)? Wouldn't that work?
It seems like Americans sure hope so. If not, then all I can tell a fellow citizen is that pitchforks only cost about thirty bucks these days, and you can still find them at most any hardware store. Like Home Depot.
pH 1.25.1o
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