After September 11, 2001 the President Knew What We Must Do: Go Shopping

Rick D. Massey, JD
Copyright © 2010

I am more saddened than disgusted every time I pull up to an intersection, look up and see the Orwellian camera staring back at me.  More troubling than the hypocrisy of the claims that these “telescreens” are there to save our lives, is the nagging fear that this lie will be accepted. 

That's what happens when corporations, whose only aim is to make money for their shareholders are allowed to make decisions and write laws to govern human beings.  Some may think it strange that a lawyer with a corporate background and a track record of encouraging small businesses to incorporate would have such a negative attitude toward corporate participation in government. But these two positions are not mutually exclusive.  Corporations should be tools of the people.  Unfortunately, the wealthiest people have used them to drive the rest of us into submission and to place us, the flesh and blood people, at the mercy (a bad choice of words because corporations by definition are incapable of mercy) of corporations. 

Corporations are legal fictions created by business people to protect business people. When corporations serve living, breathing human beings, they serve a valid and useful purpose. When they usurp the rights of human beings and take control of the levers of what should be a democratic government something has gone terribly wrong. And that unfortunately, is where we find ourselves today.

Not only has the corporation become a “person” with all of the rights of human beings (but much fewer of the obligations imposed on human beings), it is now entitled to exercise the right of “free speech” - which it communicates in the form of money.  Corporations have been buying politicians for years.  But the Supreme Court has now given this disgusting practice the legal seal of approval.  When will we finally realize the inescapable fact that power and money are inseparable twins; that those with more money have more power; and that power (whether euphemistically tagged as democracy or something else) will never be shared by those already in power with those who don’t have money?

Through the ages, our wisest leaders have instinctively known this.  Commenting on the third attempt to create a central bank in the United States, Abraham Lincoln foretold what has since proven to be completely true:

I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. As a most undesirable consequence of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed. 

Lincoln's fears have been realized.  Sen. Dick Durbin did not exaggerate when he said the banks are the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. Nor was he overstating the case when he added “. . . they frankly own the place.”

People are beginning to notice.  But they don't seem all that upset.  For a tyrannical system to last, the peasants must acquiesce in it. They won’t all be foolish enough to believe it, or to buy into it. But they do need to accept it. The system requires a lack of will on the part of the masses to revolt – an aversion to risk losing what they do have for a fair and just arrangement.

That lack of will to resist is the greatest threat we now face. The expansion of power and simultaneous breaking down of the will of the people was implemented in graduated stages. No master plan was needed. It was, as always the result of human greed. The greediest individuals do whatever it takes to get to the levers of power. Once there, they see what needs to be done to maintain and increase that power. So they proceed with the next logical step to build on what has gone before.

Who would have thought even twenty years ago that Americans would soon become so complacent that the State would have a camera trained on them at virtually every intersection in almost every town; or that the presumption of innocence would be so completely forgotten that once accused by one of those cameras they would receive a letter in the mail telling them that they have the option of ratting out their friend or family member to prove their innocence and escape punishment? 

I don't mean to trivialize the greater transgressions to our freedom, dignity and self-respect that have crept in while we were "out shopping" in response to the 9/11 attacks.  But the nonchalant manner in which the government can so blatantly intrude on our personal lives really underscores how far we have fallen in such a short time.  So much ground has been lost that our politicians can boldly take the most cold, inhumane, and despicable positions without fear of losing the popular vote.

• Laws have been proposed (and largely supported by public opinion) making it a “crime” to provide food and water to another human being who will otherwise die in the desert because he or she did not ask permission to cross an imaginary line and come onto our turf.  
• The public has supported laws that allow the government to seize the property of and to jail human beings that are dying of cancer for the “crime” of using a common plant to relieve their own pain and suffering.  
• The government no longer needs permission from the courts to spy on its own citizens. And American citizens can be (disappeared) arrested, tortured, and convicted with no right to a lawyer or to even let their own family know what happened to them by the mere declaration of the President that they are “Enemy Combatants.”  

The great state of Arizona recently passed a "show us your papers" law while our politicians freely and openly discuss how our newly created department of "Homeland Security" should operate.  And our congress can, with a straight face and in all seriousness, debate whether or not holding a person we think knows something about someone who may do something wrong upside down and forcing water down his throat until he loses consciousness is really "torture." 

We have seen how this works and where it inevitably leads.  It is about time we kick the corporations out and put human beings back in charge of governing people's lives.