LIVE, from the State that brought you Senator Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin voters now proudly present, fresh from his recall election victory, Governor Scott Walker!
At first glance, it is almost unfathomable that anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have voted to retain Scott Walker as Wisconsin's governor. This, after all, is a man who openly declared he is trying to destroy the rights of workers through a "divide and conquer" strategy; who received 61% of the funds used to fight his recall from donors who live outside of Wisconsin; and who has demonstrated that he is little more than a Koch brothers controlled puppet seeking to concentrate even more of America's wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
But, thanks to blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on the Fox (Faux) "News" channel, a corporate-controlled media that promotes superficiality over substance and tripe over truth, and right-wing generated fears about the bogeyman of "big government," America has become the land of the ignorant. Not the stupid, mind you, but the ignorant. Stupidity is a condition where individuals are incapable of comprehending a concept, no matter how hard they try. Ignorance, on the other hand, is simply being too lazy, too gullible or too narrow-minded to see the obvious.
It is this brand of ignorance, coupled with subliminal appeals to racism, that fuels organizations like the so-called "Tea Party," which, despite its pretensions of symbolizing the outraged common man, serves as nothing more than a dupe for right-wing billionaires and corporate corruption.
As regular readers of Pravda.Ru know, in past articles I too have condemned the power and overreach of "big government." But my condemnations were primarily directly at the egregious tactics being used to fight the so-called "war on terror"-tactics that have destroyed the one document designed to protect the rights and liberties of all Americans: the Bill of Rights. And, unlike hypocrites like right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, I have condemned this destruction regardless of whether it was occurring under the mendacious and fraudulent "presidency" of George W. Bush or under the current regime of the Nobel Peace Prize winning "progressive" turned warmonger, Barack Obama.
Of course, with the presidential election now looming, many pundits are "analyzing" what the results of the Wisconsin recall election portend. But there is no complexity in this analysis. The Wisconsin results graphically and unequivocally demonstrate how efficiently and methodically the United States Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has destroyed true democracy in America.
As I explained in my recent Pravda.Ru article Six Investigations that Will Never Be, the Citizens United ruling states "that corporations and labor unions are analogous to flesh-and-blood human beings when it comes to the right of freedom of speech." Although this may sound innocuous, in reality it means that corporations and labor unions can now give unlimited financial support to political candidates of their choosing. Since labor unions traditionally support Democratic candidates, the Republican party has openly declared war on them, knowing that if labor's financial resources are depleted, only the voice of the corporate interests will resound in the political arena.
Therefore the true motivations behind Walker's successful effort to stop automatic payroll deductions of union dues in Wisconsin, which has reduced union membership, Governor Mitch Daniels' successful campaign to pass "right-to-work" legislation in Indiana (a deceptive sounding law that forces labor unions to represent workers in union shops who refuse to pay dues), and Rand Paul's "right-to-work" petition should be transparent.
A 2010 Los Angeles Times article stated that 20% of Americans control 85% percent of the nation's wealth. This leaves a staggering 80% to fight over the remaining 15%. This unbalanced income distribution is worse than in the 1920s, right before the Great Depression. But if Walker, Daniels, Paul and the corporate billionaires who control them get their way, this disparity will only get worse.
Yet they politically thrive because the unity of money is easier to achieve than the unity of people. So while the 20% are united by greed, the voices of the 80% are disjointed as they rabidly fight against each other for the remaining scraps from their master's table.
After realizing that many recent wars have been waged to promote corporate interests and profitability or to conceal corporate wrongdoing, and after further realizing that some of the biggest economic and environmental disasters in American history have been caused by the deregulation of financial institutions and corporations, can anyone honestly believe that placing America's government in the hands of a few Social-Darwinistic billionaires-who don't give a damn about the economic devastation their decisions cause to the poor or middle-class-represents progress?
If there is one silver lining in the cloud of ignorance that is currently engulfing America, it can be found in the hope that this unabashed and escalating political corruption may hasten America's drift into revolution.
Although talk of revolution was prominent during the 1960s, it did not flourish because the middle-class had too much to lose. But with Citizens United fueled politics now obliterating the middle-class, with the American dream remaining only a dream for more and more people, with the increasing concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few, with corrupt politicians increasingly promoting the interests of their corporate masters to the detriment of their constituents and their country, and with America, both politically and economically, becoming little different from many third-world dictatorships, more and more Americans may soon begin to realize they have nothing left to lose.
Don't think the right-wing hasn't prepared for this potentiality. The tactics being used to fight "international terrorism"-detentions without charge or trial, the Patriot Act, clandestine prisons, secret surveillance, extraordinary rendition, torture, drone attacks and extrajudicial executions-are just for practice. The intended targets may soon be American citizens who dare to oppose a government of the corporate interests, by the corporate interests and for the corporate interests.
On March 15, 2011, I announced in a Pravda.Ru article that America is Dead. Although I did believe that America was indeed moribund, I had hoped this article, in conjunction with pro-labor protests that were sweeping through Wisconsin and several other states at that time, would shock Americans into recognizing the severity of the threat posed by organizations like the Tea Party, politicians like Walker, Daniels and Paul, and the Citizens United decision.
But given the recall election results in Wisconsin, I can now officially declare that America is indeed dead, especially for those who are members of the ever diminishing middle-class. Yet, ironically, many of them have planted the seeds of their own destruction, and while they may, along with Walker, proclaim "victory," it could soon prove to be a pyrrhic one.
The voters who retained Scott Walker in Wisconsin have destroyed America, and the principles for which it once stood, more ruthlessly than any terrorist organization, they have committed an act of treason worse than any Benedict Arnold, they have condemned millions of Americans to wage slavery, living debt-ridden, hand-to-mouth existences while the rich buy and sell politicians like trading cards.
So may God damn, for all time, the five Supreme Court "justices" who made political corruption the law of the land through their Citizens United ruling, the politicians and right-wing organizations and pundits who conceal this corruption so that billionaires and corporations can duplicitously profit from it, and the voters who act as the perfect dupes because they are too ignorant to see the truth.
May God damn them all before it's too late.
David R. Hoffman
Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru