the court, the corporate coup, and the call to struggle

http://www.nationofchange.org/court-corporate-coup-and-call-struggle-1372430476

***SNIP

Jim Crow, meet the Koch Brothers.

The Plan

You have to give them this: They were smart, they were ruthless, and they had a long-range plan. First they built a cadre of radicalized and ideologically indoctrinated lawyers through organizations like the Federalist Society. These lawyers were pre-radicalized and prepared to receive judgeships whenever conservatives gained power and appointed them.

Those judgeships began flowing to right-wing extremists with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. In retrospect, that adds a bitter overtone to Reagan’s racially-charged decision to give the first speech of his winning candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a city known only for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1963. That was widely interpreted at the time as a message to white Southern racists.

In retrospect, it was a message to the rest of us, too.

Second, they engaged in a long-term and classically Orwellian propaganda campaign in which classical jurisprudence – the interpretation of Constitutional principles in light of changing world events – was characterized as “judicial activism.” Real judicial activism, on behalf of Big Money, was characterized as more impartial and reasonable. (Think of it as the legal version of Fox News calling itself “Fair and Balanced.”)