Category: Politics

I am not familiar with politics, but Paul Craig Robert had written three blogs about election being stolen, can turn into another similar confusing situation as that of January 6th 2021 which caused a upheaval of the country. All these happen make me distrust so called “Democracy”. Politics is bought by money, government had openly allow campaign donations which had a huge loop hole to round about doing all kind of manipulation by the will of the big donors and political know-hows which can swing the votes. Of course a lot of it has to do with the Supreme Court voiding much of the campaign finance laws in “Citizen vs. United“.  In 1995, Thomas Sowell examined the elitist social movement that has now metastasized into Woke culture. Many comments that Thomas Sowell is a greater American mind, gave us some clue of the core of the issues.

Election reflections at Liberty Pen website reminds us that election night may have held the promise of a red wave but delivered the same old stagnate pond. Discontent in America was not what many of us thought. ………. A great deal of wisdom is displayed in an ancient Chinese adage: “When I talk, I put on my mask. When I act, I take it off.” – another contraction! In other words, talk is cheap; actions are what matter. Consider that about three quarters of respondents told pollsters that they felt America was going in the wrong direction, yet when the time for action arrived, they reinstalled the status quo. 

Not to mention nowadays big organization can easily use technology to distribute centralized plan without much staff. The book Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything published in 2016 actually gave you detail account of how this can be done in today’s anarchy environment. It offers a riveting, behind-the-scene narrative of how a small “distributed organizing” team operating on the fringes of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign was able to identify, recruit, train, and activate hundreds of thousands of volunteers to make over seventy-five million calls, launch eight million individually sent text messages, and to hold more than one hundred thousand public meetings in an effort to put Sander’s insurgent campaign over the top. This is the very reason why Socrates Hated Democracy. Because such operation is a phenomenon of separation of state and church, and can be easily taken over by the motto of the end justify the means.

The similar scheme of operation is also nowadays applied to business process. The book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? It’s not capitalism, it’s not neoliberalism—what if it’s something worse? 2019.  Author McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.

While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

But of course judges ARE fallible human beings affected by the same politics as anybody else. If court decisions WERE made on the basis of defined objective principles, all Supreme Court decisions would be rendered unanimously, not split 5 to 4 as most of the important decisions are. So in the end, the federal, state, and local laws are no more and no less than what the federal judges say they are.

It is surely a paradox to say that we live in a “democracy” when the reality is that a majority of five of the nine unelected Supreme Court justices with lifetime tenure trump the elected President, the 535 elected Congresspersons and Senators, the 50 state legislatures, and every state and local court in the nation. The paradox is that an unelected judiciary appears to be essential to preserving democracy. Examples of what happens in countries where the judiciary is weak can be seen in Latin America where all too often the law is whatever the president or junta of the day says it is. Nobody’s liberties are safe where the judiciary can be overruled by the whims of chief executives and legislatures.

Americans instinctively understand this paradox. Presidents and Congresses have often criticized the courts, but none has ever succeeded in defying them. Mr. Jefferson famously tried to remove the Federalist “midnight judges” appointed by his predecessor John Adams, and was administered a thumping rebuke not only by Justice Marshall but by his own party in Congress. FDR nearly destroyed his otherwise-popular presidency by attempting to “pack the court” with justices favorable to his views. Now Democratic party has embarked on the same unproductive path of trying to influence (intimidate?) the Supremes into reversing their positions. Thus, as much as we are prone to criticizing the courts,  we instinctively understand that they should remain the supreme authority on the law.

IS there a way to “improve” the decision-making processes of the courts, presumably to make them more true to the Founder’s ideals as expressed in the Constitution, without disturbing their cherished role as final arbiters of the law? Judge Wilkinson, a Federal Appellate Judge, sets out to answer that question.

Judge Wilkinson compassionately offer an explaining the paradox of judicial democracy of American constitutional law undergone a transformation in Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance (Inalienable Rights). Issues once left to the people have increasingly become the province of the courts. Subjects as diverse as abortion rights and firearms regulations, health care reform and counterterrorism efforts, not to mention a millennial presidential election, are more and more the domain of judges.

What sparked this development? In this engaging volume, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson argues that America’s most brilliant legal minds have launched a set of cosmic constitutional theories that, for all their value, are undermining self-governance. Thinkers as diverse as Justices William Brennan and Antonin Scalia, Professor John Hart Ely, Judges Robert Bork and Richard Posner, have all produced seminal interpretations of our Founding document, but ones that promise to imbue courts with unprecedented powers. While crediting the theorists for the sparkling quality of their thoughts, Judge Wilkinson argues they will slowly erode the role of representative institutions in America and leave our children bereft of democratic liberty.

The loser in all the theoretical fireworks is the old and honorable tradition of judicial restraint. The judicial modesty once practiced by Learned Hand, John Harlan, and Oliver Wendell Holmes has given way to competing schools of liberal and conservative activism seeking sanctuary in Living Constitutionalism, Originalism, Process Theory, or the supposedly anti-theoretical creed of Pragmatism. Each of these seemingly disparate theories promises their followers an intellectually respectable route to congenial political outcomes from the bench. Judge Wilkinson calls for a plainer, simpler, self-disciplined commitment to judicial restraint and democratic governance, a course that alas may be impossible so long as the cosmic constitutionalists so dominate contemporary legal thought.

But things happened in 1960s may give us some more insight. Judge Wilkinson argued in All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s , a warm and intimate memoir, that 1960s inflicted enormous damage on our country; even at this very hour we see the decade’s imprint in so much of what we say and do. The chapters reveal the harm done to the true meaning of education, to our capacity for lasting personal commitments, to our respect for the rule of law, to our sense of rootedness and home, to our desire for service, to our capacity for national unity, to our need for the sustenance of faith. Judge Wilkinson does not seek to lecture but to share in the most personal sense what life was like in the 1960s, and to describe the influence of those frighteningly eventful years upon the present day.

Judge Wilkinson acknowledges the good things accomplished by the Sixties and nourishes the belief that we can learn from that decade ways to build a better future. But he asks his own generation to recognize its youthful mistakes and pleads with future generations not to repeat them. The author’s voice is one of love and hope for America. But our national prospects depend on facing honestly the full magnitude of all we lost during one momentous decade and of all we must now recover.

But to me, I think fundamentally, American history indicated that people had put their judgement above the God, the separation of State and Church had brought out all the disorientation and paradox in constitutional interpretations.