by Len Hart, The Existentialist CowboyAmerica is ruled and held hostage by what Sir Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth'. Today, that conspiracy is the 'Military-Industrial Complex', the name given it by the last honest Republican--Dwight David Eisenhower. 'Ike' was a real hero --not a phony like Billo Reilly, not a phony like Rush 'lard ass' Limbaugh! Not a phony like almost every right wingnut on TV, radio, CNN or FOX.
This fascist domination of American life and debate is made possible only because people have bought into a lie, the pernicious notion called 'corporate personhood'. That SCOTUS, called SCROTUS by critics, would presume to rationalize and legalize what St. Thomas More called a 'conspiracy of rich men' is but the symptom of the increasingly sick American society, the increasingly perverse ruling elite of just one percent of the population.
Keep this in mind: this ruling one percent owns more than all of the rest of us combined. This ruling one percent presumes a moral superiority because they are filthy rich and you are not. They are not superior to us in any way whatsoever. Wealth is not evidence of character nor is character responsible for its creation. The wealthy kid themselves. They are not morally superior and, in many instances, quite the opposite is true.
This ruling one percent rules, not because they are right but because they can exercise raw power over the government, the media, the courts!
This ruling one percent rules not because they are right but because they can get away with it!
What if you just said NO?
What if you just told them to FUCK OFF!?
What if you embarked upon and practiced the philosophy of Ghandi --Civil Disobedience?
What if the U.S. Government of fascists, usurpers, lobbyists, K-Street kiss-ups, and, most importantly the M.I.C. were held to account for their capital war crimes?
What if these war criminals were sentenced to hang as Nazi war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg for the same crimes?
Try the War Criminals for War Crimes
If you have not heard or read: GWB and almost every decision maker in his administration is guilty of capital war crimes, international laws to which the U.S. is signatory and Federal Laws to which every American is subject. See: U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441. These are federal laws ignored and violated by George W. Bush, laws which specify the death penalty for violations. George W. Bush could be hanged when found guilty. Bush may never stand trial because, in America, only the poor are executed. The very rich get away with it. Texas is the specimen that proves that what I have said is accurate. Texas is called the 'gulag state' for good reason. Texas, as remade in the image of Bush/Perry and other fascists have created a hell-hole in which the victims of their neglect of education turn to crime. Texas is called the 'gulag state' and may well lead the nation in murders. Conveniently for the GOP, the prisons are owned and operated by corporations which most certainly contributed heavily to the Texas GOP.
St. Thomas More: "A Conspiracy of Rich Men"
Because mere legal abstractions are accorded rights that should belong only to real, living, flesh and blood people, corporations are given license to lie about misdeeds, incompetence and corporate criminality. A saint --St. Thomas More --described just such a ruling cabal during the reign of King Henry VIII. More called it a 'a conspiracy of rich men!'
St. Thomas More was absolutely correct! Everything said in his 'Utopia' is as relevant today as it was in the 16th Century. There are very good reasons for canonization. Who among us had that kind of courage? Who among us would face death courageously rather than compromise his soul with a lie?
I believe that for More at any rate it was harder to kill than to die, and this may help explain his otherwise incredible good humor upon the scaffold. But he did not shrink from either killing or dying. He did not hold that the state must be ideologically neutral, must be indifferent to what is ultimately true and false, right and wrong, must be content to practice the art of the possible in a less than perfect universe. It never occurred to More or his contemporaries that the state should trouble itself with problems of sanitation or urban development, any more than it occurs to us that the state should support the Christian religion because the Christian religion is true. For, we ask ourselves with a flutter of the mind, what if it is not true? More would have understood us no more easily than we understand him. For we are all humanitarians now, nineteenth century positivists or twentieth century libertarians or technocrats or hedonists. And conscience is a voice deep within ourselves which no one else can hear.The theft of America's wealth was accomplished by corporate influence upon a civilian structure that left alone is relatively benign. The problem is not so much government itself but 'K Street', a major thoroughfare in Washington where the numerous think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups maintain offices! 'People' themselves cannot be heard through the din they throw up. Until 'K-street' and the 'legal personhood' of corporations is smashed, the actual offices of government are beyond the reach of the people they were intended to serve. K-street will be served ---but not you! If Mr. Smith could see Washington today!! The public ownership of the airwaves had been a well-established legal principle, upheld by law and court decisions until it was all overturned during the administration of Ronald Reagan. It was in the Reagan years that the laws were re-written to make possible the big media monopolies, the concentration of ownership by Clear Channel et al. It was under Ronald Reagan that the Fairness Doctrine made possible the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. It was under Ronald Reagan than a pernicious 'right wing revolution' --what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men' --stole the people's airwaves and made possible Bush's dictatorship. It's time to wage the revolution.So there is for us something particularly beguiling about Mr. Bolt's brilliantly argued thesis in the play, that More was a martyr to the lonely existential self, "a hero of self-hood," as Mr. Bolt puts it.
