If these five justices consider disclosure to be what prevents political payoffs from corrupting politics, then the absence of such disclosure will result in such corruption so long as the payoffs are legalized.
Surveying the wreckage caused by his judicial engineering that lacked the central pillar that was supposed to keep the edifice of democracy standing, in his view, the grossly negligent architect of Citizens United, Justice Kennedy, confessed his flawed construction is "not working the way it should." Can we sue the architect for causing the ensuing demolition of democracy? What is the proper punishment for helping to destroy the country's most valuable possession? Just when does Kennedy and his gang of fellow plutocrats plan to take his disastrous decision back to the drawing boards to see that anti-corruption law is "working the way it should"?
4. Self Help: Democracy in Exile
A strangely discordant note from the main theme of unrelenting corruption can be found in the Influence Peddlers Protection Act. This same law in which Congress paid off plutocrats with enormous tax expenditures and other profit opportunities, and which further tightened the firm grip of plutocracy by prohibiting SEC, IRS or government-procurement regulations from interfering with plutocrats' right to keep their "dark money" investments in politicians secret from the public (though not from the politicians, who are expected to reciprocate), this very same law also happens to incongruously contain a provision that seeks to promote democracy, not in the U.S. but abroad.
The segregationist, propagandist, warmongering Woodrow Wilson would have liked this provision. Wilson diverted attention from the lack of democracy in the Jim Crow, Gilded Age, politically repressive United States that he presided over a century ago by creating a new national purpose for justifying foreign war. In the absence of any actual national interest in fighting Germany in WWI, he substituted the abstract excuse of spreading "democracy" abroad. Fighting a war for the unconditional surrender of Germany on behalf of the British royalty accomplished nothing for the United States but wasted blood and treasure in what evolved into two wars due to the draconian Versailles Peace Treaty Wilson helped negotiate after he made such a treaty possible by intervening in what was otherwise a military stalemate.
Just as Wilson's misdirected efforts resulted in creating Nazi Germany, which learned about the power of state propaganda and political repression from Wilson, it is ludicrous to think that the systemically corrupt United States could be capable of spreading democracy elsewhere in the world today.
Throughout its history and especially in its current New Jim Crow second Gilded Age era since 1976, the United States has struggled with difficulty to live up to its democratic traditions and the principles in its Constitution, But under this guise of promoting democracy abroad, a group of beltway bandits do run businesses as government contractors for USAID to do just that. These operators are as capable of recycling kickbacks to politicians who appropriate the money for these programs with the best of the military-industrial complex war profiteers. Indeed, some of them are the most successful of the MIC profiteers.
The two countries where the United States has had the most influence and spent the most money for fashioning a new government after it caused the old one to collapse, Afghanistan and Iraq, are, according to an accepted global index, two of the very most bottom-of-the-barrel corrupt governments in the world. Countries that do not figure in AIPAC's foreign-policy shopping list, South America generally, grew gradually more democratic in the past generation as a result of being largely neglected by the United States in favor of its obsession with its "two toxic 'special relationships,' "Israel and Saudi Arabia" in the Middle East, and its new post-communism official enemy, radical jihadism.
The influence of the US abroad is typically negative because those ultimately in charge of such matters, like Hillary Clinton was as Secretary of State, remain as totally clueless about what it would take to build a democratic foreign government that is not undermined by systemic corruption as she is about what it would take to reform the systemic corruption of the U.S. government. A corrupt plutocracy pretextually using democratic forms is what politicians in "the Clinton school of economics" -- the plutocrats' favorit es who rose in politics after corruption was legalized by Buckley v Valeo (1976) -- actually mean in their Orwellian use of the word "democracy." As Richard Falk explains, these operatives use the term "democracy" as merely "Washington's code word for integration into its version of neoliberal globalization," "neoliberal" itself being a euphemism for a corrupt plutocracy.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
