It can happen here!

Many of us think that the Constitution protects us from a dictatorship.  Unfortunately we are seeing signs of the possibility with Congress almost being in lockstep with the President and the Supreme Court becoming more subservient to the same ideology as the President and Congress.

Kurt Gödel, a mathematician and refugee from Hitler, studied the Constitution thoroughly in preparation for his citizenship.  He saw a flaw that his friends cautioned him not to mention it in his hearing.

The examiner sympathetically mentioned that what was happening under Hitler couldn’t happen here.  Gödel mentioned that he knew how it could.  His friends managed to quiet him down and he became a citizen.  See My Brain is Open by Paul Erdös.

How could it happen here?  The Constitution can be amended.  Could it be amended to give the President a life term, extend to the terms of Congress, abolish free speech,…?

Think of how much of the Constitution has already been corrupted by Supreme Court decisions:  Corporations as people, people becoming persons,…

Think of how Republicans are working hard to suppress voting or dilute the effect of any opposition.

All that is needed is for a hard-nosed party to take absolute control of Congress and three-quarters of the states.  Boom!  There goes our Constitution.

Only you can prevent it.  Vote thoughtfully in each and every election, from city council to state house to Congress to President.  You are our only bulwark against our loss of freedom.

Dictatorship of the directorate

I've long promoted the idea of withholding votes for directors of companies who are paid too much.  Well, even if all the shareholders withhold their votes, the directors of many companies get to keep their jobs.  All that is required is a plurality of votes.  Since one vote with no opposition is a plurality, they get to keep their jobs.  And their perks.  And accumulate more shares.  And run the company without any consideration for the owners.  Instead of Milton Friedman's corporate purpose of "shareholder value", they run the company for "director value".

For more, see "When Shareholder Democracy is Sham Democracy", James B. Stewart, New York Times, 2013-04-12.

Where's the praise for Obama on gas prices?

Here in Duluth, gas prices have been falling bit by bit from near four dollars last spring. Today I've seen $3.39/gallon. So, if President Obama was blamed by some for the high prices, where is the praise for the lower prices? See "Bachmann: I'll bring back $2 gas", Charles Riley, CNN Money, 2011-08-18

Actually, there are many factors outside the President's control for prices of anything. Would we want it otherwise? If the President could have such control over our economy, wouldn't we be getting into a dictatorship?

One of those factors is where fuel is sold, and I don't' mean within the U.S. According to today's Star Tribune, fuel prices might be lower if diesel oil and gasoline weren't exported to other countries.
"Fuel exports hit record, keeping gas prices high", Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times, 2011-11-12.  See either http://www.startribune.com/business/133720623.html or http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fuel-exports-20111112,0,7229614.story

Where's Michele Bachmann now on these exports? My searches on her name, fuel exports, and November dates didn't find anything obviously her opinion on these exports. However, her web site seems to be only drill, drill without any considerations of the consequences and without any mention that some fuel is exported.

Do we have these Orwellian people in our midst?

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power.
…
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists … pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.  We know that no one ever seized power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end."

- "1984", George Orwell, p. 263, Signet Classic paperback edition

Has this prediction become true?

"In a way, the world-view of the [Manipulators] imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.  They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding, they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

Who are the manipulators?  In George Orwell's "1984" it is the Party.  Who would it be in our world: corporations, the military-industrial complex, the national security establishment, the Tea Party, …?

Could the attack on public education be an attempt to ensure that people are incapable of understanding the manipulations?  Could the attack on true health care be an obfuscation to cloud understanding.  Could the use (or misuse) of words like patriotism, free market, tax burden, job creation, and on and on be used as "flagrant violations of reality"?

Could all this manipulation be a means to confuse people so that they became "not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening" and therefore not even show up to vote?