Kenneth C. Davis
July 4, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/04/davis.jefferson.other.words/
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Thomas Jefferson is famous for words he wrote in the Declaration of Independence
Kenneth Davis: Jefferson's other words resonate as well
Jefferson wrote Bill of Rights set up "wall of separation between Church and State"
Founding Fathers knew the dangers of merging church and state, Davis says
Kenneth C. Davis is the author of "Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition" (HarperCollins). He posts regularly at his blog at http://www.dontknowmuch.com/.
(CNN) -- As America celebrates its birthday on July 4, the timeless words of Thomas Jefferson will surely be invoked to remind us of our founding ideals -- that "All men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator" with the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These phrases, a cherished part of our history, have rightly been called "American Scripture."
But Jefferson penned another phrase, arguably his most famous after those from the Declaration of Independence. These far more contentious words -- "a wall of separation between church and state" -- lie at the heart of the ongoing debate between those who see America as a "Christian Nation" and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July.
It is true these words do not appear in any early national document. What may be Jefferson's second most-quoted phrase is found instead in a letter he sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.
While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "
The idea was not Jefferson's. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."
Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the "shining city on a hill" where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death.
As president, Jefferson was voicing an idea that was fundamental to his view of religion and government, expressed most significantly in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted in 1777.
Revised by James Madison and passed by Virginia's legislature in January 1786, the bill stated: "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened (sic) in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief ..."
It was this simple -- government could not dictate how to pray, or that you cannot pray, or that you must pray.
Jefferson regarded this law so highly that he had his authorship of the statute made part of his epitaph, along with writing the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. (Being president wasn't worth a mention.)
Why do Jefferson's "other words" matter today?
First, because knowing history matters -- it can safeguard us from repeating our mistakes and help us value our rights, won at great cost. Yet we are sorely lacking in knowledge about our past, as shown by a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But more to the point, we are witnessing an aggressively promoted version of our history and heritage in which America is called a "Christian Nation."
This "Sunday School" version of our past has gained currency among conservative television commentators, school boards that have rewritten state textbooks and several GOP presidential candidates, some of whom trekked to Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in early June 2011.
No one can argue, as "Christian Nation" proponents correctly state, that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ's divinity.
More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.
But the founders, and more specifically the framers of the Constitution, included men who had fought a war for independence -- the very war celebrated on the "Glorious Fourth" -- against a country in which church and state were essentially one.
They understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America. They knew the dangers of merging government, which was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which as Jefferson argued, was a matter of individual conscience.
And that is why the U.S. Constitution reads as it does.
The supreme law of the land, written in the summer of 1787, includes no references to religion -- including in the presidential oath of office -- until the conclusion of Article VI, after all that dull stuff about debts and treaties: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (There is a pro forma "Year of the Lord" reference in the date at the Constitution's conclusion.)
Original intent? "No religious Test" seems pretty clear cut.
The primacy of a secular state was solidified when the First Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights. According to Purdue history professor Frank Lambert, that "introduced the radical notion that the state had no voice concerning matters of conscience."
Beyond that, the first House of Representatives, while debating the First Amendment, specifically rejected a Senate proposal calling for the establishment of Christianity as an official religion. As Lambert concludes, "There would be no Church of the United States. Nor would America represent itself as a Christian Republic."
The actions of the first presidents, founders of the first rank, confirmed this "original intent:"
-- In 1790, President George Washington wrote to America's first synagogue, in Rhode Island, that "all possess alike liberty of conscience" and that "toleration" was an "inherent national gift," not the government's to dole out or take away
-- In 1797, with President John Adams in office, the Senate unanimously approved one of America's earliest foreign treaties, which emphatically stated (Article 11): "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) ..."
-- In 1802, Jefferson added his famous "wall of separation," implicit in the Constitution until he so described it (and cited in several Supreme Court decisions since).
These are, to borrow an admittedly loaded phrase, "inconvenient truths" to those who proclaim that America is a "Christian Nation."
The Constitution and the views of these Founding Fathers trump all arguments about references to God in presidential speeches (permitted under the First Amendment), on money (not introduced until the Civil War), the Pledge of Allegiance ("under God" added in 1954) and in the national motto "In God We Trust" (adopted by law in 1956).
And those contentious monuments to the Ten Commandments found around the country and occasionally challenged in court? Many of them were installed as a publicity stunt for Cecile B. DeMille's 1956 Hollywood spectacle, "The Ten Commandments."
So who are you going to believe? Thomas Jefferson or Hollywood? On second thought: Don't answer.
