From The Ramparts

We're Condemned to Repeat the Past

                                                  We’re Condemned to Repeat the Past

                                                              Junious Ricardo Stanton

            A Spanish philosopher named George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are witnessing this axiom playing out in front of our eyes in real time on a daily basis. We are being conditioned through propaganda and sophisticated mind entrainment to have short attention spans and memories. The powers who shouldn’t be want to keep us as my friend Chatherine Austin Fitts says, like mushrooms, in the dark and feed a constant diet of cow manure. They want to stifle our critical thinking and common-sense approach to living.

            As we scan our current socio-economic-geo-political landscape we see many parallels to fairly recent and ancient history but because we have been fed cow dung, kept int the dark and gaslit we don’t remember the past or its significance to the present. We have been subjected to an induced amnesia via mind control, miseducation and propaganda.

            A case in point is our current political milieu where we have a president, who took an oath to uphold the US Constitution and abide by its separation of powers and assigned duties yet sets policy using executive orders, to bypass the Constitution and the role and duties of the legislative branch! To be fair this is not all Trump’s doing nor is he the first to do it. The US Congress has long abandoned and abdicated any pretext of doing the people’s bidding and business. For the most part they are crass money grubbing grifters for hire to the highest bidder willing to stuff their campaign coffers and political action committees with unlimited amounts of cash, perks and bribes.

The US Supreme Court exacerbated this trend by ruling in a landmark case entitled Citizens United v the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that what used to be called “dark money” can now be given in unlimited sums to candidates and restrictions on campaign contributions by corporations, unions and other collective entities are a violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause!? They actually ruled huge corporate donations do not lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption!?

One justice wrote that disclosure requirements dampen free speech and should be invalidated altogether! Yes, they actually wrote that in a 5-4 decision with a straight face! That 2010 decision became law and has had and is having a profound impact on elections ever since. You can’t make this stuff up.

            Obviously, justice Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas forgot history. Apparently, they were oblivious to the past, and lost all common sense and connection to reality. Are they saying unrestricted and unlimited infusions of campaign funding by corporations, unions and organized special interest groups like the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma or the Zionists don’t set a dangerous precedent; or that huge infusions of cash in election campaigns won’t outweigh the smaller contributions of individuals, poorer and less organized groups? Clearly, they are neither students of human nature nor history.

            Obviously, they forgot the corruption of the Harding Administration’s Teapot Doom Scandal, New York’s Tammany Hall, or the myriad examples of how money influences elections as well as policy. Some time when you have a few moments to spare log onto https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/a-decade-under-citizens-united to follow the money and see just how massive money donations influences local, state and national elections.

During Trump’s first administration his bone headed trade wars and tariffs severely hurt US farmers. They lost the China market for their soybeans. Trump was forced to quietly bail them out. The exact same this is happening with his latest insane universal tariffs. https://citizenwatchreport.com/tariffs-are-killing-farmers-bailout-is-complicated/ History is repeating.

Keep in mind, now we are experiencing a situation where Donald Trump’s family is reaping huge benefits from him being in the White House just as Joe Biden’s family did when he was president. That is how the game is played. It is a bipartisan thing and since we have forgotten the past, we are now doomed to relive it.

                                                -30-

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 9:40 AM