(Nor a Friend of the Earth or the Constitution)

It takes bravery, as the National Anthem reminds us, to keep Old Glory waving and to keep faith with the Constitution. That’s a taller order now than ever before.

“Establish Justice.” It’s more and more dreamed of than delivered.

Promote the “general Welfare.” Poverty dogs our nation in far greater numbers than it did in the worst days of the Great Depression. In the mightiest economy the world has seen, poverty is a disgrace. It insults the Constitution. The globe’s one superpower can’t find the bravery to fix it. When the Star-Spangled Banner brings us to our feet, why aren’t we blushing?

Perhaps that’s why we hear God Bless America more and more. But why would any god of fairness bless a nation that grew by genocide, erasing the Native Tribes, and by slavery on unprecedented scale, whose vestiges continue in countless ways to keep us a nation divided against itself. What could be more ironic than its role in our foremost entertainment industry – football – where blacks now dominate the trenches of warfare? Can we excuse its popularity because the blacks are bearing the greater risks, both as linemen and as running and defensive backs, who will suffer the preponderance of concussions and eventual brain impairment? “A brain is a terrible thing to waste” – unless it’s a black brain.

How do universities still run with that motto, with a straight face, chasing gridiron glory and fat bowl checks, knowing that any and every concussion has the potential of wasting a brain?

The vast hypocrisy of all this should prompt higher education to declare a sports holiday. Make it a full year, and see what it tells us about ourselves, as a swarm of couch potatoes. It won’t happen. It can’t. There’s too much money involved. Education is badly tainted by it, with high schools and universities both dancing to the music of this unrivalled entertainment industry. Money is the tail that wags every dog in our economy of free enterprise.

But sadly, it ain’t soooo free anymore. If it were true capitalism, it would spread wealth more than it concentrates it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, to keep us free. To deliver economic justice. To prove itself in a growing middle class. But we know it’s not working because our middle class, once the envy of the world, has been dwindling to where it can no longer be called a middle class. It’s too small. And, the hope of growing a new middle class has gone dark, because Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage in more than a generation, so that it will not by a 40-hour work week keep the earner living above the poverty line. It leaves the growing population living in minimum-wage jobs (thank you, Mitt Romney, for being so honest about the less fortunate and powerless “47%”) living at the pleasure of the Wal Marts and the other makers and manipulators of markets, essentially pitting the multinationals against communist China. Daring the Brave to do anything about it. Even Texas, which is leading the nation now in population, job and economic growth, sees the surge of new jobs concentrated in the low-wage service sectors.

So what we have in place now of the promise of the Constitution is government by oligarchy, spearheaded by corporate power, which has the green-light no less than from WeThePeople’s last line of defense, the Supreme Court. American history will have no irony greater than this. It makes a monster of the legal profession, where the record plainly shows that money talks loudest.

Just five lawyers outvoting four others to feed us the cruel joke that corporations have personhood and thus have the same grab on the Bill of Rights as individuals, because they are formed by people. By that slender, shaky 5-4 vote, these lawyers are telling us that money has the right to walk all over us, when and where it pleases.

The growing oligarchy has been aptly framed as the One Percent vs. the 99 Percent.

Maybe there’s room for hope – thanks to climate change. It’s too early to visualize the battle lines that will form. At least some of the billionaires are beginning to see that denying climate change is a blind man’s bluff, and they have the most to lose. After all, the One Percent hold assets as great or greater than the lowest 50 Percent combined.

However high their mountains of wealth, they will not, cannot, deny the earth the last word. What sterner enforcer of that word than the oceans, which are steadily rising as the icecaps and glaziers melt away? Once they are gone, no resource may be more precious than safe drinking water.

Ironically, it is the richest, most populous State that is driving this home to Americans. Though California has grown an economy ranked as the seventh largest, trailing only six nations, it is suffering a drought that has no end in sight, as its matchless farms cut production and idle large tracts in an effort to conserve water. But they already have badly depleted and endangered their priceless aquifers.

If the aquifers don’t recover, neither will California, nor the nation as a whole. It’s a perfect opportunity for the California billionaires to step forward, and make themselves the example by sharply curtailing their extravagance and shaving away their luxurious lifestyle. All the world would notice if Rodeo Drive boarded up all the shops.

In a world increasingly threatened by the divisions and terrorism that religions are spreading, the USA, as the last superpower, stands yet as the bastion of freedom most likely to lead mankind away from demise. Whether the oligarchs see this, in time to curve history in a positive direction, is a grave question. They wield the corporate power, and with it the legal profession, too easily swayed by prospects of fatter wallets, to take us in a new direction. It is that power that, while tarnishing freedom, leads freedom in the global trade war with communism.

But are they aware enough, and brave enough, to act? Will they realize that to act is to save themselves? The choice with the most promise would be instruction to their high-powered lawyers to give us the rule of law the Constitution promises, to ensure that it lives by the letter of the Preamble of the Constitution, which stands as the bravest commitment a people ever made to themselves to make freedom ring, and ring, and ring.

The oligarchs have that choice. Any other makes them fools. They can run, but they can’t hide. There no longer are mountains or islands secure enough to guarantee their survival. They and their fortunes will not keep the oceans from rising, or the ice fields from dying. They must realize that the last word is never theirs, no matter how large their law firms. That word is always the earth’s, in which climate change is a friendly warning. If they can’t see their responsibility to start helping the world of free enterprise meet it and live by it, they’ll keep growing risks for the kin whom they are bent upon showering with their assets.

Oligarchs, you have the choice. Where’s the bravery? Gumption could work, with some initiative and common sense. But the singing at which you, your corporate mouthpieces and lawyers excel simply won’t cut it. The earth isn’t listening. She will always have the last word. Against rising oceans and other new waves of climate change, corporate power will become useless. And wealth won’t cut it, either. That you can take to the bank, should any remain standing.

Frank Mensel — July 2015