Tagged: self-destruction

“As untold millions of dollars pour into the shadowy campaign troughs of the presidential candidates, voters need to be reminded of the rosy assumptions of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that legitimized the new spending frenzy. In allowing unlimited spending on candidates by corporations and unions, the court’s decision, in 2010, blithely pronounced, ‘A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today.’ Effective disclosure exists? The court majority in the 5-4 decision should have been watching this month when the Republican-controlled Congress, which has firmly bottled up all campaign disclosure legislation, voted to further cripple disclosure at two of its most vital points. In the new budget bill, Republicans inserted a provision blocking the [IRS] from creating rules to curb the growing abuse of the tax law by thinly veiled political machines posing as ‘social welfare’ organizations. These groups are financed by rich special-interest donors who do not have to reveal their identities under the tax law. So much for effective disclosures at the I.R.S.”

Source: The Editorial Board. “Political Dark Money Just Got Darker.” New York Times. December 25, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/opinion/political-dark-money-just-got-darker.html.

“O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship…Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed. And so the gods will depart from mankind, a grievous thing!, and only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches by main force into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, and robberies, and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth no longer stand unshaken, and the sea will bear no ships; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, nor will the stars pursue their constant course in heaven; all voices of the gods will of necessity be silenced and dumb; the fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken in sullen stagnation. After this manner will old age come upon the world. Religion will be no more; all things will be disordered and awry; all good will disappear. But when all this has befallen, Asclepius, then the Master and Father, God, the first before all, the maker of that god who first came into being, will look on that which has come to pass, and will stay the disorder by the counterworking of his will, which is the good. He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; he will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence. And thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect, so that the Kosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker and restorer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with unceasing hymns of praise and blessing. Such is the new birth of the Kosmos; it is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-striking restoration of all nature; and it is wrought in the process of time by the eternal will of God.”

Source: an excerpt from Asclepius.

we are witnessing the self-destruction of Amerikkka. is corruption within our government the cause?

In thinking about the prevention of corruption in their new nation, the Framers considered ancient as well as modern histories of failure. As with eighteenth-century British intellectuals, the Framers’ political thought and discussions were infused by the recently published (in 1776) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, references to the Roman and Greek corruption are scattered throughout the convention and ratification debates. “Can we copy from Greece and Rome?” Charles Pinckney asked. The Framers constantly compared the British government to the end of Rome–where a well-designed government was eventually internally corrupted and, therefore, self-destructed.

Look at what’s happening in Greece and Spain! And we (which includes our banking institutions, the auto industry, etc.) are not “too big to fail.” Printing imaginary money won’t fix our problems. Lying to ourselves won’t either. Neither President is going to “create jobs” or improve our economy long-term because the system is broken. Why? Because it’s inherently corrupt. I could insert the history of how the Christian Europeans “discovered” this land (and other countries around the world that were already inhabited), but I don’t have the time.  As the saying goes, what goes around, comes around and finally, in 2012, we are about to witness the fall of both the European and American empire. It was definitely preventable — for a lot of our problems have always been malleable. However, the biggest threat to good government has always been corruption and those in power (majority White) typically display this behavior. It’s imperative that we develop a new system.

Check out Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. It demonstrates that a better world and society is truly obtainable, and its closer to becoming actualized than we might think. Expand your mind.

Source: Zephyr Teachout, The Anti-Corruption Principle, 94 Cornell L Review 341, pg. 350 (2009).