Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Erosion of Our Rights and Marshes

You have the right to remain silent . . .but you have to speak up, i.e., not be silent, to invoke the right to silence. If you don’t speak up about the right to remain silent, you waive your right to remain silent. And so it is. It is such perverted logic that our Supreme Court justices, who claim to know the original intent of the forefathers who wrote the Constitution, have devised a Jonathan Swift Liliputian-like scheme to defeat the intent and the purpose of the Fifth Amendment of that document which states (in part) that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself . . .” Thus, in our era, we witness the gradual erosion of those very same precious rights. Did you know that multinational corporations like Fox Corporation, for example, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a foreign national, and whose second largest shareholder (40%) is an Arab living in the middle east, have the same exact First Amendment rights that ordinary people of the United States have insofar as the freedom of speech guarantee of that amendment? In other words, a corporation is a person for purpose of the U.S. Constitution. No wait. It gets better because the rights of corporations trump that of individuals because corporations can tap their vast profits and contribute without limitation to affect political campaigns so long as the rubric fictional distinction between soft and direct contributions can be claimed. BP, the corporate “person” is free to distribute the largesse of its quarterly billion dollars of profit to a variety of politicians who can stand up in front of large audiences and mouth the words “drill, baby, drill.” These same politicians with oil money dripping from their pockets can criticize Obama for being "unAmerican" for his critique of BP's conduct in the Gulf which is not only eroding our rights, but the entire marshland of the southeastern United States.

I can’t wait to see what in the hell the Supremes are going to do with the Arizona immigration law.