If you study the actual workings of the justice system over the course of our history, it becomes clear that it favors the rich over the poor, the white over the black, the orthodox over the radical.
The very structure of the system insures it, with judges generally coming from the upper classes, often appointed by the political elite, with money dominating the system at every turn, as in the greater
difficulty of poor people in being represented adequately in court.
If you study the legislation passed by Congress throughout history, from Hamilton’s economic program in the first Congress to the tax laws of today, benefiting corporations and the wealthy, you will see that our representative system represents the wealthy in large part. If you observe our wars, you find that the so-called ‘checks and balances’ we learn about in school, where no one branch of government can dominate, simply don’t work in times of war. The President decides on war, Congress goes along obediently, and the Supreme Court has never ruled that a war is unconstitutional, although judicial review is presumably part of their job, and every war since World War II has violated the requirement of the constitution that Congress alone can declare war. [hz]
“Budget conservatives” and “constitutional literalists” don’t seem to stand up on that issue; Zinn is right: Congress must declare war. They don’t. It’s as if they don’t really care about the constitution or the budget after all.
They don’t. They only care about power and how much money they can grab for themselves.
Charly@#1:
They only care about power and how much money they can grab for themselves.
That seems to be the unavoidable conclusion.
Conservatives have no opposition to confiscating the wages of workers, or confiscating the lands of indigenous people (see: Ayn Rand & Native Americans).
@#3
I just googled for this. Now I feel like throwing up. I already knew that Ayn Rand had said some embarrassing or even outright disgusting things, but her quote about Native Americans was just too awful. How can somebody be such an asshole. . .
Of course, it’s nothing new that many people can be extremely hypocritical. They will defend some right (be it property rights or any other rights) when it’s their property that is about to be taken, but they will mysteriously change their opinion the moment it is somebody else’s property and they are the ones taking it.
@ 4 Ieva Skrebele
Interestingly enough Rand was ethnically Jewish.
I am not sure what that says except she probably was clinically insane? Or had the level of personal awareness of Donald Trump on a bad day?
jrkrideau@#5:
I am not sure what that says except she probably was clinically insane? Or had the level of personal awareness of Donald Trump on a bad day?
She was so utterly selfish that it didn’t register?
@ 6 Marcus
She was so utterly selfish that it didn’t register?
Yes. Better/shorter way of my “had the level of personal awareness of Donald Trump on a bad day” though I also meant that the awareness was more all-pervasive.
She may have been lucky to get out of the Soviet Union alive but I don’t think she ever understood that her early successes in the USA were almost certainly due to her Soviet education, either.
jrkrideau@#7:
She may have been lucky to get out of the Soviet Union alive but I don’t think she ever understood that her early successes in the USA were almost certainly due to her Soviet education, either.
She appears to have made no effort to interpret any of what happened to her as anything other than a consequence of her awesomeness.
I assume you’ve run across the various analysis of her very problematic fan-service of William Hickman [for one example] making one of your personal heroes out of a serial killer who dismembers people is … problematic, to say the least. I went through a period where I thought Aleister Crowley was interesting (so was P.T. Barnum!) but I out-grew it. Rand seems to have been very good at adopting a belief that served her, and not challenging it after it was adopted. Those are not the behaviors of a healthy rationalist.
@8 Marcus
Well, a lot of fools and idots these days make a hero out of Hitler who, when you think of it, was one of the spectacular failures of the 20th C so Rand’s fandom seems reasonable, for some value of reasonable.