The progress of American democracy has been an evolving process since 1789. Slowly, with resistance by “conservative” forces. Gradually, Constitutional Amendments were added, almost always pushing America to honor the words of the Declaration of Independence: “..that all Men are created equal..with certain unalienable Rights..”
BUT – some questions exist:
#! – ask YOURSELF: WHY was it necessary to add this Amendment: “The right of citizens on the United states to vote shall not be denied or abridged..on account of sex.” ??????? WHY was political [and economic power] denied to 50% of the human race????????????
#2 – ask YOURSELF: WHY was it necessary to add this Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged..on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” ??? Were some people BORN with the “wrong’ skin color, as members of the “wrong” race????????
Due to the “Progressive ERA,” the “New Deal,” and subsequent further REAL reforms, America slowly became a REAL democracy, l933-l965, in many ways – BUT still with weaknesses. In 1947-75, America became a REAL middle class democracy – with broad economic prosperity – BY DESIGN – laws passed, norms observed. The wealth of America was SHARED !!!!! – BY DESIGN. Ordinary workers had REAL, fair to all, RIGHTS.
BUT – this was “too good a deal” for America’s “undeserving” middle class. There was “too much democracy in the air.” Women and minorities had gotten “uppity.” Things had to change.
1975-2010 “represented a drastic departure”..the “business community..who had benefited most from the American free enterprise system..recognized..the cumulative outcome of past negotiations had been burdensome protective governmental infrastructure..it was not content with..resisting the general trend toward increased governmental intrusions..it seized the ‘reform’ mantle and launched a vigorous counter-offensive aimed at changing the existing institutional arrangements dramatically…This time, the target of the reforms would be “big government,” rather than “big business.”..the goal would be a return to a political economy that more closely resembled the laissez faire benchmark of the Gilded Age..[a] remarkably successful 30-year project ushered in a Laissez Faire Revival that continues to dominate the American political economy>” [“Freedom to Harm”]
[*** “America headed in the wrong direction” is NOT an accident – it has been ORCHESTRATED BY DESIGN !!!!!]
Thew first real billionaire, Henry Ford, happened about 1925. In 2024 America has “a record 813” [Forbes] It also has 5.5 million millionaires {real useable assets], up 62% in the last decade [.0167% of U.S. population]. Little legislation gets passed that †hose .0167% don’t approve {see “campaign contributions”!!!!!]
*** Gaius Petronious Arbiter [27-666 AD]: “What power has law where only money rules?”
*** Gary Wills [“What Jesus Meant”]: “According to the gospels, he [Christ] preferred the company of the lowly and despised to that of the rich and powerful.”
*** Justice Louis Brandeis: “We can have either a democracy..or we can have great wealth concentration in the hands of a few. But we cannot have both.”
***Theodore Roosevelt: “Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.”
*** Sarah Chayes: “..one certainty..there is no way to access infinite wealth without rigging the system. No one becomes a billionaire honestly.” [“On Corruption in America”]
AN SO – the “rules of America WERE CHANGED, often “legally.” Over the last 50 years, the rich and connected have, one by one, REWRITTEN. THE. AMERICAN. LEGAL. CODES. Taxes on wealth – lowered and eliminated. Regulations benefitting the public, but hurtful to corporate bottom lines – weakened or eliminated. Labor unions – neutered, harassed, destroyed. Access to courts – reduced or eliminated. Jobs – eliminated, off-shored. Attempts to cut, or eliminate Social Security & Medicare – INTENSIFIED. Public property & resources – given away.
THINK of the change from mass middle class prosperity to “America headed in the wrong direction,” 1980-2024, as nothing other than a PLANNED, ORCHESTRATED, PURCHASED, THEFT. The era when America came close to honoring the full realization of 1789-1980 “democracy,” 1947-1975, was. MURDERED by the GREED of the top 1%.
THIS. is a THEFT. of the birthrights of ordinary people, and their children, and their grandchildren, and……..
Consider:
1] “If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.” [Justice Brandeis]
2]”during the 20th century, America managed to make its economic and social system both more and more fair and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. Incomes rose in sync. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. †he clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests.” [Kurt Anderson – “Evil Geniuses”]
3]. “I am of the opinion that a good judiciary lends much to the dignity of a state and the happiness of the people…On the contrary a bad judiciary involverd in party business is the greatest Curse that can befall a country.” {Andrew Jackson]
4]. “I don’t want to know what the law is. I want to know who the judge is.” [Roy Cohen}
5]. “In no other area, observed one scholar, “was the process of strategic investment [by right-wing funders] as prolonged, ambitious, complicated and successful as the law.” The “campaign for the courts,” as a critical organization dubbed it sought “to mold a new jurisprudence” that would radically change” the way justice is dispensed in our society.” In particular, those waging the campaign sought ‘to make the protection and enhancement of corporate profits and private wealth the cornerstone of our legal system.” Toward that end..investors helped fund law-and-economics programs like Henry Manne”s property rights ‘public interest’ law firms such as the Pacific Legal Foundation..”
[ Nancy MacLean: “Democracy in Chains” ]
6]. “The best way to take control over people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedoms at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which the4se changes cannot be reversed.” [Adolf Hitler]
7]. “An unjust law is no law at all.” [St. Augustine]
8]. “..a new school of legal thought..’law and economics’..became one of the prime organizers of a regular series of seminars for judges..inculcating legal arguments in favor of network priorities and market-based ethical standards and denigrating the very notion of the public interest…the Federalist Society..subnetwork of legal scholars and practitioners has been crucial to the hydra’s ability to weaponize the justice function..much more radical..What American citizens don’t yet realize..is that ‘this will make it very hard for future democratically elected institutions to govern.'”