Showing posts with label Bill of Rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill of Rights. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Unequal Protection: Jefferson Versus the Corporate Aristocracy
Tuesday 19 April 2011
Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-jefferson-versus-corporate-aristocracy/1303196400
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.
The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1
In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2
The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.
In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3
Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.
Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.
In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:
With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5
The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”
As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”
This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6
Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.
The Three Threats
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:
•Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)
•Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)
•Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)
Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.
Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right
Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.
On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.
On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9
By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10
The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11
All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.
The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy
Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12
Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.
“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:
Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.
Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.
But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.
As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.
Notes:
The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.
James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.
James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout=html&Itemid=27.
A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.
This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=306.
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=998.
Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl223.htm.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
Want a copy of the book? Receive "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' - And How You Can Fight Back" as a thank-you gift with a donation of $35 or more to Truthout.
Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-jefferson-versus-corporate-aristocracy/1303196400
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.
The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1
In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2
The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.
In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3
Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.
Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.
In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:
With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5
The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”
As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”
This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6
Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.
The Three Threats
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:
•Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)
•Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)
•Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)
Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.
Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right
Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.
On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.
On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9
By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10
The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11
All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.
The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy
Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12
Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.
“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:
Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.
Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.
But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.
As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.
Notes:
The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.
James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.
James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout=html&Itemid=27.
A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.
This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=306.
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=998.
Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl223.htm.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2218.shtml
The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Jul 23, 2007
I protest, as of the very first line of Bush’s July 17 “Executive Order” (meaning not necessarily read or approved by Congress). I protest this “Order,” which itself is in flagrant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to freedom of speech, the press, and to protest, despite the fact that that right has been violated by various courts in various eras in contentious situations like the one we have today.
I protest also that the Bush “Order” sanctions its own unconstitutionality by invoking the Constitution for its enforcement in the first line: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Remember the Constitution is the document Bush called “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as he went forth to dismiss the right of habeas corpus and fought for renewal of the illegal USAPATRIOT Act.
The outlaw protects his illegal war
Yet, in this new illegal stroke of a pen Bush outlaws all protest in the United States against his scurrilous Iraq war. And with this law, he turns all of us (US) who do not nod in bobble-doll agreement with him into “the enemy." That is, if any act [of ours], provision of funds, goods, or services by [which can he mean anything], to, or for the benefit of same threatens the ‘stabilization of Iraq,’ which can equally mean anything.
I also maintain that the ‘stabilization of Iraq’ can be best achieved by a quick and diplomatic withdrawal of all troops from that beleaguered country, whose physical, spiritual, and human toll is destabilized each additional day we remain there. Our stay encourages resistance, as does our asserting ourselves as ‘an occupying force.” What’s more, we have totally failed at replacing the infrastructure we destroyed, and we have depleted Iraq’s human resources due to death, disease, and flight.
Exactly what and who ‘destabilized’ Iraq?
Moreover, the ‘destabilization’ of Iraq was created by illegal means, by the assertion of Bush and his band of outlaws, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al, and their knowingly untruthful assertions that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and were prepared to use them; and that, in fact, President Hussein had procured ‘yellow cake uranium from Niger” to use in the production of WMD for imminent use on America.
These assertions were proven to be a pack of lies by no less than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Africa, found the “yellow cake” assertion to be fiction not fact, and asserted same in his New York Times op-ed, What I Didn’t Find in Africa. For this Wilson, an international business consultant and Untied States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995 had his wife, Valerie Plame, outed as a CIA officer, also jeopardizing the operatives working under her command. This ended her career not to mention endangering or ending the lives of those who worked for her.
In fact, outing a CIA officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. As is lying the United States into a unilateral, preemptive war a crime -- a war which drew the protests about its illegality from our allies and the United Nations.
Subsequently, the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity was traced to the office of Vice President Cheney, which begat a Department of Justice investigation into this crime, headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 28, 2005, the VP’s chief assistant, I. Lewis Libby, was amazingly the only one indicted for the crime of passing Plame’s name and identity along to news reporters. Libby was subsequently sentenced on June 14, 2007, to 30 months of prison time and a $250,000 fine. Quelle dommage as the French say -- what a horrible thing. Ah, but then not so horrible because President Bush amazingly commutated the felon’s sentence. And Bush might, given his kingly druthers, completely pardon Scooter.
Additionally, UN fact-finder Hans Blitz and his investigators could find no trace of facilities for the production of WMD throughout Iraq. Blitz’s lack of findings compounded the evidence of the high-crime of misleading America into war. And still no one was fully prosecuted and imprisoned for that crime, which borders on treason.
What about the outlaws’ involvement in 9/11?
