>i ask again: the cops busted into & searched my home the other night for
>no good reason, what else do i have to appeal to? thank god for a fucking
>Fourth i say, because i did go to neighborhood watch and i did make a
>complaint.
Didn't stop the cops from breaking in, did it? Doesn't stop the cops from harassing and killing mainly black & Latino kids every day in NYC and elsewhere? If our constitution protects our precious liberties, why do we criminalize more behavior and jail more people than just about any other country on earth?
>methinks this is a spurious correlation. the constitution doesn't *cause*
>any of this, the capitalist system via the tool of the constitution does
>though.
The checks-and-balances, or divide-and-rule, system has no small amount to do with capital's power in the U.S. Surely you've read the Federalist Papers and know they designed it that way. Check out Federalist #10 <http://www.mcs.net/~knautzr/fed/fed10.htm> just for a reminder of Madison's thinking about nature, property, and limited government: "The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government." Though the lopsided distribution of property is "sown in the nature of man," nature needs the help of cleverly constructed government to keep society from falling prey to "mutual animosities" and the dreaded "faction" (i.e., class conflict). The whole constitutional machinery was concocted to frustrate the popular will and keep property insulated from democracy, dispelling Madison's nightmares of "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project."
Margaret wrote:
>Your privilege, of course. But can you name a document
>anywhere else that does the job better?
We have listmembers from many countries of the world. I'd be interested if they feel democratically deprived next to the U.S.
>I think those planters were remarkably foresightful,
>me. Pity their political successors are such
>pillocks, but that's my fault, and yours, for allowing
>them to *be* successors.
And the machinery they devised has nothing to do with who became their successors?
Doug