Elections provide the bread-and-circuses staged drama that is
passed off as democracy.
Despite the anything-goes quality of American culture, one thing
remains verboten to say publicly: the U.S. Constitution has failed. The reason why this painfully obvious fact cannot
be discussed publicly is that it gives the lie to the legitimacy of the entire
status quo.
The Constitution was intended
to limit 1)
the power of government over the citizenry 2) the power of each branch of
government and 3) the power of political/financial elites over the government
and the citizenry, as the Founders recognized the intrinsic risks of an
all-powerful state, an all-powerful state dominated by one branch of government
and the risks of a financial elite corrupting the state to serve their
interests above those of the citizenry.
The
Constitution has failed to place limits on the power of government, on the
emergence of unaccountable states-within-a-state agencies and on the political
power of financial elites.
How has the Constitution failed? It has failed in three ways:
1. Corporations and the super-wealthy elite control
the machinery of governance. The public interest is not represented except as
interpreted / filtered through corporate/elite interests.
2. The nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve, has
the power to debauch the nation's currency and reward the wealthy via issuing
new currency and buying Treasury bonds in whatever sums it deems necessary at
the moment. The Fed is only nominally under the control of the elected
government. It is in effect an independent state-within-a-state that dominates
the financial well-being of the entire nation.
3. The National Security State--the alphabet agencies
of the FBI, CIA, NSA et al.--are an independent state-within-a-state,
answerable only to themselves, not to the public or their representatives.
Congressional oversight is little more than feeble rubber-stamping of the
Imperial Project and whatever the unelected National Security leadership deems
worthy of pursuit.
The Constitution's core
regulatory element--the balancing of executive, legislative and judicial
power--has broken down. The judiciary's independence is as nominal as the legislative
branch's control of the central bank and National Security state: the gradual
encroachment of corporate and state power is rubber-stamped and declared
constitutional.
The secret
power of the National Security agencies was declared constitutional early in
the Cold war, when unleashing unaccountable and secret agencies was deemed
necessary.
The bizarre
public-private Federal Reserve was deemed constitutional at its founding in
1913, and the Supreme Court famously declared that corporations have the same
rights to free speech (including loudspeakers that cost millions of dollars) as
living citizens.
The powers
of the Imperial Presidency also continue expanding, regardless of which party
is in office or the supposed ideological tropisms of Supreme Court justices.
Every step of this erosion of
public representation and the elected government's power is declared fully
constitutional, in classic boiled-frog fashion. The frog detects
the rising temperature of the water but isn't alarmed as the heat is increased
so gradually.
Since the
rise of unaccountable states-within-a-state are constitutional, as is the
dominance of corporate / private-wealth elites, on what grounds can citizens
protest their loss of representation?
Elections provide the bread-and-circuses staged drama that is passed
off as democracy. The key goal of the
corporate/state media coverage, of course, is to foster the illusion that
elections really, really, really matter, when the reality is they don't. The
National Security State grinds on, the Federal Reserve grinds on and the
dominance of corporate-wealth elites grinds on regardless of who's in office.
Every emergency is met by the ceding of more power to unelected elites
in positions to serve their own interests. The
Cold War, financial panics, Cold War Redux--every crisis is an excuse to expand
the powers of the unaccountable, opaque states-within-a-state.
The media is already gearing up with 24/7 coverage of the 2020
elections. The constant churn
of drama-trauma serves to mask the impotence and powerlessness of the citizenry
and the unaccountability of the states-within-a-state that rule the nation.
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