Nor were there any firings, denunciations or prosecutions for the administration’s failures to prevent 9/11, which event wrongly contributed to the war on Iraq. Truly, quelle dommage, considering the largest intelligence organization in the world, the CIA, and the largest Department of Defense, with a compound budget of $600 billion plus, were unable to stop 19 rag-tag “terrorists” with box-cutters from cruising airliners-as-missiles into the World Trade Towers on 9/11. Could we possible have more outlaws at large here, above and beyond the seven of the purported hijackers living in the Middle East today?
In fact, at this point not only do I protest but I accuse the government of criminal negligence, if not active participation, in the execution of 9/11’s horrific events. These very events gave the Bush administration to complete their the coup d’etat.
This change gave the administration the power to first preemptively, illegally, declare war on Afghanistan and attack it, supposedly in search of Osama bin Laden, of whom a look-alike confessed to the crimes on a poorly made tape, most likely by the CIA. The day before 9/11, bin Laden had checked into a Pakistan hospital for his kidney condition. As of July 2001, he had entered the American hospital in Dubai for dialysis and met with his CIA handler; so much for homemade patsies and their producers. As to explanation of the events of 9/11, please take a look here at what really happened.
The larger outlaws’ purpose of 9/11
The larger purpose of 9/11 was to be the inciting incident to create “The War on Terror” to secure Afghanistan and build pipelines to tap the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin countries and send those precious resources down to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean for export. Of course, the larger purpose of invading Iraq was to secure its oil as well, and provide a steady flow for the Texas-driven, price-gouging outlaws and the insatiable thirst of their SUV-driving clientele, et al.
The Bush gang goes on and on, like the James brothers roaming across the spiky landscape of the Wild West, as of now the Wild Western World, hell-bent on demonizing and scape-goating Muslims, to keep Americans hungry for war with the world and their so-called attackers. This is for the purpose of creating a global American empire.
Thus 9/11 was a classic false-flag operation, ala Hitler’s Reichstag Fire, which I thoroughly protest, including the 3,000 lost souls on 9/11, the 3,800 American soldiers subsequently lost in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans lost in their respective countries, and the squandering of some $650 billion dollars, if not more, to do so.
So add mass murder and colossal financial theft to the tab of the outlaws’ crimes, which have generated more Wanted-for-Impeachment posters on the Internet than ads to meet pretty singles.
Thus, given this egregious list of crimes, this endangerment of the US population, the wanton attacks on two countries, the raising of hostilities with Muslim countries worldwide, as well as with Russia and China, I refer to you for study, guidance and precedence for action, not just a piece of paper but The Declaration of Independence,
America’s first great legal document says . . .
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States . . ."
Do King George of England’s offenses sound like King George of America’s offenses?
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:”
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:”
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”
“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation . . ."
“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . . ."
If you feel King George of America has failed the Declaration of Independence’s litmus test to lead, perhaps you should continue to protest, and protest even more loudly for his impeachment, along with Vice President Cheney’s, so as to put an end to their remorseless tyranny.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Jul 23, 2007
I protest, as of the very first line of Bush’s July 17 “Executive Order” (meaning not necessarily read or approved by Congress). I protest this “Order,” which itself is in flagrant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to freedom of speech, the press, and to protest, despite the fact that that right has been violated by various courts in various eras in contentious situations like the one we have today.
I protest also that the Bush “Order” sanctions its own unconstitutionality by invoking the Constitution for its enforcement in the first line: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Remember the Constitution is the document Bush called “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as he went forth to dismiss the right of habeas corpus and fought for renewal of the illegal USAPATRIOT Act.
The outlaw protects his illegal war
Yet, in this new illegal stroke of a pen Bush outlaws all protest in the United States against his scurrilous Iraq war. And with this law, he turns all of us (US) who do not nod in bobble-doll agreement with him into “the enemy." That is, if any act [of ours], provision of funds, goods, or services by [which can he mean anything], to, or for the benefit of same threatens the ‘stabilization of Iraq,’ which can equally mean anything.
I also maintain that the ‘stabilization of Iraq’ can be best achieved by a quick and diplomatic withdrawal of all troops from that beleaguered country, whose physical, spiritual, and human toll is destabilized each additional day we remain there. Our stay encourages resistance, as does our asserting ourselves as ‘an occupying force.” What’s more, we have totally failed at replacing the infrastructure we destroyed, and we have depleted Iraq’s human resources due to death, disease, and flight.
Exactly what and who ‘destabilized’ Iraq?
Moreover, the ‘destabilization’ of Iraq was created by illegal means, by the assertion of Bush and his band of outlaws, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al, and their knowingly untruthful assertions that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and were prepared to use them; and that, in fact, President Hussein had procured ‘yellow cake uranium from Niger” to use in the production of WMD for imminent use on America.
