"No Labels" Is Not An Anodyne Bipartisan Organization; That's a Masquerade

Click here for an article at Raw Story by Thom Hartmann entitled "The 'No Labels' agenda is more disturbing than you know."

Historians and futurists tell us that we are moving into a new era, a Fourth Turning. It certainly feels that way.

But the people who have been in charge the past few decades — particularly Republicans on the Supreme Court, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and the Republican Congresses associated with them — have so rigged the game that it’s going to be a real challenge to dislodge the corrupt systems they’ve put into place.

The article concludes:

Can we overcome the damage the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have done to our nation with their twin doctrines of corporate personhood and money-as-speech?

It turns out that Supreme Court opinions aren’t carved in stone. Congress can change and regulate the Court (as I detail extensively in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America). It’s a big lift, but Congress can also simply pass laws that, in most cases, can reverse Supreme Court decisions.

It’s thus within the power of Congress — if it can overcome the corruption injected into it by five Republicans on the Court — to undo much of the damage of Citizens United and the Court’s preceding decisions that set the stage for it.

Our best recent shot at doing this was the For The People Act, which would have reversed large parts of the Citizens United decision and publicly funded federal elections. But a handful of billionaires poured their cash into the coffers of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin — and every single Republican in the Senate — and the legislation, which passed the House, died at the hands of a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

It’s still possible, if Democrats take a large enough majority in state houses this November and at the federal level next year, to pass that legislation or something like it and begin the process of reclaiming our democracy from this corrupt Supreme Court and the billionaires it has handed our country over to.

If we fail, America will almost certainly devolve into a full-blown oligarchy like Trump’s beloved Russia, and our democratic experiment will be suspended for another generation and perhaps irretrievably.

The stakes have never been higher. If ever there was a time to engage in politics, this is it. Spread the word.