We Are Having the Wrong Debate
The debacle of the health care bill collapsing into an insurance industry giveaway has certainly made the Senate, long home to old, out-of-touch white guys, look like the place where good legislation goes to die. The problem is that they aren’t just old, out-of-touch white guys. They’re whores.
This was completely predictable, at the latest when we couldn't even get meaningful credit-card reform passed after the same banks had just tanked the economy and given themselves huge bonuses for doing so. We live in a slutocracy where we are ruled by prostiticians beholden to wealthy corporate interests which, left to their own devices, will eventually destroy the economy just as they have destroyed democracy.
There’s some debate going on over what exactly is in the monstrosity that is the Senate Health Care bill, whether or not to support it, how onerous the mandate is. But that’s the wrong debate. The debate we need to be having is how we should change the U.S. Constitution. I know that makes me seem like an outlier, even in progressive circles. But let me tell you exactly where we’re stuck. Some people looking at the debacle of the sluts in the Senate turning the HCR bill into the worse outcome imaginable are saying that what we need is campaign finance reform. They reason, soundly enough, that if we were not in fact governed by whores, the government might actually do something for the voters instead of doing things for the corporations which employ their friends, them after they retire from public service, and who fund their campaigns. The reasoning is that if elected politicians were not in fact beholden to wealthy corporations simply to be elected politicians, then the interests of intelligent self-government could actually control the decisions they make.
Here’s why that’s not going to work: there’s a pesky little thing called the U.S. Supreme Court which has ruled, in effect, that money=speech. Therefore, according to them, the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause prohibits laws restricting corporate speech, i.e., the contributing of money. So any law reforming campaign finance sufficiently to get corporate money out of politics will fall by the wayside as soon as the SCOTUS gets ahold of it. And you can bet the day after the law is passed, the leader of some conservative action group who secretly pays hookers to pretend they are underage boys in airport restrooms will be out there hysterically shrieking about the offense to liberty—and filing suit for an injunction.
So if you want to get it by the Supreme Court, the absolute minimum you’re going to have to do is to clarify what the First Amendment does and doesn’t mean. Unless you figure we can just all sit around and hope that one day there will be five honest justices on the Supreme Court who will turn that point of law around—and you’re willing to have it hanging by a vote until the next jerkwad republican appointee decides to vote the other way.
The question then becomes, is that the only part of the Constitution we should change?
A few facts: the U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution in the world. It was written at a time before telephones, computers, cars, and television. It was the first attempt at constitutional democracy since the greeks. The Senate was put in there to deliberately slow things down, because, since this was a new thing, the framers weren’t sure an enfranchised populace wouldn’t get out of hand.
The results are in, and it wasn’t the enfranchised populace that got out of hand.
This problem isn’t going away. The problem is systemic. HCR is only a currently salient example. The next fail/sellout will probably be banking reform. If you talk about the symptoms instead of the problem, the wealthy corporations—the plutocrats—have already won. Even in the unlikely event they lose on a particular issue—I mean, people are dying for lack of healthcare, and we still can’t get anything done—the system that allows them to use our government like a giant ATM where they put money in at one end and get favorable laws out the other end that lead to even more money will go on unabated.
What else is it that could work? Maybe we could elect huge democratic majorities and a President who promises change—oh wait—we tried that. It is becoming an epic fail. The only thing that will work is to change the system, and that begins with the Constitution.
What else should we do while we're there? End corporate personhood? Dismantle the Republican/Democratic party duopoly? End private media ownership?
Part of the big picture is that we have to start having this debate NOW because one of the next casualties of government by slutocracy is going to be meaningful climate change legislation. And that won’t be just the sound of democracy you hear going down the toilet. That will be the ability of the planet to support human life.
Maybe I’m still an outlier. I proposed some ideas about Constitutional amendment in a post last year that attracted little notice and fewer comments. Maybe now the writing on the wall is a little plainer.