While we were sleeping

There is a news report that Vice-President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia went duck hunting recently. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem like impartial justice to me. Especially in light of the Supreme Court deciding the outcome of the last Presidential election.

Am I paranoid? Well, there is also an article about Eugene Scalia, the son of the justice, who is himself a lawyer for the Department of Labor, attacking a whistle-blower within the Department of Justice. The ususal role of the Department of Labor is to protect whistle-blowers, here it is the opposite. Could it have something to do with the fact that his Daddy is on the Board of Directors of American Justice?

We have the son of a justice working within the administration working against wistle-blowers of the justice department while the top of the administration is chummy with the top of the judical branch. This is not exactly a separation of powers.

And, in the background, we have a republican insider complaining about a new nepotism within the Republican party, and the current president is the son of a recent president. A family whose grandfather did business with the Nazi’s, and is also friends and business associates with the bin Laden’s.

I suspect a whole boatload of crimes are buried in an oil tanker at sea, if you believe that man is motivated by greed. But the bigger question remains, what is it that is causing this balance of power to fail systemically. Expose a few bad guys, and someone new will fill their place. The system of checks and balances is a myth, and is not working. The marketplace theory we are complacent with does not exist. And now it is eating away at our laws. Without laws protecting the weak, we are all screwed. When laws are an instrument of the strong, then there is no shelter from them.

Rationalism is a scientific interpretation of society that every cause has an effect. Simply explaining away these power grabs as the failure of the individuals does not address the real problem: the system of checks and balances is failing. Since money is at the heart of these power grabs, then logically our banking is at the heart of their opportunity to lie and cheat their way to the top. As Willie Sutton the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, ‘because that’s where the money is.” But we shouldn’t forget what Theodore Roosevelt said. “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

Big Oil and Big Railroads. The Military-Industrial Complex. Old news, or todays’ news?

Maybe it is just a bad habit, passed down through the generations. If you are told a lie, and you believe it, how would you ever know it is a lie? If you are born a prince, then you would expect one day to become a king.

http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20021030081103-75909.asp

http://www.theadvertiser.com/news/html/FC017FD2-725F-4003-BA27-FA88A7D9E33D.shtml