What a week! Tuesday night I was close to suicidal, it looked so
bad. I didn't take the fact that the swing states hadn't begun to count
the early/mail-in/absentee and provisional ballots yet.
But today, today, I'm happier than I've been in 5 years, probably happier than I've ever been. It's such a relief.
Congratulations, to Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, the 46th POTUS and VPOTUS of the United States. 😎
The US has serious constitutional problems. It's undeniable now. Our constitution was antiquated 70 years ago. We had hints of these troubles: Bush v. Gore; presidential scandals going back fifty years; the resistance to reproductive rights, and how it made SCOTUS nominations a campaign priority; voter suppression; lopsided gerrymanders of states' voting districts; the SCOTUS's virtual nullification of the Voting Rights Act against the clear intent of Congress; the development of corporate person-hood as a legal entity; the equating of money with political speech.
I could continue to cite many examples that prove the US Constitution is failing. This is happening because it's a first draft, therefore, it was bound to show seams and cracks by now. It's a wonder it hasn't buckled before. My contention is that today, the citizens of the US should consider writing a second draft, and put it up for ratification.
Now, I haven't researched this topic yet, but I've long debated politics on social media. I know, for expertise on the subject, that's laughable. Before that, I did the same thing on discussion groups going back 25 years. No, that doesn't qualify me as a Constitutional scholar either.
However, those many political discussions and arguments do give me experience with the popular opinions and our various factions understandings of US history, civics, and politics. It's also caused me to think and read about political theory. I will study more as I post more blog entries on the topic.
The right to question
Nevertheless, I'm starting with this assertion: the greatest problem in our Constitution is the lack of a definition, or any clear description, of rights. It cites some rights definitely exists: free speech; freedom of religion; the right to remain silent. Then concedes that there may be others not mentioned (the 9th Amendment), and the ones that aren't mentioned are reserved to the states and the people "respectively" (the 10th Amendment).
In other words, the Founders punt. Their most important document gives no hint as to how to recognize if a specific right, or what human options or actions are rights and what aren't. It basically trusts our intuition.
A detailed discussions of rights are in the Founders' writings. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man being a great example. Judges and justices alike have gone to the Founders' secondary writings for guidance. But one needs to ask: which Founder and when? They not only differed in their opinions, but their opinions changed over time. If they had known that scholars and judges would be culling their private writings for wisdom on how to run a nuclear-armed country nearly 250 years later, would they have written the same things? It's impossible to know, of course, but then how do we know the musings from the doctrine and dogma?
The Federalist Papers, are a good source to find out what they thought as the Constitution was being considered for ratification. However, those are the opinions of only three Founders.
Worse, by 1800, their entire vision of how the new country would operate had completely broken down. They created our system in the hope that it would avoid factions, then they watched their dream fail. The contentious factions fought so bitterly that the Founders were in despair. But they had no other plan, so the new system continued to evolve.
Another source are the debates in state legislatures about the Constitution. But again there's the problem of which Founder to choose as the expert? Also, if they thought that way at the time, what did they think later?
The Founders themselves obscure things further with hypocrisy. It's not strictly true that modern liberals hail by what the Founders promised, while Conservatives are more influenced by their actions, but it's mostly true. How Jefferson could espouse on freedom and rights while owning slaves is often cited as irreconcilable. He doesn't say how, in any of his writings, the man who developed the political theory of rights in the Declaration of Independence had no conscience about keeping his slaves. His promises to release them all appear to be for show, and pale compared to what he did.
In the Declaration, Jefferson asserted that all men (women not thought of yet) have inalienable rights endowed by the creator.
He did this, because the Declaration had to explain why a rebellion against a king who ruled by the Will of God wasn't a rebellion against God Himself. Inalienable rights were Jefferson's challenge to the Divine Right of Kings. The political theory served its revolutionary purpose, but how much did Jefferson, and the other Founders really believe it?
If we judge by their actions and writings after the Revolution, they mostly act like it was sophistry all along. Then again, so was the Divine Right of Kings. I will say just because the Founders used Jefferson's theory as an excuse doesn't mean that Jefferson's insight was false, or unworkable. I believe the opposite is true, but Jefferson, like other Southern Founders who grew up in the slavery caste system, probably would've been panicked at suggestion that they live one day without their slaves.
End of Part 1.
I'm text-banking for the Democratic Party. I'm glad I finally found my participation niche. I can do this far better than say, phone banking or canvassing. I tend to go blank and lose my attention when nervous, and both make me nervous. I'm also going to be a poll worker on Election Day. Obviously this election is going to be an event of history. I hope Trump is shut out, 0 electoral votes, but that's probably hoping too much.
We cannot have a representative government with democratic rights and allow people to hoard as much money as they can grab. You cannot have an impartial judiciary, a cogent legislature, or an un-corrupted president. Not while the government power has to compete with economic power, and not when government is so easily captured by moneyed interests. Economic power is too easily leveraged into political power.
I remember the definition of money given in high school classes as a "medium of exchange." Wikipedia defines money just:
"Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context.[1][2][3] The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any item or verifiable record that fulfils these functions can be considered as money."
