The only advantages that Marx had over Jefferson was that Marx wrote and published a cohesive system of political and economic philosophy with fifty years of additional historical observations of the capitalist industrial system. Jefferson's system lacked such extensive knowledge of the capitalist industrial system, and has come down to us in a series of letters and notes, rather than coherent treatises.
America's Constitution has many faults that are in need of correction: from the fact that the Vice President would be the presiding officer at his own impeachment trial, to the Electoral College. (See Ryan Teague Beckwith's Roll Call article "Where the Framers of the Constitution Fell Short," for more on this subject.) But its greatest fault is not including a requirement for Congress to hold the Executive and Judicial branches responsible for some of their most egregious acts.
It is time to bring the Executive Branch to heel over a broad range of subjects from failure to abide by the War Powers Act in Libya, to their complete disinterest in prosecuting any of those individuals responsible for the economic meltdown in the Fall of 2008. There should be a proviso in the Constitution that requires that Congress includes penalties in their legislation for failure to enforce a law involving government officials, as well as a means to petition for redress of grievances against wrongdoers if the government fails in its duty to investigate.
It is also time to require, by Constitutional Amendment, that the Federal Judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down, have a code of conduct and ethics overseen by someone besides the court in question. Related to this is the need for the impeachment of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas for perjury in the filing of his financial statements over the last twenty years.
We have not lost our country yet: but it is becoming more probable every day. We have made things (corporations) into people. Yet they have not the limits of mortal man: they can live for centuries, they have no heart to stab, no eyes to blind, no body to incarcerate for their crimes. They are demons: immortal, rapacious, immoral, and without souls. They can ruin the lives of tens of thousands (Bhopal, India), and pay no commiserate penalty.
These corporations are working hard to commit the greatest of all evils: turning human beings into things. They are doing this by impoverishing the middle and working class until today we have a Gini Coefficient (which measures a nation's income inequality; the higher the number, the greater the inequality) of 46.6. This is eight points lower than Mexico, 3 points higher than Iran, 13.5 points higher than Canada, and almost twice as much as Japan's 24.9, which is the lowest in the world. (http://www.dol.gov/)
We must act, and return to both the degree of balance of the American peoples' incomes and the responsiveness of our elected officials that we had forty years ago, before it is too late.
We owe it to ourselves, our children, and the memories of those who came before us to do this while we still can without violence.
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