A girl I grew up with posted something on Facebook. Back in high school we had many mutual friends, many shared moments, but were never close. A sterling individual--never heard a negative thing about her--never knew her other than anything but sweet as can be. And as Facebook is, people you hung out with way back, you add as a friend, or they add you, you check out their stuff, find out what they’re about, and either continue to keep them on the radar or press Hide.
She’s political, a liberal, and like a lot of my liberal friends was all fired up to have Obama elected. Today she posted a status: "Three women on the Supreme Court! It's a great week for equal rights! :D"
I’ve been turning the sentiment over most the day and here’s what I wanted to say:
Did you ever see that movie The Corporation? http://www.thecorporation.com/ It came out in 2003, and the takeaway was that corporate power, under the guise of a legal fiction, is a sociopathic entity in control of governance, slowly enslaving humanity, not to mention destroying the environment. What I wanted to say to this girl I knew, is that unless Ms. Kagan was friendly to corporate power, she’d be nowhere near the Supreme Court. Woman or Man, if you’re on the Supreme Court you’re there because The Corporation likes you.
For my liberal friends, unless you’ve been busy with life, the Obama Administration has done nothing but further the corporate agenda, which is to say the previous administration’s agenda. The most disgusting thing to be found in all humanity is torture. The Bush Administration advocated for it and the lawyers behind those memos giving cover for it are still walking around today. The Obama Administration killed the single payer option to health care reform, said No to a Fairness Doctrine (having more than corporate speech on the broadcast frequencies), has allowed the banking industry to loot We The People for close to a trillion dollars, and all the while hasn’t said a peep about the fact that one single private corporation now tallies 80%+ of all votes cast nationwide, all behind closed doors. If you don’t have transparent elections, you don’t have a free society, the two are one and the same. Thus, we currently are not free, contrary to whatever you think and feel.
In addition to that, you may have read reports yesterday about Verizon Inc. and Google Inc. hashing out a deal behind closed doors concerning the Internet: If you like the Internet the way it is, then you're for net neutrality. If you'd rather pay more for less service, and have a corporation tell you what you are and aren't allowed to see, then you're against it--plain and simple.
I’ve been on the hunt for a solution, and all the information I’ve processed has lead to the conclusion that the only way humanity will reverse the fatal trends of sociopathic/corporate governance is if a tipping-point majority of us advocate for the constitutional principle of holding a convention. Many think it’s too daunting a thing to think about, but it’s not. All political reformations the world over since history began have always come down to one thing: a tipping-point majority saying the same thing at once. That means we don’t need the whole country calling for the Article V Convention, just a tipping-point of us.
Many of you have children, you’d die trying to prevent a sociopath getting hold of your kids. Well, a sociopath not only has hold of your kids right now, it’s got you and all of human civilization too. Are you afraid of advocating for the Constitution because sociopathic governance might target you? It already has and it’s building its mousetrap for us all quickly as it can. The only thing that threatens it is the collective sovereign power of American citizens calling for a convention, because when people come together consensus happens--it’s natural (one of the positives of the human condition).
Talking about the Article V Convention is not fringe, a growing number of citizens are becoming aware of this legal mechanism the Constitution provides. Professor Lawrence Lessig from Harvard is openly calling for it: http://www.callaconvention.org
A former state supreme court judge, and founder of the largest accredited law school in the nation is putting together a virtual convention: http://www.conventionusa.org
There’s a national group (although their website needs work, it shows all fifty states have repeatedly cast applications, and one session of Congress after the next fails to carry out its constitutional obligation to issue the call): http://www.foavc.org
This is not a political issue, but a legal issue, and we’re either going to pressure Congress to issue the call or sociopathic governance will do away with everything we know and love. One way or the other it’ll happen within the next two years.
You want to be Republican, root for Republicans? Be a Democrat, root for Democrats? Great, that’s fine--but we can multi-task too, right? We can root for our founding principles at the same time, right?
We have two choices: the inevitable and fatal consequence of sociopathic governance, or rocking and rolling as Americans--free citizens--dusting off the Constitution, and putting it to work for us here and now. Imagine this: the whole country coming together on the authority of the Constitution, in a deliberative assembly, trying to hash out what 38 states can agree to ratify. Even if we can’t find something 38 states can agree to, the constitutional process of finding out one way or another will transform reality and free humanity.
What will come? Time will tell. I encourage you to think about those you love, what you yourself love, and keep in mind the old adage--you never know what you have until it’s gone. It won’t take all of us to make it happen, just some of us.