Jeff Koopersmith takes the Roberts Court to the woodshed.

The Supreme Court, our last hope, has let us down.

First, it was the Congress fiddling with health care lobbyists until almost all is lost to provide health insurance for our neediest neighbors.  Then is was the White House, cosseting the richest men and women in America and making the poorest pay for it, Now, worse than the these two legs of the American tripod of fairness, the Supreme Court this week announced that it would allow corporate America to spend as much as they pleased to propagandize – to lie – to us and our children. It is an outrage.

As I observe my grandchildren winding their first steps to school I cannot but question what kind of world we are poised to leave to them.  It seemed to me, as a young man at university during the 1960s that my generation would complete at least part of the work our fathers and grandfathers began just after the great depression of the 1930s.

That period marked the end of the rotten era authored by America’s Robber Barons, most of whom have now been turned, mystifyingly, into heroes rather than the scum they were; The most greed-filled, avaricial, bribing, and murdering inhuman crust history had witnessed in 5000 years. There brand of living is now called "Heroic Capitalism" though there is nothing heroic about it.

Many of my contemporary’s fathers perished in World War II fighting the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese.  Now we have forgotten what they fought for and battled against:  Progress toward sharing, high levels of employment, health, and just plain heart have been trampled on over the past decades culminating in our nation running away from loving and sprinting toward hatred based in fear. 

Yes, Fear.  It is eating the world alive, and we are leading the way once again.

This week the Supreme Court of the United States, the last hope for the people, shocked us, no stunned us, writing that not only are corporations “people” but also that they have a right to “free speech” as guaranteed under the Constitution.  It appears that the majority of Justices – all placed in their high-backed leather chairs by men of greed – forgot that corporations are “fictitious” persons giving them rights in civil law, not some constitutional protection to engage in wholesale deceit and propaganda.  

Remember the right to free speech carries with it the potential to lie.

What makes this decision that overturned decades of former and controlling Supreme Court decisions (stare decisis) which sought to preserve our Democracy by holding the greedy at bay in some effort to equalize the voices of the people – whether they be rich or poor, smart of dumb, Black or White, will end with a world that cannot rely on anything much less the truth.

My generation played at least some role in stopping what seemed to be continuing wars fought against “communism” and in opposition to nations that couldn’t possibly defend themselves against our military power.  We stopped some of the lying.

Many of us never wondered why we could not defeat the North Vietnamese.  Certainly, we could have won that war – and in less than a week, I expect.  We knew that America was in Southeast Asia fighting and delivering nearly 60 thousand of our terrified boys to the Angel of Death not because we could not win that war, but because we did not want to win it.  We wished to stretch it out as long and far as possible in some adolescent stage play designed to frighten other bullies.

Vietnam was making some of us very rich, and helping to continue the myth that the Soviets were about to attack us with nuclear weapons that we also knew would most likely fail their targets.  The Soviets were not, and are not very sharp when it comes to aeromechanical devices.  They work with a heavier hand, not the hand of our American surgeons of destruction.  Either that, or all our civil and military leaders were idiots – and such was not the case.

What is ironic today is that others and I were planning to use this very instrument of fairness that the Supreme Court stole from us this week.  We were going to attempt to stop Fox News and other media sources from remaining propaganda machines 24 hours a day, 7 days a week supporting only the ultra right, the corporate elite, and those that stupidly support them – no matter what. 

We are ready and able to prove that Fox News id not entitled to hide behind a news or any other shield of free speech offered to the media and thereby our goal, even if unachievable was to bankrupt them with just the fees and fines they would receive for their civil criminality. It was, until just a day or two ago, illegal, in my opinion, -  for NewsCorp Inc. to engage in, even to relish in, their battle to move the American people from caring to loathing, from giving to taking, from peace to disorder, from democracy and whatever was left of it to fascism.

If you cannot make out the parallels between the United States in 2010 and Nazi Germany in 1939, you must be sightless in many ways, and even this – the apprehension of Nazism - has been mystified in the minds of the dummies that Fox and other such propaganda machines engage., Fox has convinced these citizens that Nazi’s were Socialists – not tyrants in fact posing as socialists.

Liberals as was Ted Kennedy are now Nazis in the minds of many of America’s most naïve.

What I expect now is that corporations will rush like a tsunami toward a beach that pounds the sense out of any law, federal, state, or local which seeks to restrain them from unbridled greed based on criminality or immorality.  They will base these assaults on just the opposite - legality and morality.

The President will find himself turned into a  socialist beast by "Wall Street Television" for his comments just yesterday regarding these monsters and what they have delivered to the American economy through felonious activity.  The medical health providers and insurers, with rocket-like speed, will load the airwaves with brutal and outrageous lies to bury any chance of health care reform.

I marvel. How can the five men who wrote the narrowest possible 5-to-4 majority opinion in CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION wake and look in a mirror?  There are those among us who believe the Court was bribed, something I will not consider simply from the horror of it.  However, just to think about that possibility is terrifying.

Be forewarned.  This decision, if not rendered impotent by congressional action will act as the bulwark of revolution in this nation.  This decision will spread its ugliness throughout the land, perhaps enveloping the earth like a disease, and deny freedom of information to the people of the world. This may be more terrifying than the loss of free speech itself, for the loss of free information here is defined as the loss the truth.

God Help these United States.