The Flaw in the War Against Women

By TRB

Everyone has heard the begrudging complaint, "Oh, they're always a step ahead of you."

Well, that should be amended because in truth they are miles out in front. Independents, progressives and liberals would do well to remember that. We took our eyes off the ball while the Democrats turned into slightly less grumpy Republicans right in broad daylight. If not for the presidential veto and the presence of a few sane Democrats in the Senate, we would be sitting back in 1938 right now, sucked into the black hole of ignorance that the U.S. Supreme Court created when it ruled that money, cash money and free speech were the same thing.

Last month we were talking about the war on unions. This month it is war on women. Expect to see a war on all people who believe in freedom of speech, privacy, independent lifestyles, various political thought, all Gays and Lesbians, their children, their rights in every regard to the control of their personal lives. Expect to see these crimes because you will.

And don't sit back in your easy chair Mr. Normal, believing they won't get around to you or someone you love, a child, a niece or nephew, a grandchild. Soon it will be your turn Mr. Normal because although they once enjoyed holding you out there as an example of the way a righteous life should be lived, you are simply no longer needed. The whole thing was a shake down from the beginning.

Five Supreme Court Justices,(A majority) which includes the Chief Justice have sold our rights to the people with the overseas banking accounts bursting with what the Supreme Court considers America's "free speech." These individuals, mostly tax-hating right wingers who could care less if your mother died in a nursing home or out in the woods, folks like the Koch Brothers who threw so much money at the Governor of Wisconsin and the state legislation that they almost completely destroyed the unions - who want to make our lives miserable so they can make more profit.

By our corrupt Supreme Court's reckoning, that wasn't money being stuffed into envelopes to pay for favors for the Koch Brothers. That wasn't bribery, although its manner is the exact replication of the breaking of the laws of bribery. This is what that Court did. It basically made bribery legal. The Koch Brothers were simply exercising their rights to "free speech" in all those pay offs.

From now on, all legislators can take as much "free speech" as a corporation offers. Whose "free speech" is going to impress them? Yours or General Motors? The Supreme Court decision creating parity between free speech and money should be unconstitutional, for the simple fact that it seriously weakens the effectiveness of the right of free speech for the vast majority of Americans. If money can be considered "free speech" it also takes a lot of power away from individuals exercising their right to assembly. Again, what politician is going to care when 500,000 protest legally in Washington D.C.?

When a lawmaker can receive money as "free speech" he no longer has the incentive to care about the rights of the people. He has become just another corporate member of America's corporate government. He may as well report to a boardroom, not to Congress. He doesn't work for the people anymore. He works for corporations whose interests are likely in direct conflict with the people who voted him into office.

Overseeing this phony democracy we have this lizard-skinned Republican "Speaker" who often courts favor with a group of characters who somehow escaped from "Alice in Wonderland," calling itself the Tea Party. And those clueless Democrats who still can't understand why Clinton would make love in a room just a little larger than a broom closet when there were all those perfectly and historically correct bedrooms right upstairs.

But this really is a boring bunch. No need to call them and complain or gather in large numbers outside our buildings in Washington which we allow them to sit in and destroy our lives.

The Supreme Court thought it could create a corporate democracy, a true contradiction in terms. By making money free speech our Justices forgot. They forgot that the free speech/money would have to come from somewhere. Unlike human beings whose free speech just comes from their intellect or lack thereof, the corporations free speech/money has to be given to it. And we are the consumers who decide how much of that free speech/money the corporations will have with which to bribe our Congress.

We could stop the corporation "free speech" with a very effective gag called the boycott. But more on that later.

For some reason there is a belief in this country that the corporation is a very powerful thing, all powerful in fact. We know now that the Supreme Court decision basically allows corporation control of our government. There's a flaw in that thinking though. There are two relatively recent examples of this.

Most people figure the Vietnam War stopped because we lost it. We were losing it. But the corporations pulled the plug on it. When LBJ realized that even the corporations were against it, he gave up. What was the sense? The corporations didn't like the feeling in this country caused by the war. It did not not make for a good buying and selling environment. Peace marches were clogging downtown areas. How was anyone ever going to buy anything?

The war came to an end when it posed a danger to U.S. corporate profits. In the same way, it wasn't Martin Luther King who won the passage of the Civil Rights Bill. It wasn't LBJ. It was corporations, who didn't give a damn about civil rights, and still don't. They just couldn't handle it when young African American men began to burn those neighborhoods, their neighborhoods, in Watts in Detroit. When the corporations saw the level of violence in that unrest, they jumped right on the Civil Rights bandwagon. These two incidents are not unknown to most thinking Americans; they just don't like to look at what they really were. Instead, they have revised history.

Now the hapless Democrats, The Republicans the Lizard-skinned Speaker of the House and Lewis Carroll's characters from "Alice in Wonderland" have decided to wage a war on our sisters, on the children of unmarried women, on their health, on their very food supply. They have even decided to murder them rather than stop a life threatening pregnancy. They want to dismantle Planned Parenthood.

I don't know about you but I grew up in a family with sisters. My father always said what happens to one of you, happens to all. Take care of each other. My father was right and most men out there know that. We take care of those we love.

Now that our government is run by corporations, it no longer makes any sense to march on Washington, or to phone your Congressman. What do you think will interest him more, your protest or the free speech/money from corporations, the very life blood that keeps him in office? So forget the politicians in Washington. Who is really running America?

I've said this before, but the Supreme Court by giving money the same rights as free speech has turned control of the government over to the corporations. That can be dealt with, however. Their power is a myth. And this is why. They can't do much, if anything, without money. For that reason we should seriously consider using a boycott to fight this war against women.

Pick a corporation, any of the thirty or forty who now run this corporate state. The other night, as part of a discussion group, I chose General Electric that also has a major TV network you can boycott. But there are others. Boycott all of them in some way or other. For example, begin to change up on the product brand names you usually purchase.

Just reduce their profits once, and they will be up on Capitol Hill telling our pretend government to leave our sisters alone.