BILLIONS - June 16, 2011

The US Supreme Court has never actually ruled that anyone who had a billion dollars was entitled to a billion extra votes, but it began to feel like it. Certainly the Koch brothers had more influence on the outcome of the 2010 vote in WI than the hundreds of thousands of voters who had been persuaded by their slick advertising that it was not worth the time and effort to get down to the polls and vote. And that on top of those who felt that if the Dems could not get over the obstructionist tactics of GOP, then it didn’t matter who won the election. So it is proven again that if the People did not take account of who was primed to do them more damage (not to mention the few that were actually acting in their interests), then Plato’s dictum on the worthlessness of democracy would be reinforced. On top of that, the prospect that the Kochs didn’t have to say who was paying for the slick ads that flooded the TV made it appear as the cool thing that year was to “turn the rascals out” or to “starve the beast” or any of the shallow slogans by the use of which they could be persuaded to act against their own better interest (not to mention their best ones). It must, after all have looked like the Dems would lie battered in the ditch after deciding that it would be ungentlemanly to give GOP a dose of what the representatives of the billionaires had been offering the negligent People as the strategy that they said was their way out of the dead end. Both in DC and in Madison, it seemed that those who were threatening to kill off the People’s democracy and blame it on either the machinations of the Dems or at least a law of nature were going to get away with it and secure an almost unconditional surrender for the hirelings of the Plutocrats. So it looked to many that the appropriate way to punish their false friends in the Center Left was to vote to empower their true enemies on the Far Right.