Goodnight Moon

While getting PAK2 to bed this evening, I (as usual) was reciting Goodnight Moon.  PAK1 is too old for this sort of thing you know...

While this story is really quite dark and existential.  In particular the lines:

Goodnight nobody,
Goodnight mush.

Less the mush part but the acknowledgment of nothingness is kinda heavy for such a book.  I mean we say 'goodnight' to the air later in the book so ths is not just some elemental nothingness that we are talking about.  You know what Nietzsche sad about looking into the void:

If you look long enough into the void,
the void begins looking back through you

Reeling myself, however reluctantly, back from this nonsense, there has been something going on which sees fit to coment on.

Earlier this week, the Supreme court in Citizens United vs. FEC ruled 5-4 providing corporations the same rights to influence the electoral process as human beings.   From The Huffington Post

Today, in a radical act of judicial activism, five Supreme Court Justices overthrew 103 years of American statutory and judicial law going back to the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt by ruling that corporations have the Constitutional right to make unlimited campaign contributions.

This is in effect a bloodless judicial coup which turns the American government over to the biggest corporate interests, to the degree that hadn't happened already.

This is a two-part coup. In 2000, in the judicially unconscionable Bush v. Gore ruling, the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to George W. Bush. Bush, in turn, appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, who, in their confirmation hearings, disingenuously promised the Senate and American people to be judicial moderates and avoid judicial activism. Now, in 2010, in perhaps the greatest act of judicial activism in American history, they overthrew 103 years of precedent to turn the US government over to the largest corporations.

 Did not manage to hear much about this decision on the news, but I have mostly given up on that sort of thing.  An interesting (IMHO) take on this was made by Ian Welsh here:

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state.  Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests.  Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose.  Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government - after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else.

 I have been thinking about this for a few days and am not really sure exactly how one goes about responding to such a thing.  Those of you who have had the misfortune of reading this blog for the years that I have been whining about the state of affairs know that I have a pathological fascination with boiling frogs (in metaphor ok!).

 Only time will tell if this will really change the sickening state of real-politiks.  A real problem I have regarding this is the real precedent setting situation where corporations have (yet again) been provided rights that have been provided to people.  A corporation is a buisness abstracton and should not be given any additional freedoms.  I mean really who are these privlidges being granted to?  Board members?  They already have full rights (given citizenship etc).

I need a drink...