A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally . . . . Of course it's much less effective now that for most of us the actual words of the oath are not much more than impressive mumbo jumbo ...But though few of us have anything in ourselves like an immortal soul which we regard as absolutely inviolate, yet most of us still feel something which we should prefer, on the whole, not to violate. It may be that a clear sense of the self can only crystallize around something transcendental, in which case our prospects look poor, for we are rightly committed to the rational. I think the paramount gift of our thinkers, artists and . . . men of science should labor to get for us is a sense of selfhood without resort to magic.11The historian, dry and finicky, can only reply that this "hero of selfhood" and therefore this "man for all seasons" is radically different from the person so painfully, so incompletely reconstructed from the evidence that has come down to us. It is not that Mr. Bolt's presentation of More is vulgar or superficial — so often the fate of historical personages at the hands of less skilled artists. On the contrary, Mr. Bolt's sympathy for his subject is so deep that one senses it in every lilting line he has written. If anything, the playgoer or moviegoer will find in A Man for All Seasonsconfirmation of Swift's observation that More was "the person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced," and of the more recent judgment of Hugh Trevor-Roper — a contemporary historian not much given to compliments even to the dead — that More was "the first great Englishman whom we feel that we know, the most saintly of humanists, the most human of saints, the universal man of our cool northern renaissance."12--MARVIN O'CONNELL, A Man for all Seasons: an Historian's Demur
A line in Shakespeare's Henry VI reads: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!" In this case, we spare those lawyers who may help us take back the media! My revision of Shakespeare is:
The first thing we do is take back the media. It was the Communications Act of 1934 that made law the principle that the airwaves belonged to the people. It was left to Ronald Reagan to dismantle that principle and thus pave the way for the consolidation of the U.S. media into very few hands. Just five to seven major, huge corporations own the major media outlets in the United States. As a result, your access to media is limited or non-existent. Next --they will try to control the internet. My critics will rejoice. But you, dear reader, will be likewise be silenced. There are no winners when the major corporations presume to shut us all up! For good!
A good second step involves smashing the 'media' lobby on K street. We need to get over the idea that corporations have a right to lobby the government! Corporations are not people and, as far as I am concerned, have no rights whatsoever. Someone, show me a principle of science or law which credibly equates living tissue with legal abstractions and cubicles!Thanks to Ronald Reagan and the GOP, one is hard pressed to find in any US market, a locally owned radio station or TV outlet. Before Reagan, it was not unusual to find locally owned radio and TV stations in small to major markets across the nation. Now ---it seems --all are owned by some five to seven major conglomerates. If we, the people, should declare it so, corporations themselves might just be written out of existence. And good riddance! Real people have 'rights'. Legal abstractions do not. The idea that an artificial, legal construct --a 'conspiracy of rich men' --has inherent or inalienable rights is pure bullshit. It's absurd on its face. How did this idiotic idea become so ingrained?
CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE!We --a revolution of the people --shall make the laws under the common law and ancient principles that declare people not only have rights but are, in fact, sovereign! Should we the people so decree, Fox and the handful of huge corporations that presume to tell us what to do and what to believe, have neither right nor privileges, then Fox and the handful of huge corporations will be either shut down or taken over!
Begin by organizing and insisting upon an FCC with teeth! Insist upon restoring the Fairness Doctrine! Insist upon limitations to corporate ownership of media or prohibiting corporation ownership outright! Remember --'legal abstractions' have NO rights and certainly not those of 'real people'. Insist upon ownership rules that break up the media monopolies. Measures like this existed before Ronald Reagan began an assault upon the rights for the benefit of abstractions, before the GOP conspired with More's 'conspiracy of rich men'. More generally, the people have paid for Reagan/GOP fascism with the truth itself. Therefore, wage revolution against corporate 'person-hood'. In the absence of corporate influence, government will simply have no choice but to respond to real people or just disband. Certainly, as the fall of Rome proves, ineffective, top-heavy bureaucracies whose only purpose is the waging of wars of self-perpetuation and aggression, are simply not needed. Not surprisingly, the corporations have it the wrong way around again. Green energy is NOT the problem; it is rather the solution. It's corporations that resist or block the development of 'green energy' that are the problem. As I learned in broadcasting --if you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem. In America, the corporations ARE the problem. The very concept of 'corporation' is institutionalized mental constipation, a block against reason and inquiry.
...when I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths, which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.
They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.
But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
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