A new U.S. Supreme Court ruling impacts Holistic health and Big Pharma

In yet another US Supreme Court ruling delivered early April of 2014  (cf McCutcheon vs Federal Election Commission – 12-536 (2014)),  a slight majority of the Federal Justices allowed corporations even more unrestricted access to “legitimate” bribery via campaign donations, that which necessarily impacts health since Big Pharma is one of the biggest campaign donors (e.g., President Obama allegedly got his biggest donation from Big Pharma).

As the studies show, the more mainstream politicians receive bribery money from corporations, the more they direct their political and legal activities in their favor, if only to get more favors both for other elections or even post public “service”.

Already “special corporate interests” (eg Wall Street’s banks, Big Pharma and their allies) had been allowed in 2010 via the “un-constitutional” and-or controversial ruling Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission) a similar decision, from the same mis-guided Federal Supreme Court, whose majority of Justices allowed corporations to exercise political and financial “undue influence”, in secrecy, via “super-pact companies”,  upon most mainstream politicians, law-makers and judges of the Land who then tend to sacrifice the People’s wellbeing and basic needs on the altar of greed, corruption, dogma, ignorance and ineptitude.

The same US Supreme Court had granted corporations the “personhood” status, bestowing upon them the same rights that have been allowed for humans.

And many more “rights” than for Nature, including animals,  to the post mortem chagrin of US Federal Court Justice William Douglas who had championed the bestowing of “rights” to most of Nature, including trees and rivers.

In his dissenting opinion in the landmark environmental law case, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), Justice Douglas argued that “inanimate objects” like Rivers and Trees should have standing to sue in court. I quote his take on this issue.

“The critical question of “standing” would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton”.

Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727, 741–43 (USSC 1972).

So now the United States’ legal system protects more those corporations who pollute and destroy the environment than the Environment and Nature, when it should be the other way around, at least for a Holistic Congress and a Holistic US Supreme Court,  both of which are still very “alien” ideas in the mainstream.

For the entire People United Decision, click here.

For the entire McCutcheon Decision, click here.

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” Patrick Henry.

POST SCRIPTUM

OVER HALF  OF THE US CONGRESS MEMBERS ARE NOW PART OF A “MILLIONAIRES” CLUB,  THESE ARE ELECTED OFFICIALS WHO  GET SUBSTANTIAL  “DONATION CAMPAIGN” FUNDS FROM CORPORATIONS LIKE “BIG PHARMA” AND BECAUSE OF THE US SUPREME COURT RULINGS,  THE NAME OF THESE DONORS CAN NOW BE CONCEALED FROM THE PUBLIC VIA THE SUPER-PAC PROVISION.  SO NOW WE UNDERSTAND WHY THE LAWS THAT FAVOR ALLOPATHIC DRUG MEDICINE, THE SCIENCE OF WHICH IS STRONGLY BIASED, ARE OR SHOULD BE DECLARED “UNCONSTITUTIONAL”.

“For the first time in history, more than half the members of Congress are millionaires, according to a new analysis of financial disclosure reports conducted by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Of the 534 current members of the House and Senate, 268 had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012 – up from 257 members in 2011. The median net worth for members of the House and Senate was $1,008,767. The wealthiest member of Congress? That’s Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, who had a net worth between $330 and $598 million. The reports found that there wasn’t much distinction between the two parties – congressional Democrats had a median net worth of $1.04 million as compared to about $1 million for Republicans. In both cases, the averages are up from last year, when the numbers were $990,000 and $907,000, respectively.”

SOURCE: The Center for Responsive Politics

P.S. (BIS) OPINION

There’s nothing instrincally wrong with being a millionaire or a billionaire if this shows merit and the person’s finances having been generated for socially good purposes. However, when the millions come from dubious activites that destroy social cohesion, health and the environment and when especially these millions are protected by tax loopholes Congress enacts and when the wealth of these individuals exposes them to the unethical section of the corporate “One Percent” who bribes them with additional millions so that they will make laws that will favor irresponsible Big Business etc, then we have a genuine constitutional issue that ought to be examined in a genuine Court of Law.

The additional problem though is that even high ranking Judges are part of this bribery campaign scheme. In Washington State for example, one Supreme Court Justice, Mr Johnson, received over 400,000 dollars of donation campaign money from a Building company and when that company was before him as a legal party, not only did Mr Johnson refuse to recuse himself, but he decided the case in favor of the company, despite evidence of wrongdoing.

TRIPLE P.S.

So if the People’s grievances and genuine constitutional issues can’t really be heard in American courts, we have the election mechanism for possible change.

But with so many corporate billions of dollars going into media manipulation, with so many tons of toxicity and foreign molecules going into the environment, foods and medicine that affects the mind, with so much sickness and chronic stress that befalls most Americans,  whose “middle class” by the way recently got zapped into oblivion,  will voters understand the key issues that are before the ultimate Court, the Court of Public Opinion  ?

Furthermore, differently from many other advanced Democracies like Sweden, Norway, France, Swiss and even Germany, Spain and Italy,  the mainstream American culture system has so strongly embedded within the American psyche a “sacred” respect for the central legal authority (ie, at least as strong as  Marxist ideology  on the dictatorship of the communist systems’s “central committees” and Stalinist “agit-prop”),  a respect American “w.a.s.p”  ideology has connected to God’s grace and protection, (e.g., the “In God we Trust” on the American dollar bills) , that one can be skeptical about real change in America.

But “miracles” and keen social happenings still can happen, notwithstanding the pessismitic observation from one of the most admired social observer   and political philosophers whose books have been analyzed in the majority of Western and non Western political science institutes, including in the U.S. for over a century.

“It is in vain to summon a people, who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity…(….) Alexis De TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America (1835).

 While suffering himself from  different health ailments and challenges,  like other great thinkers from  Michel Montaigne and Clausewitz to  paraplegic F.D Roosevelt, Alexis de Toqueville nonetheless traveled extensively and homelessly in the United States from his native France observing the mores and belief systems of those times and while he did note many positive elements of  American Democracy, his final judgement was indeed quite severe (see above).

Today, almost two centuries later (from Tocqueville’s observation), is there any Hope for real change ? See the Holistic Wellbeing Campaign blog for more….