July 15, 2012 by David K. Sutton
Bill Moyers: A sham for invalidating democracy in the name of democracy
Bill Moyers:
Let’s see if we’ve got this right.
On the one hand, conservatives declare that corporations and the super rich can spend all they want on exercising their First Amendment rights, but on the other, they demand to keep it secret so the rest of us can’t exercise our First Amendment rights to fight back.
Have you ever heard a more cowardly lion? It’s one big joke, big enough to make you cry.
Three things don’t go together: money, secrecy, democracy. And that’s the nub of the matter. This is all a sham for invalidating democracy in the name of democracy. It’s the trick authoritarians always use to hide their real intention, in this case, absolute power over our public life and institutions: the privatization of everything.
The Supreme Court is pointing the way. Instead of mitigating the worst excesses of both the state and private sector, the court has taken sides, saying to the masked wealth of the one percent, “America is yours for the taking, for the buying.” That’s what George the 3rd thought too, which brings us back to the celebration of the 4th of July, to the Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have thought that a little uprising now and then would be good for what ails us.
This time, the overweening power is not the monarchy, but plutocracy, the convergence of the political, religious, and corporate right that would keep us in the dark about where all that money is coming from and who it’s buying, until one day, we wake up and our country is no longer our own. Fortunately those orange jumpsuits come in one size fits all. So remember moneyed lords and ladies what King George learned the hard way, you can only push your subjects so far.
