Plutocracy Supreme

Or Is It Supremely Plutocratic?

Abstract: The USA Supreme Court decided plutocrats could buy politicians with as much money as they want, calling this “no right more basic in our democracy”. With democracy like that, who needs plutocracy?

***

Plutocracy is an exponential phenomenon born from the growth of capital and the power it buys, breeding with the excuses the Dark Side makes for it, the increasing means the Dark Side provides with, finalized by tipping into abject cruelty and madness.

In the USA a lot of the Justice system has to do with politics. Judges and prosecutors are either elected as politicians, or selected by politicians.

Supreme Ginsburg, “Liberal” Champion, Worth: Only $20 Million. Nothing Else!

So no wonder that the Supreme Court lifted all restrictions, de facto, on campaign financing by the hyper rich. The servants serve their masters well. And cynicism helps. “Justice” Bryer, the second wealthiest Supreme, pointed out liberally that the restrictions to the wealthy buying politicians previously in place did not work, so one may as well remove them.

“Liberally” Up Yours. It’s rather curious that someone such as Ginsburg, and Bryer, who were only teachers and a judges, their entire lives, could amass such a fortune. (Even plutocratic universities such as Harvard, Columbia and Stanford, where they were, don’t pay their professors that much.) It would certainly raise eyebrows in, say, Europe. How come so rich? No wonder they treasure their fellow have-it-alls.

The more modest the intellectual capability, the more economic it is to believe, rather than trying to think.

There are those who believe the USA is the greatest democracy, blah blah blah. How can they make their belief compatible with the eternal reign of the unelected Lords of the Supreme Court? Let alone the “Supremes” playing plutocratic politics?

We are on the correct trajectory to end up just as the Roman Republic did. The Roman Republic had a law enforcing an absolute limit of wealth on each family. After 150 BCE, Rome became a global power, and the wealthy owned properties overseas, allowing them to turn around these limits.

Republican minded Romans tried to limit the power of the hyper rich. They were destroyed by a succession of assassinations and civil war. Rome became a fascist plutocratic empire, that quickly degenerated from its contradictions (and then spent centuries in a morbid state).

***

The USA is obviously following a similar trajectory to folly. The practical cancellation of inheritance taxes, the lowest taxes for the rich, and their buying of their servants the politicians, and the massive propaganda to go with them, insure that the implosion down the abyss will go faster than in Rome.

The Justice of the strongest and wealthiest is no doubt the best.

The very definition of democracy “Chief Justice” Roberts uses is silly: “There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”… in light of the fact he agrees to let each plutocrat give 3.6 million, to just one candidate, that is, about 72 times the average family income. About 4,000 times what one average family could possibly give. Some can exert 4,000 times the power on the elective process, and a primate is called “Chief Justice”. What democracy is that?

Even among baboons, no baboon exert 4,000 times the elective power. Baboons find the USA much removed from democracy.

Say a skeptical New York Times in “The Court Follows The Money”: “This money can then be funneled to specific campaigns through the use of joint fund-raising committees, effectively nullifying the per-candidate limit. Chief Justice Roberts blithely rejected such a scenario as “speculation,” and he ignored political reality by confining the meaning of corruption to instances of “quid pro quo,” or the direct exchange of money for political favors.

In other words, Chief Justice Roberts is either not very smart, corrupt, or both. It is weird that, in a country often defined by its fans as the “country of freedom” citizens accept to be submitted to the decisions of nine individuals nominated for life, while having obviously so little brain power.

That politicians dominate Justice in the USA has consequences on normal people, such as making them live in implicit terror. That implicit terror, among others things, enabled slavery. So slavery was misunderstood, all along: it has to do with plutocracy, not racism. Racism was a consequence.

The case of the West Memphis Three. Three poor white young boys were accused of Satanism (and this human sacrifice). Damien Echols was condemned to death, and spent 18 years on death row, as an anti-Christian. As he says: “In the USA, the Justice system is founded essentially on politics and money. I would have been dead if other rich and influential people had not been interested by the case.”

Echols and his co-accused spent more than 18 years in jail. When their DNA was finally tested, not only it did not fit, but the DNA of unknown perpetrators was found (Arkansas still consider them culprit, and condemned them to “time served”!). Echols feels that, as he puts it: “instead of talking about “Prosecutors”, “Judges”, “Justices”, as if they were moral persons. But in truth, they are just politicians, who do not hesitate to execute people they know are innocent, just to look like heroes”.

When justice is the abyss, plutocracy is its name.

Patrice Aymé