This amazing age

We are living through an amazing age - and nobody seems to give a damn.
1. The Obama White House is now fighting a court battle to preserve a power assumed by the president - to order the assassination of anybody, including American citizens, with no charge, no trial, no nothing. Just a matter of giving an order. The test case involves a moslem - so it's quite possible Obama will get away with this. And that is pretty well the end of any democracy that was left in the US constitution. Indeed, I have never heard of any democracy allowing such arbitrary powers to a leader. This has more commonly been the style of Hitler and Stalin and Mao.

Haven't noticed it in the news? No. that's because they're too busy following the big story of how the Mt. A. football team is doing.

2. The Supreme court has also decided that a corporation is a person - with all the rights of a person. Therefore, corporations can now give parties as much as they like - just like real people. Well, perhaps it's not that important. Corporations in Canada and the US have been buying governments and taking over government for years in both countries.In fact, corporations get bailed out. Persons don't.
Despite the wording of the constitution, it was never true in the US that all people were created equal. Even as those words were written, the US economy was based on slave labour. And his has depended on cheap labour ever since.

3. Corporations have also bought most of the education system in the US, and are buying it up in Canada, too. The broad aim is to train students only to work for the corporations - be on time, follow orders, don't think. To that end, the Humanities programmes in the universities are dead meat. Corporations need thinking only at the executive level. That level will be filled by the children of the rich who are able to afford the cost of private schools. The rest will get education run by private investors for private profit to turn out cheap and obedient labour for when the rich kids take over from their daddies and mommies.

The results are already showing in the US as its educational rating compared to public schools around the world continues to drop from an already miserable eighteenth to twenty-fifth. But you won't find that in the news, either. (To be fair, most journalists don't even understand what's happening. So it's easy to churn out the propaganda their owners want.)

It's an amazing age. We're moving on from democracy to a social structure in which property has more rights than people, and some people, very few, have a lot more rights than all the rest of us. We're moving from the age of freedom based on law, to rule based on the power of a leader to assassinate at whim.

How long will it hold together? Not very. The US, no matter who gets elected, is already committed to eternal war. And Canada will follow it. Neither country can economically or socially take the strain of that. Corporate greed, news media propaganda, and public indifference is about to take us where Rome took its people. Enjoy the games while they last.