The U.S. Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. What this nation needs now is separation of wealth and state.
Without such a protection, Americans stand to lose their democracy. They'll be ruled instead by an aristocracy of 1 percenters.
That's the 1 percenters' plan. To them, it was no more than a perk when the U.S. Supreme Court enabled politicians to open their wallets for unlimited, anonymous campaign contributions. That's because way before the 2010 Citizens United ruling, 1 percenters were working on a takeover. If the 99 percent don't stop them soon, don't establish some sort of separation of wealth and state, then the nation will lose its founding precepts -- that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Aristocracies can ignore the governed.
Already the 1 percenters have been extraordinarily successful. The rich really do enjoy advantages. They've succeeded in stuffing Congress with their peers. In America, fewer than 1 percent of all people are millionaires. In Congress, 47 percent are. The median net worth of a U.S. senator in 2010 was $2.56 million.
Those guys haven't experienced what it's like to try to pay a mortgage, fix the car and keep food on the table for the average household with a median income of less than $52,000. They're completely out of touch with the 50 million Americans who don't have health insurance.
In addition, the 1 percenters implemented a system to influence even those lawmakers who are not millionaires. It's called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporations and the rich, like the billionaire Koch brothers, give ALEC money, which it uses to write "model" legislation, like voter suppression laws. ALEC's lawmaker members, mostly conservative Republicans, pay dues of $50 a year. ALEC entices them to attend swanky conferences with freebies, like ALEC-paid hotel rooms, ALEC-paid plane rides and God knows what else ALEC-paid. Of course, those aren't bribes. But the free vacations may incline lawmaker members to introduce ALEC-written legislation.
ALEC is sly. It doesn't come right out and say its "model" voter identification laws are intended to suppress balloting by Democrats. ALEC contends they're designed to prevent voter fraud. Within the past two years, 10 states passed these laws.
But in-person voter fraud, the kind these identification laws are supposedly intended to prevent, barely exists. In the dozen years since 2000, only 10 cases occurred in the entire United States, according to a study funded by the Carnegie and Knight foundations.
That's one case for every 15 million eligible voters. By contrast, as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack the government-issued identification these laws typically require. That's millions of disenfranchised people in those 10 states.
And studies have found that those people tend to be young, women, minorities, the elderly, low income, the disabled and more likely to vote Democrat -- if they could vote. In fact, a prominent Republican in Pennsylvania, the largest battleground state to have adopted a voter suppression law, admitted it. Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said passing the state's voter suppression law was an achievement for the GOP because it meant Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would win the state. That's a state where Democrats have a registration edge and Obama has a lead in polls.
That's how it's done. That's how the 1 percent creates an aristocracy for themselves. They make the wealthy few more powerful by buying elimination of that nettlesome one-person-one-vote democracy problem. The rich count more when the riffraff don't count at all.
A handful of one-tenth-of-one-percenters, including billionaires Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and hedge funders Kenneth Griffin, Cliff Asness and Paul Singer, will spend $500 million to install their chosen candidates in the White House. Adelson by himself is expected to give $100 million to elect Romney and Paul Ryan, one tenth of the billion the Republicans are expected to spend. That kind of money will buy Adelson a little more than a couple of overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
In addition to ALEC, these billionaires bought for themselves shadow parties, as writer Matt Bai described them in the New York Times. They fund groups like Club for Growth, which defeats Republican candidates they deem not conservative enough. They finance groups like Americans for Prosperity, which promotes ultra-conservative economic ideas.
They're willing to buy influence, but not pay taxes to support their country. The Ryan Roadmap budget would reduce millionaire Romney's tax rate from about 14 percent to less than 1 percent. And, for the 99 percent, Ryan would destroy Medicare as we know it.
In the early days of this republic, John Adams worried about the country creeping toward aristocracy. As he prepared to take the office of vice president, some leaders, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, argued that government officials should serve without pay. Here's what biographer David McCullough wrote about the incident in his biography of Adams:
"Were a law to be made 'that no man should hold an office who had not a private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,' Adams had written earlier while in London, then the consequence would be that 'all offices would be monopolized by the rich; the poor and the middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.'"
Here's the difference between George Washington and John Adams. The general was a wealthy Virginia planter whose riches were made in part on the backs of slaves. Adams was a middle-class Massachusetts farmer who opposed slavery and never owned a human being.
Congress agreed with Adams. Aristocracy was forestalled. Today's middle-class farmers, mechanics and nurses now inherit that responsibility to separate wealth and state.
This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.
HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at the corrupting influence of money on our politics August 29th and September 5th from 12-4 pm ET and 6-10 pm ET. Click here to check it out -- and join the conversation.
