By Jim Hoover

You have seen the scale of justice held by the Lady Justice, often depicted wearing a blindfold to denote justice being meted out objectively. The personification of the moral force in judicial systems dates back to Ancient Egypt’s Goddess Maat, but the image is actually patterned on the female Roman goddess Justitia, who carried the scales in one hand and a sword in the other, the former symbolizing “right rule” and the latter, representing the power of Reason and Justice.

In today’s plutocratic world, if you look closely, there is a fat finger on the right side of that scale, part of the hand of the vested interests that tilt all rulings and decisions in their own direction. Money is their sword that shreds reason and justice and replaces it with the tyranny of greed.

How do they do that? They manipulate the forces that oversee or influence justice and fairness: justices of the courts, political representatives, and the media.

You might say that there are always these forces in our society, and you would be correct. The difference is that currently these forces — relentless, imposing, unified, and amoral — are overwhelming the system with power, money, influence, and control over institutions that were built to protect the majority of us.

The result — wars were fought to sustain the interests of a few; Supreme Court decisions permitted corporate control of elections; wealth was redistributed from poor to rich; and expedient, if not corrupt, political control permitted criminal activity among the privileged.

What corporate interests want overrides what the majority of the people want.  For example, the following is what Americans favor:

• 74 percent support using federal funds to put teachers, firefighters, and cops to work.
• 65 percent support cutting the payroll tax for workers.
• 64 percent support federal spending to repair our crumbling roads, bridges, and schools.
• 52 percent support increasing federal aid to unemployed workers.

Unfortunately this is not what Congress and the president are doing, generally because the Republican-controlled members of the House are puppets of the rich. In contrast, the rich want even lower taxes for themselves, exported jobs, and low costs for doing business. In that equation is included unrestrained pollution, unregulated drug prices, no standards for air, water or consumer products, and continued corporate welfare. A good jobs program, including infrastructure spending, does not figure in plutocratic plans right now, but the defeat of Obama in 2012 does.

On the state front, to keep or enlarge Republican control of government through elections, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to curtail the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Reminiscent of Dixiecrats using poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, the new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots with various measures that suppress their voting. Also related is the Republican legislature in Pennsylvania, a state exclusively carried by Obama in 2008. The GOP legislature is trying to change the electoral vote allocation to favor sparsely populated rural areas which voted Republican in 2008.

Altogether, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting, overwhelmingly favoring the Republican vote. The states include Kansas, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – all states with a recent Republican majority.

“One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July.

On the environmental and consumer protection front, the Koch brothers are waging war on the EPA and calling for an end to controls that increase their costs of doing business. Obama seems to be playing along with expected approval of the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline, running right through America’s heartland, carrying toxic oil from Canada’s tar sands to oil refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Extraction and transportation associated with tar sands oil would produce more carbon emissions than traditional oil, causing extreme environmental damage along the way.

Demonstrations against the pipeline in front of the White House netted jail time for thousands of demonstrators, ironically, even while Wall Street criminals and Bush administration perpetrators of war crimes walk free.

The misanthropic behavior of majority whip Eric Cantor seems to be tied to his energy industry friends. He recently spoke the truth in saying that the only thing stopping Republicans from achieving three of their key goals – ending Medicare, gutting protections for American workers and destroying the EPA – is the Democratic Senate.

The unified Republican “stop Democrats from voting campaign” and their hamstringing of economic recovery are designed to defeat Obama in 2012, assuring a free reign in destroying the middle class.

Is that what Americans want?