THE ROBERT´S COURT WANTS TO BRING BACK THE CORPORATE FASCISM OF THE EARLY 1900´s

Bush´s appointment of John Roberts as the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court may eventually "trump" the current Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the White House.

...The US Supreme Court

The first thing you might be asking about the above headline is; "What do you mean about bringing back America´s corporate fascism?" Well, per the dictionary, "fascism" is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

And before regulatory acts were passed such as The Tillman Act, the Federal Election Campaign Act , Taft-Hartley Act and the McCain-Feingold Act, there was no control on how much money either corporations or unions could donate to anyone or any issue´s election campaign.

Even though the Republican Party has been shrinking and it has become a right-wing tool, mostly for the far-right religious fringe, the only way the Republican Party can recover their previous power over the next decade is to immediately clear away all impediments to unrestrained corporate participation in electoral politics.

Today, if a corporation likes a politician, they can use their money for making sure he or she is elected every time. And if they become upset with a politician, they can also carpet-bomb his or her district with a few million dollars worth of ads and politically destroy them.

With all the "tea-baggers" and "gun-and sign-totters" at these recent so called "grass-roots" get-togethers, (that are actually organized by FOX´s right-wing Glenn Beck and Dick Armey´s conservative FreedomWorks), these "information-challenged" individuals don´t seem to understand that they are the ones that are supporting the true concepts of bringing back "fascism".

And it looks like that´s exactly what the John Roberts Supreme Court is planning.

In the Citizens United case, the US Supreme Court has now asked for it to be re-argued this month. They are going all the way back to the 1980s and re-examining the then "rationales" for the US Congress to have any power to regulate what the GOP calls "corporate free speech."

This case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, presents the best opportunity for the Roberts Court to use its five vote conservative majority to totally re-write the face of politics in America. This could roll us back to the pre-1907 era of the then wealthy "Robber Barons" which had originally caused the need for campaign finance control.

As Robert Barnes wrote in The Washington Post on June 30, 2009, "Citizens United´s attorney, former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, had told the court that it should use the case to overturn the corporate spending ban the court recognized in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, as well as its decision in 2003 to uphold McCain-Feingold as constitutional."

As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker ("No More Mr. Nice Guy"): "In every major case since he became the nation´s seventeenth Chief Justice, John Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

Judge Roberts first showed his position on this when in 2007 in the case of the Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right To Life, the Roberts Court ruled that the FEC couldn´t prevent the WRTL broadcast station from running ads just because they were a corporation.

As to the conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice, Antonin Scalia, the idea of Congress passing laws that limited "corporate free speech" was clearly horrifying to Scalia. He went after the 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce case, in which the MCC was limited in their "free speech" in a political campaign because they were a corporation.

The bottom line, for Scalia, is that, "The principle that such advocacy is at the heart of the First Amendment´s protection and is indispensable to decision making in a democracy. This is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual."

In the 1986 Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. Public Utility Commission of California case, Scalia rejected the arguments that corporate participation, "would exert an undue influence on the outcome of a referendum vote and that corporations would drown out other points of view and destroy the confidence of the people in the democratic process." Scalia even quoted an opinion in another case writing that "corporations are guaranteed the freedom of speech and of the press…safeguarded by the due process of law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Chief Justice Roberts weighed in, too, accepting the notion that, "the corporate identity of a speaker does not strip corporations of all free speech rights. It would be a constitutional ´bait and switch´ to conclude that corporate campaign speech may be banned."

Justice Robert´s Bottom line – "corporate free speech rights are Real Rights that Must Be Respected".

The now retired Associate Justice David Souter wrote the dissent in FEC v. Wisconsin (this was a 5-4 decision, with the usual right-wing suspects on the "5″ side): "It goes without saying that nothing has changed about the facts. They demonstrate a threat to ´the integrity of our electoral process, which for a century now Congress has repeatedly found to be imperiled by corporate, and later union, money: witness the Tillman Act, Taft-Hartley & FECA."

Obviously depressed, Souter closed his dissent with these words: "I cannot tell what the future will force upon us, but I respectfully dissent from this judgment today."

The attempt of corporations and their lawyers, (like Roberts was before ascending to a federal court) to usurp American democracy is nothing new, as Justice Souter well knew; "Fascism has always been a threat to democracy."

In early 1944 The New York Times asked then Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace´s answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis Powers of Germany and Japan:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those… With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate ´poisoner of public information´…"

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism´s "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism that the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. … Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must…develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power."

Does this all sound more than vaguely familiar?

As someone once said, "America will never be destroyed by an outside power, it can only be destroyed from within." I fear that this is a true statement, and that Justice Roberts will be trying his best to achieve this goal.

In just a few months, we may again stand at the same crossroads that FDR and Vice President Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. As it is today, fascism was then rising in America. This time however, it is calling itself "compassionate conservatism," and "the free market", (also sound familiar?). The point of its spear then and today was and is, "corporate personhood" and "corporate free speech rights."

The current Roberts´ Court´s behavior, if the prediction of their goal for this month is accurate (and it´s hard to draw any other conclusion), is now paralleling 1936 when Roosevelt had said: "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

Here´s hoping that it's not going to be, "De ja vu, all over again".

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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