I beg to differ with experts about this: money is power, first and foremost. If power in human affairs is defined as the ability to get others to follow your will/wishes, whether to compel them or persuade them in other ways, money is power. It's different from other types of power in that you can count it because laws of mathematics apply to it.
Money is also the world's oldest sustained social program. The first coins were issued by Lydia. The king's head stamped on it meant the King was guaranteeing the amount of gold or silver in the coin. James Burke in his 1970s PBS series Connections tells how the touchstone could be used to determine the amount of gold in a coin.
At the time, it democratized power and diversified the ways of getting it through production of goods and providing of services that earned it. Early accounting also provided a means to determine the responsibility. "Follow the money" is a practice as old as currency itself. It also multiplied the ways people could cooperate. Contracts became written, with the exact amount of money specified.
A neglected quality that money has that shouldn't need to be expounded, but does is due to the fog of ideology: money is a government program.
Libertarian efforts to uncouple currency from government have so far failed, and I think they will continue to fail, miserably. Bitcoins are good scams, ransoms, and money laundering, but not much else. They're also good for speculating if you like to gamble at unknown odds. By making all transactions private and closed to scrutiny, it becomes somewhat like having a tree falling in the woods. The transaction doesn't exist until it's exchanged out of bitcoins and into a real currency. Going into why they'll is really beyond the scope of this essay.
But now we find ourselves in a position of such great wealth disparity that our system has stagnated and is breaking down. Think about this: any solvable social problem we have always hits and impasse in the same place: taxing the wealthy. Since the wealthy are the only people today who have substantial money, if tax revenues can't be collected from them, or their wealth can't be bounded, social progress will stagnate. This is what happens with any national or international issue you raise. It happens with our crumbled infrastructure, it happens with health care, it happens with criminal justice reform, it happens with environmental problems. We use the word "corporate" to shift blame to a faceless entity, but the wealthy are behind the corporations.
Our country, our society is going to collapse if excess wealth can't be controlled. Right now, the financiers and banks are the gatekeepers to wealth. They know what sort of person they'd trust with a loan. People Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who are obsessive and fanatical about making money, no matter the cost to the workers and to their environment. In other words: conservative capitalist. They'll also capture government agencies and elected officials.
The notion that billionaires are better than everyone else has to die. This is difficult to do, because they're powerful people, and human beings are awed with power no matter the source and means.
For left-leaning people or centrists who think defeating Trump will heal the country, I have bad news: a single election isn't going to do it. The Democrats have to be committed to creating landslides from here on out.
Biden is far from my first choice for president, but he's the best one to run for this election. The Left might think Trump's disastrous term affords a grand opportunity to guide the country Left, but no, it isn't that. It's just a chance to stop the hemorrhaging.
(BTW, I laugh off suggestions that Biden has dementia. Maybe he's short of sleep some days, but dementia is nonsense. I also laugh it off the same suggestions about Trump. People think it's easy to diagnose a syndrome that's only positively identified by autopsy, and when diagnoses are most difficult tasks physicians have.)
The GOP must be defeated, and it must be in a landslide. They had a chance to remove Trump and they cynically refused. If I were religious, I would see God's judgment in how right on the heels of Trump's acquittal, both COVID and an economic recession both hit us. (Yes, the recession started in February, independent of COVID.)
For their support of Trump, their failure to remove him, GOP's in Congress and everywhere deserve ignominy. For the corruption of our government, for backing Trump in his incompetent response to COVID, I hope they continue to lose subsequent elections to the point where they become a regional party at best.
If that happens, I expect the Democratic Party will split between the liberals and the centrists. The GOP's ideological and electoral competition are the only forces keeping the two factions together. The unity isn't viable in the long run.
I see Biden as transitional. Since guys his age are known to frequently die, Biden is probably transient as well. Yes, he's a centrist. He (and/or Harris) will have to make the choice whether he's going to screw the wealthy by taxing them, or screw his base by embracing business interests. It might seem he's already made the choice, but I don't presume that, despite indications of leaning toward the wealthy. The wealthy are used to getting their way, so they're easy to pwn. He knows it's not viable to maintain Clinton/Obama triangulation. So, either his voting or his financial constituency is going to get screwed.
However, he won't have that choice if the GOP remains competitive.
I give a disclaimer to all my predictions: we live in an intrinsically unpredictable universe. Guesses about the future that aren't scientifically tested are almost always wrong.
Also, if Trump stays in power, nothing I've predicted here even applies. My predictions on that contingency are all uniformly dire.
 |
| Chief Justice John Roberts showing his rapt attention to a historic moment, not to mention his impartiality as a judge. Thanks to sketch artist/political cartoonist Bill Hennessey. I hope Hennessey wins a Pulitzer Prize, and Roberts is remembered for this more than anything else. |
“Sixteen pages of Think Big [Trump's 1989 book] are devoted to revenge. All of them run directly contrary to this basic biblical teaching. Trump leaves no room for doubt that revenge is a guiding principle of his life—“My motto is: Always get even.”
― The Making of Donald Trump
 |
| The headline is a Tweet. Already he knew how to mislead in a few words as possible |