These assertions were proven to be a pack of lies by no less than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Africa, found the “yellow cake” assertion to be fiction not fact, and asserted same in his New York Times op-ed, What I Didn’t Find in Africa. For this Wilson, an international business consultant and Untied States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995 had his wife, Valerie Plame, outed as a CIA officer, also jeopardizing the operatives working under her command. This ended her career not to mention endangering or ending the lives of those who worked for her.
In fact, outing a CIA officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. As is lying the United States into a unilateral, preemptive war a crime -- a war which drew the protests about its illegality from our allies and the United Nations.
Subsequently, the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity was traced to the office of Vice President Cheney, which begat a Department of Justice investigation into this crime, headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 28, 2005, the VP’s chief assistant, I. Lewis Libby, was amazingly the only one indicted for the crime of passing Plame’s name and identity along to news reporters. Libby was subsequently sentenced on June 14, 2007, to 30 months of prison time and a $250,000 fine. Quelle dommage as the French say -- what a horrible thing. Ah, but then not so horrible because President Bush amazingly commutated the felon’s sentence. And Bush might, given his kingly druthers, completely pardon Scooter.
Additionally, UN fact-finder Hans Blitz and his investigators could find no trace of facilities for the production of WMD throughout Iraq. Blitz’s lack of findings compounded the evidence of the high-crime of misleading America into war. And still no one was fully prosecuted and imprisoned for that crime, which borders on treason.
What about the outlaws’ involvement in 9/11?
Nor were there any firings, denunciations or prosecutions for the administration’s failures to prevent 9/11, which event wrongly contributed to the war on Iraq. Truly, quelle dommage, considering the largest intelligence organization in the world, the CIA, and the largest Department of Defense, with a compound budget of $600 billion plus, were unable to stop 19 rag-tag “terrorists” with box-cutters from cruising airliners-as-missiles into the World Trade Towers on 9/11. Could we possible have more outlaws at large here, above and beyond the seven of the purported hijackers living in the Middle East today?
In fact, at this point not only do I protest but I accuse the government of criminal negligence, if not active participation, in the execution of 9/11’s horrific events. These very events gave the Bush administration to complete their the coup d’etat.
This change gave the administration the power to first preemptively, illegally, declare war on Afghanistan and attack it, supposedly in search of Osama bin Laden, of whom a look-alike confessed to the crimes on a poorly made tape, most likely by the CIA. The day before 9/11, bin Laden had checked into a Pakistan hospital for his kidney condition. As of July 2001, he had entered the American hospital in Dubai for dialysis and met with his CIA handler; so much for homemade patsies and their producers. As to explanation of the events of 9/11, please take a look here at what really happened.
The larger outlaws’ purpose of 9/11
The larger purpose of 9/11 was to be the inciting incident to create “The War on Terror” to secure Afghanistan and build pipelines to tap the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin countries and send those precious resources down to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean for export. Of course, the larger purpose of invading Iraq was to secure its oil as well, and provide a steady flow for the Texas-driven, price-gouging outlaws and the insatiable thirst of their SUV-driving clientele, et al.
The Bush gang goes on and on, like the James brothers roaming across the spiky landscape of the Wild West, as of now the Wild Western World, hell-bent on demonizing and scape-goating Muslims, to keep Americans hungry for war with the world and their so-called attackers. This is for the purpose of creating a global American empire.
Thus 9/11 was a classic false-flag operation, ala Hitler’s Reichstag Fire, which I thoroughly protest, including the 3,000 lost souls on 9/11, the 3,800 American soldiers subsequently lost in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans lost in their respective countries, and the squandering of some $650 billion dollars, if not more, to do so.
So add mass murder and colossal financial theft to the tab of the outlaws’ crimes, which have generated more Wanted-for-Impeachment posters on the Internet than ads to meet pretty singles.
Thus, given this egregious list of crimes, this endangerment of the US population, the wanton attacks on two countries, the raising of hostilities with Muslim countries worldwide, as well as with Russia and China, I refer to you for study, guidance and precedence for action, not just a piece of paper but The Declaration of Independence,
America’s first great legal document says . . .
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States . . ."
Do King George of England’s offenses sound like King George of America’s offenses?
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:”
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:”
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”
“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation . . ."
“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . . ."
If you feel King George of America has failed the Declaration of Independence’s litmus test to lead, perhaps you should continue to protest, and protest even more loudly for his impeachment, along with Vice President Cheney’s, so as to put an end to their remorseless tyranny.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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