CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE END OF OUR CONSTITUTION? Rule of Law no longer exists in the US. It was totally destroyed on September 8, 1974. Since then, every American has known that punishment for an illegal deed depends on one’s contacts. “It’s who you know stupid.” Let us hope that President Barack Obama will change that, and bring us back into ethical civilization. To do so, however, he would have to indict the whole administration of George W. Bush, and certainly Vice President Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and their staff, for crimes against humanity. But Congress and especially the US Supreme Court, by its usual 5–4 decisions, will not permit him from doing so. Hence, our chances of regaining our coveted Rule of Law are extremely meek. Of course, the rich gangsters, whether CEOs of Bechtel, Enron, Halliburton, AIG, or any other major corporation, or the country’s top bureaucrats, may act so outrageously that they may eventually spend time in jail, maybe, though certainly not presidents, vice-presidents or CIA heads who lie, cheat and violate so many laws that thousands, perhaps millions, of innocents are murdered all over the world every year. The disgusting corporate owners who give themselves millions in bail-out parachutes, enjoy very legally the good life, made from the pensions of hundreds of thousands of their retirees, who, after 30 years of loyal work, have to beg to survive. But as we saw so vividly on television when Hurricane Katrina’s devastating torrents wiped out New Orleans’ shabby ghettos, the poor surviving blacks, who lived there because they could not afford the white-owned high ground and who then had to steal food because their families were hungry, or more shocking to the white middleclass which escaped in their fancy cars, dared to steal a TV set -- oh my god, property! -- risked being killed by a vicious order issued to both local and military policemen: “shoot to kill.” That’s rule of law today, as re-defined by a bastardized Constitution. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein said that “Watergate” was “not about a break-in. It was about a criminal conspiracy to undermine the Constitution by the President of the United States.” But the Constitution has been undermined, crumpled, literally for centuries. And by and large, the US Supreme Court has either approved or remained silent. Some such cases are classics, such as when the court approved President Lincoln’s order to blockade Southern ports before the declaration of war, or when it okayed the constitutionality under the War Powers Act of prohibiting liquor as detrimental to the nation’s goal of raising enlistment for World War I -- in 1919, after the war had ended (and that great ruling was pushed by famed liberal Justice Louis Brandeis). 179 CHAPTER TWENTY ONE More seriously, the court did not object to President Truman’s “police action” invasion of Korea, or President Kennedy’s “advisers” invasion of Vietnam or President Johnson’s 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic or President Reagan’s similar act in Grenada, all on the grounds, totally fabricated, of saving US lives. The Supreme Court had three chances to rule on the validity of the War on Vietnam, and refused to issue an opinion. Nor, of course, will this court ever consider the possibility that “preventive war,” as advocated today by the power-madmen in Washington, is totally in violation of the spirit of the constitution even if Congress gave and continues to give those madmen the legal tools with which to wage it. More recently, the court has even destroyed a basic right of capitalist America, or rather the rights of small capitalists: it ruled that under the law of “eminent domain,” passed by Congress to facilitate states wanting to build highways or bridges, a big corporation had the right to seize the property of small land or building owners if the result might create more jobs and/or more tax revenue. So now no home is safe in America from capitalist predators. The most outrageous violation of the Constitution, so far, was carried out by a 5 to 4 decision of the Supreme Court in the 2000 election. True, Democratic Party candidate Al Gore’s lawyers were stupid; instead of demanding a recall of all of the state of Florida, which we now know had elected him by over 50,000, he knit-picked a few counties, giving the Republicans a chance to say, yeah, but what about that other county. Still, in that case, the court validated a coup-d’etat, and no one moved. For the blacks, the poor, the exploited and the young, it just didn’t matter any more; they knew there was no rule of law in America. Aided by a “convenient” 9/11, the Bush clique claimed that national security demanded a continuous effort against terrorism, and used that demand to crush meaningful dissent in America. The Supreme Court under its new chief, John Roberts, approved, allowing the US to edge ever closer to a vicious fascist dictatorship. Academia also approved. American best-selling historians, such as David McCullough, Joseph J. Ellis, Richard Brookhiser, Ron Chernow and Walter Isaacson, have long been extremely adept at re-writing US history so as to make it fit with what the average American has been taught since kindergarten. As Daniel Lazare meticulously documented in his The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy, the US Constitution is used to put dissenters in jail or, as in the case of the Rosenbergs, to execute them, not to curtail the power or programs of presidents. It has been used to tell each child, that America’s forefathers were noble, gentle and magnanimous. It has been done ad infinitum. Every schoolboy believes, for example, that the American Revolution was waged by folks fed-up with exorbitant taxes imposed by nasty England. Fact is, as New York Times Book Review editor Barry Gewen wrote recently: “It was the English who were shouldering the real burden, paying taxes on everything from property to beer, from soap to candles, tobacco, paper, leather and beeswax.” Even the infamous tea-tax, which we were all told started the revolution, was paid mostly by the British at home. As for America’s heroes, they were mostly despicable, selfish, entrepreneurs. John Hancock, for example, was a millionaire smuggler and a thief, who with other “great founding fathers,” such as 180 .