The US Supreme Court struck down a key portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, gutting one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and marching the country resolutely towards open fascism and authoritarianism.
With this act of the extremist Supreme Court, the disenfranchisement and silencing of the American citizen is closer to completion. Not satisfied with their previous rape of voting rights—the illegal installation George W. Bush to the seat of world power in 2000—this cabal of corrupt political facilitators has essentially given political operatives and corporations its blessing to subvert elections at will.
Racism, race-related voter suppression, and other methods of flagrant election manipulation will be “allowed to happen.” The ability to install a chosen politician into power has become that much easier, and political change that much more impossible. Efforts to “clean up the vote” now face permanent derailment.
Justices (or more accurately “Injustices”) Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy know that institutional racism has never been eradicated. With a wink and a nod to their fellow Washington colleagues, they know that a gridlocked Congress—dominated by fellow right-wing extremists and bipartisan consensus corporatists—will not undo the damage they just caused. For all of them, the Constitution is a piece of waste paper.
For the Washington consensus, and particularly right wing extremist Tea Party fanatics, this coup is a cause for celebration. Consider every US election in the future already stolen. Or perhaps more accurately, preemptively seized for corporate power.
What must be understood is that the destruction of this fundamental liberty is no isolated act by the Supreme Court. There is a long-term agenda that is being hammered out, and it does not include the preservation of civil rights. It certainly does not include protecting or preserving democracy.
The United States has been in a state of emergency since 9/11/01. This state of emergency is permanent. The PATRIOT Act is eternal. War is endless.
As detailed by Michael C. Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, the attacks of 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act sounded the death knell for civil liberties. As he noted, “thousands of times per day, in the discourse of public officials and candidates, in the media and on the street, America is exalted as the land of the free. While the truth of the matter was never quite as simple as that, the decades when this sentiment had a real basis in fact and in law are long gone.” Gone, or in the process of being eliminated, are the rights of association, information, speech, privacy, protest, legal representation, a free press, and freedom from unreasonable searches—among many others.
Recent events merely serve as reminders of what has already been lost. A police state already flourishes within US borders. As the Edward Snowden affair rudely underscores, the NSA and the CIA have the world under surveillance, but on a scale and depth even beyond Snowden’s own whistleblowing revelations. As demonstrated by the mobilization of force in the wake of the Boston bombing, the country can be locked down the moment there is an order from the Homeland Security apparatus.
This is how an empire in decline, facing world resource scarcity and the sunset of its global petroleum-based system, maintains control.
This is how a militarized national security and war machine keeps its citizens monitored and surveilled, shackled, and pacified.
And without a vote, politically silenced.
Larry Chin is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.
