Corporate versus Non-Corporate Rule
Democracy cannot survive a corporate state
An extraordinarily insightful commentary has been published that names very specifically our main predicament as a nation.
The article is called The Anonymous Executioners of the Corporate State, by Chris Hedges, and contains this important quote about the Steven Donziger trial:
“From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.”
Hedges is hard hitting, but I think his article is an illuminating reflection on where America is today. And his words contain a warning. To turn away from such a warning is to fail our nation at a critical hour.
A huge matrix of multinational corporate power now reigns over us like an invisible aristocracy, acting as what Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to as “economic royalists.” Its savage minions of well dressed lawyers and lobbyists now hold our government, and by extension our democracy, hostage.
The real dichotomy now is not between Left and Right; that’s more or less a smokescreen. The real dichotomy is between corporate and non-corporate rule. Money having turned our government into a system of legalized bribery, both major parties have now sold their souls to corporate power. Republicans and Democrats form not really a duopoly so much as a monopoly of corporate control, one party completely controlled by corporate power and the other sort of going back and forth.
And now there’s an even greater threat. Our Congress already infected with the undue influence of its corporate donors, that same undue influence now permeates our judiciary as well. Steven Donziger’s corporate prosecution is a case in point.
This is very, very serious.
Our democracy is threatened, but we’re going to get through this. That, I believe with all my heart. We’re a generation called, in ways we never thought we would be and in the same way Roosevelt described his generation after WW2, to a “rendezvous with destiny.” We will rise up and defend our democracy the way our ancestors did before us, not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans who care.
I’m sending you the Hedges article because, to me, it’s connecting dots that need connecting. The more we know, the more we understand. And the more we understand, the more we will be able to change things.
I will be appearing on the Katie Halper show with Chris Hedges and Steven Donziger tonight at 7pm ET (guests will appear sometime around 7:30).
I feel like we've been lobsters in a slowly boiling pot. Now the water is getting pretty hot.
The question remains: how do we get term limits imposed on our legislative branch !? That , in itself , would do wonders to curtail the corrupt lifetime politicians who are in the pocket of all the corporate interests!