[Sarah Chayes: “On Corruption in America”]
9] “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty – power is ever stealing from the many to the few.” [Wendell Phillips]
10]. “..essentially all..economic gains of the last 20 years have gone to a tiny sliver of the wealthiest Americans, and that’s not by accident..It’s by design. the wealthy have paid for the ability to stand at the drawing board and plan out big parts of the economy so..the whole thing works particularly well for them…Once COVID-19 took hold, we saw exactly how rigged our economy is. In the first six months of the pandemic, 30 million people lost their jobs, and America’s billionaires made $845 billion dollars.” [ Pearl & Payne: “Tax The Rich”]
11]. “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.” [ Justice Robert Jackson ]
12]. Henry Manne..created a ‘boot camp’ for law professors in 1971..paid professors from prominent law schools $1000 to attend..The money can from companies including Exxon, General Electric, and IBM…”general counsels of many of these companies were aware..how helpful “Chicago Economics” was in antitrust cases..in 1976, he added a two-week course for federal judges..By 1980, almost 20% of federal judges had attended Manne’s program, by 1990..40%. An examination of judge’s rulings before and after attendance found significant shift toward trust-the-market rulings…
‘to justify the insertion of economics into antitrust law, Robert Bork rewrote history..policy makers across the political spectrum wantred to believe Bork was right…Judges wanted to believe Bork…The F.T.C…won 88%..during the first half of the 1970s. Between 1976 and 1981..won 43%..”
“The courts..continued to roll back antitrust law..Judges replaced the presumption of guilt with a presumption of innocence, and then defined the offense narrowly, rendering illegal conduct unlikely…Public policy..moved in that direction over the last two decades. Regulators brought a dwindling number of enforcement actions; courts kept chipping away at the law.” [Applebaum: “The Economist’s Hour”]
13]. “Judges are but men, and in all ages have shown a fair share of frailty. Alas! Alas! The worst crimes in history have been perpetrated under their sanction.” [ Charles Sumner]
14]. 1966 “class action’ lawsuit rules changes enhanced citizen’s ability to hold corporations accountable, which posed a serious threat to the freedom of American corporations..In a clever turnaround, the business community framed [this] ..as “tort reform.” It devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to a massive public relations campaign aimed at changing public attitude toward the civil justice system with..ultimate goal of returning..to the laissez faire benchmark of the late 19th century.”
“Several themes were endlessly repeated: “personal responsibility,” freedom of customers to pay less for a more risky product; “greedy trial lawyers,” “corporate victimhood” [robbed by undeserving plaintiffs and rapacious lawyers]; “drag on the economy,” “activist judges,” “incompetent juries<‘ “litigation lottery,” “runaway juries” in “judicial hellholes.” All this created a “litigation crisis” talk radio and Fox News drummed into people’s minds. [McGarrity: “Freedom to Harm”]
15]. “Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.” [G.B. Shaw]
16] “In most other Western democracies, the legal system has been somewhat sympathetic, or at least relatively impartial..often resisting employer demands, protecting labor at crucial moments, and sometimes even embracing it. [Not America.]. Rarely has the legal system been its advocate, protector, or even a neutral party, and more typically it has been an adversary.
“In early U.S. history, the legal system treated unions as criminal conspiracies; still later, it accepted some strikes as legal in principle but often treated..activities associated with them..as criminal conspiracies.” [Sexton: “The War on Labor and the Left’}
17]. “To usurp supreme and absolute authority..in a free state and subject it to tyranny, the people must have already become corrupt by gradual steps from generation to generation.” [ Machiavelli ]
18] The Koch plan for constitutional revolution
1] a vast legal shift; quietly exacted changes in legal rules to bind citizens; exhibit #1 – forced arbitration. Reagan-appointed federal judge: “This is among the most profound shifts in legal history..business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.”
2] a cadre promoting the view of Constitution from a unique era of U.S. history: after the defeat of Reconstruction to the Great Depression: Lochner and Plessy era and a twisted l4th Amendment which enabled an era of unmatched corporate dominance
3] the goal not to shrink big government; the cadre seeks a Constitutional interpretation giving federal courts vast new powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by elected representatives; “judicial activism” by Koch-approved judges to secure economic liberty
4] donor networks “pumped hitherto unheard of sums into state judicial races”..as corporate donors invest in judges they believe will interpret the Constitution and..laws in their favor..allow the revolution to go forward…North Carolina insider: ‘Lose the courts, lose the war.’
5] Supreme Court – smart court watchers on Roberts’ Affordable CAre Act case: it’s not the verdict but what Roberts said about the Commerce Clause
6]. three additional battlefronts: a power grab by affiliated state legislators to deny local governments the right to adot policies that depart from the Network model; voter suppression – 2010-2012, 4l state legislators introduced ALEC legislation in 180 bills to restrict voting and gerrymandering by the ‘REDMAP’ plan; the Koch network “secretive operation that conducts political surveilance and intelligence gathering on its liberal opponents..an example the smear attack on Jane Mayer after she exposed some Koch network details. {N. MacLean: “DEmocracy in Chains”]
19]. “The essential claim of the fundamentalist is that he knows the truth..It is an external truth, brought to him by a book, a sacred text, a mullah, a pope, a political visionary, or a religious community with an authority pastor.”
[ A. Sullivan: “The Conservative Soul” ]
20]. “A study by Princeton Professor Martin Gilens shows..between the 1980s and..2020s, policies supported by the rich ended up being passed into law between 60% and 70%…not a single policy supported by the majority of voters but opposed by the rich and the business community ended p being passed into law.” [“Tax The Rich”]
21] “The great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.”
With Justice For All 