You don't honestly believe that do you? Anything that is changed to the constitution that goes through the amendment process IS legitimate. ANYTHING. No liberty minded American can deny that.
It is the things changed that DOES NOT go through the legal amendment process that we have issue with, as should any intelligent American.
Oh really?
I've been watching the political process for a long time and I've lived longer than African-Americans have even been relatively free in this country .. I don't remember conservatives or so-called constitutionalists at the forefront of any of the social changes in America. In fact, they've stood in opposition to them.
You personally may have no problem with things constitutionally changed, but that is not the sentiment of the "government is evil" fad. They want to take things out of the constitution. Hell, many of them still arguing against civil rughts laws.
"Government is evil" is a notion thrown out there by the left to disparage those of us on the right. We have a healthy skepticism of government, and why not? Take a look at history, every society that has collapsed has done so due primarily to the excesses of government.
And there is that thing that we'd rather be in control of our destiny rather than having some bureaucrat mandating everything from our diet to our sleep habits.
A healthy skepticism? Where is your healthy skepticism of corporations and special interests?
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There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks, they maximize wealth, they create jobs. Theyre a great thing but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they dont have the same aspirations for America that you and I do.
A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits and the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system which is just a system of legalized bribery to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the market place to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the common, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.
And that doesnt mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means theyre amoral and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process.
Let them do their thing but they should not be participating in our political process because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic.
Its against the law in this country because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins and thats the way the law works and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process.
This White House (Bush) has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid the domination of our government by corporate power.
This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders republican and democrat have been warning the American public against the domination by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another republican in his most famous speech ever warned America against the domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country I fear the bankers more."
Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of Fascism" and Benito Mussolini who had an insiders view of that process said the same thing. Essentially he said that - he complained that Fascism should not be called Fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state of corporate power.
And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called Communism.
The domination of government by business is called Fascism.
And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 2005
