CORPORATE CORRUPTION OF OUR CONSTITUTION

Do you agree that everyone has equal rights? Yes, of course. It is written in our Constitution and in our Bill of Right. The Constitution says “you” have the right own a gun if you are part of an organized militia. The people in the colonies did what was logically correct under these circumstances; they did not have money to pay taxes and even if they did, they did not want to pay them. Many, many people lived on the edge of civilization and many of them own guns—it was a way of life. Thus, the Constitution said recognized that the government did not need money to buy guns—“no more taxes”. In addition, the logic, as expressed in the Constitution, developed during the formation of the Federation of States; it is that every state in the Union would have the right to defend its self against other states. States power rests in the hands of individual. This translates to the  belief that every man has the right to defend his or her family and every state has the right to protect his state from other states. There is something exhilarating, exciting, and even beautiful about the harmony in all of that; the harmony in that, not the gun ownership, is what makes America what it is.

That being the case, how can it be that individual rights cause disharmony? We all know and suffer individually social conflict everyday in life ranging from petty things to life threatening situations. The same thing holds for governmental units we have established: cities, counties, states, and countries. We even divide the world into groups of countries that pit one group against the other almost as if we needed conflict to survive. We, as a species, have learned and refined winning strategies to cope with these conflicts at all levels. All of this is to satisfy our own innate or natural need to establish some form of hierarchy dominance at all levels.

Just like individuals, the colonists were afraid one of them would “get more” than the other colony had; thus, they demanded equality; it was reason they came to the new world. However, it should be obvious, even to the most naive observer, that California is not equal to Rhode Island or North Dakota.  It would be foolish exercise to try to enumerate the similarities or the differences between states and it would be foolish to try to list the difference and similarities between two people. With that in mind, “we the people” should appreciate that those who wrote the constitution were able to ameliorate and codify the differences between states as well as people in the form of only three braches of government and wrote in pliability or plasticity in the form of common law. Everyone agrees, and my reference here is to the world as a whole; the results were astonishingly good but were not perfect; we can narrow the most glaring imperfection to definition of “individual rights”.

Various people and groups of people have distorted the meaning of “individual rights” both as the basis for camaraderie as well as to establish individual license for use in their fight for hierarchy dominance. For example, give yourself the right to own and carry a hidden  gun, to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, to drive as fast as you want; these things are against the law; they are a direct challenge to your constitution right to your individuality: in modern Fox News political rhetoric, a challenge to your freedom. Add to this the right to keep the money you earn by not paying taxes, to keep black people from voting is your “state’s right”, to dump coal ash into the Dan river in North Carolina or taconite tailings into Minnesota’s Lake Superior, or build a house in river flood plains, or use child labor, or not pay minimum wage. Virtually, all laws in one way or another challenge your individual rights as a “person”. The secret to winning power is to get as many “persons” as you can to prevent lawmakers from writing the laws that offend what you see as your individual rights.

Corporations have developed, evolved really, a new and unique way to do this. The Supreme Court of the Untied States, what used to be your court; the one that was there to defend your individual rights, suddenly calls corporations “persons” and treats them as such. They opened the floodgates for corruption of our legal system; in fact, they opened up “our” Constitution to corrupt. They have enlisted huge numbers of people—one of our nation’s entire political parties—to support their “individual rights” as “corporate persons”. They have been successful in convincing people, with jingoisms, to vote for them because they are committed to “stand by the side of the American people” and fight for their individual constitutional rights. Thus, they equate what you see as your “Constitutionally held individual right” to defy the law and ride a motorcycle without a helmet or own a gun with their constitutional right as “persons” to defy the law and dump coal ash into the Dan River. It is their right to defy the EPA and contaminate the environment to enhance profits—and you, my Republican, friends fight hard and vote for “their” rights” just as their ads have provoked you into believing Obama is coming for your guns or hate it that corporation make money.  Did I mention that Koch industries is a person, who unfairly, can not register to vote.

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