The line in the political sand is growing very long...

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25. You're preaching in the wrong pew and to the wrong choir my liberal friend...

If you think the protections inscribed in the Constitution in regards to private property, property rights, property interests, commerce, military appropriations, taxes and tariffs, ect...have nothing to do with economics then I can't help you on your journey. "Political economy" has a meaning in examination and analysis of such things.

It is you that have been misled by your illusions of the greatness of the "grand American experiment" (that was never really all that grand to begin with but a ruling class scam in the making from its inception) that has become the grand American nightmare of death, poverty, wage-slavery, destruction, and ruthless Empire. There seems be a fundamental weakness in your illusions of the "American Dream" and the great Constitutional scheme senz...poor people keep showing up by the millions. The tattered ghosts of the late Roman Empire rulers are probably shamed at the effectiveness of such "founding fathers."

I suggest you "enlighten" yourself before casting aspersions of Limbaugh, Clinton supporter, or right-wing propaganda on genuine leftist cynicism of the motivations behind the Grand American Constitutional Scheme and the motives of its "Founding Fathers." It's doubtful that Bertell Ollman (as one example of many Marxists and leftists who share the same opinion) will ever be confused for Rush Limbaugh, Clinton supporters, or right-wing propagandists.

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Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution

by Bertell Ollman

(Snip)

When Moses invented ten fundamental laws for the Jewish people, he had God write them down on stone tablets, Lycurgus, too, represented the constitution he drew up for ancient Sparta as a divine gift. According to Plato, whose book, The Republic, offers another version of the same practice, attributing the origins of a constitution to godly intervention is the most effective way of securing the kind of support needed for it to work. Otherwise, some people are likely to remain skeptical, others passive, and still others critical of whatever biases they perceive in these basic laws, and hence less inclined to follow their mandates. As learned men, the framers of the American Constitution were well aware of the advantages to be gained by enveloping their achievement in religious mystery, but most of the people for whom they labored were religious dissenters who favored a sharp separation between church and state; and since most of the framers were deists and atheists themselves, this particular tactic could not be used. So they did the next best thing, which was to keep the whole process of their work on the Constitution a closely guarded secret. Most Americans know that the framers met for three months in closed session, but this is generally forgiven on the grounds that the then Congress of the United States had not commissioned them to write a new Constitution, and neither revolutionaries nor counter-revolutionaries can do all their work in the open. What few modern-day Americans realize, however, is that the framers did their best to ensure that we would never know the details of their deliberations. All the participants in the convention were sworn to life-long secrecy, and when the debates were over, those who had taken notes were asked to hand them in to George Washington, whose final task as chairman of the convention was to get rid of the evidence. American's first president, it appears, was also its first shredder.

(Snip)

Fortunately, not all the participants kept their vows of silence or handed in all their notes. Bit it wasn't until 1840, a half century after the Constitution was put into effect, with the posthumous surfacing of James Madison's extensive notes, that the American people could finally read what had happened in those three crucial months in Philadelphia. What was revealed was neither divine nor diabolical, but simply human, an all-too-human exercise in politics. Merchants, bankers, ship-owners, planters, slave traders and slave owners, land speculators, and lawyers, who made their money working for these groups, voiced their interests and fears in clear, uncluttered language; and, after settling a few, relatively minor disagreements, they drew up plans for a form of government they believe would serve these interests most effectively. But the fifty years of silence had the desired myth-building effect. The human actors were transformed into "Founding Fathers." Their political savvy and common sense were now seen as all-surpassing wisdom, and their concern for their own class of property owners (and, to a lesser, extent, sections of the country and occupational groups) had been elevated to universal altruism (in the liberal version) or self-sacrificing patriotism (in the preferred conservative view). Nor have we been completely spared the aura of religious mystery so favored by Plato. With the passage of years and the growing religiosity of our citizenry, it had become almost commonplace to hear that the framers were also divinely inspired.

(Snip)

Taken at face value, the Constitution is an attempt to fix the relations between state and federal governments, and between the three branches—legislative, executive, and judiciary—of the latter. And most accounts of this document have concentrated on the mechanical arrangements that make this balancing act possible. In the process, the Constitution's basic assumptions and particularly its social and economic purposes have been grossly neglected. It is a little like learning in some detail how a car works before even knowing what kind of machine it is, what it is supposed to do, and why it was constructed in just this way. Learning the functioning of any system, whether mechanical or institutional, is not without value in determining its meaning and use, but we would do better to approach their symbiosis from the other side, to examine who needed what and how the specific structures created responded to these needs. What is really at stake in any political dispute, the real-life questions involved, and why different people take the positions they do, can never be adequately understood by focusing solely or even mainly on the legalistic forms in which the issues are presented and fought out.

(Snip)

In examining any political phenomena, it is always wise to ask, "Who benefits?" As regards the American constitutional system, the answer was given clearly, if somewhat crudely, by Senator Boies Penrose, a late nineteenth-century Republican from Pennsylvania, who told a business audience: "I believe in a division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass the laws under which you make money … and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaigns funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money" (Green, 35). When, a few years later, Charles Beard suggested that the same kind considerations may have played a role in the writing of the Constitution, he unleashed a political storm against his book that had few if any parallels in our history. Then-president Taft publicly denounced this unseemly muckraking as besmirching the reputations of our Founding Fathers. Not particularly noted for his indifference to economic gain when he became president, Warren Harding, at that time a newspaper publisher, attacked Beard's filthy lies and rotten perversions" in an article entitled, "Scavengers, Hyena-Like, Desecrate the Graves of the Dead Patriots We Revere" (McDonald, xix). And even as a growing number of professional historians came to accept Beard's interpretation, the city of Seattle banned his book.