Supreme Court.

Left: A recent photo of the US Supreme Court.

Why do people in positions such as judges, priests, bishops, so often wear robes, weird hats and other strange garb? The reason is such clothing is meant to separate these people from the rest of us and so intimidate us. We have no robe, we have no fancy degree from some fancy law college, so just sit down and shut up.

Another right wing pro capitalist has been put on the US supreme court. Elena Kagan throughout all her career has supported capitalism. She will continue to do this on the Supreme Court. Obama continues to support and strengthen the capitalist institutions.

The capitalists and their propagandists like to talk about the wonderful democratic American system of checks and balances. This is a fraud and a lie. There is no system of checks and balances. The Senate is rigged. There are two Senators elected for every state no matter how big or small the population of the state. So tiny Iowa has as many Senators as mighty California.

Only one third of the senate is elected every two years along with the House of Representatives. This means that it is impossible at any one election for the American people to elect a majority of the House of Representatives and Senate. This blocks mass movements being reflected electorally in one election and allows for manipulation and stalling by capitalism of any mass movement for change.

Then there is the President. The president is not elected by the American people on the basis of one person one vote. The president is elected by the so called electoral college which is not democratic. It too, like the Senate, does not reflect the population as a whole but gives extra weight to different states in order to weaken the power of the working class in the major urban areas.

All these machinations have one purpose. That is to keep as much power as possible out of the hands of the urban working class. American capitalism murdered African American people and kept them as slaves for centuries and kept them from exercising their democratic rights. Then after slavery was ended they used their racist state and KKK to keep them away from the polls. And through all this period and continuing today they have maintained the undemocratic system which they claim is the system of checks and balances but which in reality is to keep the working class as a whole from dominating the electoral system.

Back to Kagan and the Supreme Court. If the measures above fail US capitalism still has the Supreme Court. This is an unelected body. That is it is totally undemocratic. These bunch of elitists sit on the Supreme court and can strike down any law that is passed anywhere in the land. This is one more way that capitalism has to block a radical socialist or workers movement.

Behind all these forces US capitalism have the armed state apparatus, the cops, the CIA, the FBI, the military, all of which its uses to enforce its rule. This includes assassination where it warrants this is necessary. Think Martin Luther king, Malcolm X, the Black Panther leaders and many many workers organizers. These cop and military forces are the armed fist of capitalism to be used against its own working class and its rivals abroad. But back to the Supreme Court.

In the first two hundred years of the Supreme Court, that is up to 1999, just over 200 people sat on this court. All but two were men. All but two were white. All but seven were Christian. Not much chance of a non white, woman, non christian getting a trial of their peers there. That is the Supreme Court is undemocratic and has a tradition of being racist, sexist and confined to one religious viewpoint.

The unelected Supreme Court, this entirely undemocratic body, can strike down any law and over turn any decision of the still limited but much more democratic decisions of the population reflected in the elections to Congress and the senate and the state and local bodies and decided upon by votes in ballots. The organizers of this blog believe that the Supreme court should be either abolished or democratized, that is its members elected.

PS One other factor which I do not have time to develop. When talking about democracy and checks and balances we must take into account the domination of the mass media by the corporations and the rich and their parties. Equal time for different ideas and alternatives has to be a fundamental principle of any system. Not like the US system where how much coverage you get for your views is determined by how much money you have, that is by how successful you were in exploiting the working class or conning their organizations' leaders.