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Miles Mogulescu: Paul Ryan: Lying Liar
Part 2 of 2
I don't want those ideals to stamped out, obliterated, destroyed, brick by brick. Under Romney/Ryan, what happens to liberty? My freedom, my choices will be dictated by the length of rope I'm allowed to have, not laws. Imagine eminent domain, completely and totally unhampered?
Your house will no longer be your castle. Even if you own it outright. All it will take is a developer, with an idea. The basics are in place, water, sewer, etc. All they need is the right political connection, and it's theirs. Remember the fix is in. Any legal recourse you may have had, is gone. Families have already lost their homes from eminent domain, but on a smaller scale. But with money, buying power, it could get worse.
NOW. Politics & Economy. The Debate over Eminent Domain. Kelo v. New London | PBS http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/domaindebate.html
Homeowner Drops Trump Suit Vera Coking Accepted A $90,000 Settlement From The Casino Mogul's Contractor, For Damages To Her Home. She's Still Fighting To Keep The House. - Philly.comhttp://articles.philly.com/1997-02-19/news/25533159_1_donald-trump-trump-plaza-eminent-domain
IN BRIEF; Follow-Ups: Judge Rejects Property Seizure . . - New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/26/nyregion/in-brief-follow-ups-judge-rejects-property-seizure.html?src=pm
Part 1 of 2
It's impressive how far-sighted the forefathers of our great country were. The Bill of Rights is a classic example, along with the Federalist Papers, which you can obtain on line at http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/poldocs/fed-papers.pdf
The following can be found on page 8:
The utility of the union to your political prosperity
The insufficiency of the present confederation to preserve that
union
The necessity of a government at least equally energetic with
the one proposed, to the attainment of this object
The conformity of the proposed constitution to the true principles
of republican government
Its analogy to your own state constitution
and lastly, The additional security which its adoption will afford
to the preservation of that species of government, to liberty,
and toproperty.
Any people that dare to disagree with the status quo and seek a better life would be quickly identified and located by all those interconnected public and private cameras and computers and scooped up and held for indefinite dention while they can be indoctrinated and brainwashed to accept the new status quo as "meek" follower class that expect their reward after death - to inherit the earth and spend eternity free of want in "heaven".
The 1% has bought themselves and aristocracy. Now they are trying to reenact slavery through debt. Suppressing the votes of the masses, increasing the tax break’s for themselves while eroding the safety net that so many Americans have come to rely on increasingly in the last few years. It is not a question of "if" but "when" will it get to the point that the wealthy/corporations succeed in eliminating all social services and create a second generation feudalistic society.
Lobbying in government has to go! Laws have to change! People need to draft up ethical agreements for their representatives to sign.
How can these messages get out to the masses when the broadcasting outlets are controlled by those ultra rich? Why is the cable channel Fox news owned by Rupert Murdoch (who also controlled every single prime minister of Britain) not held more accountable?
It is up to us to save our country!
Stand up to the aristocrats, standup for our heritage!
Too many people sitting around with a lot of cake should be careful ... as Marie Antoinette.
This is based on adjusted gross income which includes income from all sources and is before the standard deduction, itemized expenses, and exemptions for dependents.
The average income of the bottom 95% (tax forms showing income below $154,600) is only $40,500 and the average income of the bottom 90% (tax forms showing income below $112,100) is only $30,500.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0#table1
The capitalist system we've embraced to govern ourselves has always had a "lotto" like feel to it. The possibility of "hitting the big one" keeps us meek and standing in line for our ticket to real freedom. IOW's, "wealth." I don't envision that changing any time soon from what I see going on around me ...
Myself and my brother both worked from our low teens and are still working into our 50's and we have been able to put away enough to be very wealthy. No one teaches pay yourself first. if you take 10% of everything you make and invest it in yourself you will be rich before your 50. yes lets bring down the system that allows everyone to become rich .
Part 1
Would that it were ever so. The US has always promoted itself as the bastion of freedom in the world, assigning near deity status to the founders of the nation. History however, shows a much different outcome than what the people were taught over the course of time from the founding of the constitution forward. What we've really been is "somewhat free'er" than most of the rest of the civilized world some of the time. But even so, only wealthy, white, educated, males need apply. Though the words themselves are lofty indeed, the application has been completely lacking from the very beginning. In the process, the revolutionary spirit of the wealthy white males that founded the country has been lost since the civil war at least. The brief time that most of us live is barely enough time for a few of us to even grasp an understanding of how we're organized and what can be done to improve our outcomes knowing that we won't live long enough to experience the fruits of such labor. Most of us lack such understanding for so much of our lives that by the time we begin to see it, we're already so entangled in the web of it all that there's little we can do to change it.
Now even evangelicals are preaching that ________ (fill in the blank with God, Jesus, Allah etc) wants you to be rich (as they are collecting money from the poor in order to finance their mansions and fleet of rolls royces)