Voltaire is Spinning in His Grave
When in the course of human events we look at the Letters to the Editor of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and see people who write in clichés and ignore reality. But they really can’t be blamed because the Enterprise didn’t report the events that give the lie to Joseph Moore’s recent assertion that the First Amendment is “one of the bedrock principles that make our country so great.” He used the wrong tense and should have more accurately said: “made our country so great.”(Writer’s note: For those who didn’t read or remember this letter to the Enterprise editor, 9/11/15, it expressed the opinion that We the People do indeed enjoy freedom of speech.)
We do not. That freedom is gone, gone with the rest of our rights decimated by a Supreme Court loyal only to wealth, and the power it buys, and by its politicized program to inflict harm on the poor and the striving middle class who desire only a piece of the American Dream.
A mere five black robed traitors to traditional American values has warped our Constitution into a device to protect the position of the ruling class and its continuing assault on our freedom, prosperity and sovereignty. There have been repeated attacks on our free speech rights by this court which has always arrogantly bragged that the Constitution means exactly what these five say it means, nothing more, nothing less.
Believe it or not, the Supreme Court has held that it is perfectly Constitutional for a private employer to terminate an employee simply because that employee had an Obama for President bumper sticker on his car, parked in the company parking lot, that annoyed the boss. The Court’s reasoning was that the private property rights of the corporation are greater than the free speech rights of our citizenry even though free speech was “protected” by the very FIRST Amendment and there is NO protection of private property rights in the Bill of Rights, except in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, which were gutted on previous occasions.
Believe it or not, the Court also limited the free speech rights of our long tradition of union organizing. Two Americans have now been fired for handing out union literature on company property, once in the cafeteria during lunch and the other in the parking lot during shift change. Employers are getting bolder and nastier as the Court has encouraged them to go after anyone who wishes to improve his life even if it means taking away an established right.
(The majority of the Supreme Court professes to believe a philosophy that is called “Federalism” and holds that the words in the Constitution mean what they say and since the First Amendment clearly states that “Congress may make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” but since it does not mention corporations the Court gives them free rein to do whatever they want to our traditions and freedoms.)
The Court gives the corporations the right to flood the airwaves with their un-American philosophy and sooner or later the corporations will develop a black list of the political opinions of all of us and take actions to terminate employees not for their bumper stickers, but for their ideas and politics. The door is now wide open for this.
And no one raised a peep in protest; folks who are outraged by this power grab are also intimidated by the ever increasing power of the corporations to take big bites out of our freedom because only the corporations now have enough cash to fight an issue all the way to the top. Federal and state regulators and law enforcement also shy away from confronting the massively wealthy corporations because they simply don’t have the dollars to wage a long, complicated legal fight and so renege on their obligation to enforce the law.
In addition, the corporate conservatives, who do such a great job in advocating less power to the government and more to the undemocratic Corporate State, hand out large political contributions to reactionary bigots who agitate for ever more police power to the point that many cities have paramilitary police forces equipped with “crowd control” armaments to use to shut up any protests that might arise from people alarmed at the loss of their freedoms.
(The Enterprise reported on 9/14/15 that another high court has held that protesters can no longer demonstrate on the plaza of the Supreme Court building, which is directly across the street from our temple of democracy, the Capitol.)
Looks like if we can no longer protest with our words we shall have to do so with our bullets.
What will the Supreme Court outlaw next, the Declaration of Independence? Our founding document is all about free speech and states, clearly, that We the People have a natural Right to Revolution. A close paraphrase of that document tells us that “whenever ANY government abuses our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is our right and duty to alter or abolish that government and start a new one, and this right comes from God and cannot be rescinded by man (or the Supreme Court.)
The Court toes the Corporate State line by limiting government power to regulate business matters. And sooner or later Supreme Court and the Republican Party will wake up and realize they and their “special interests” may well be on the receiving end of our SECOND Amendment, the ultimate guarantor of our right to be free.
George Orwell saw the pattern decades ago and his words can be updated to read: “all classes are equal, but one is more equal than the others.”