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My Challenge to You

posted by snarko2 on July 4 2008

History matters. July 4 of this year marks the 232nd anniversary of the July 4, 1776 proclamation of the American Declaration of Independence. What happened 232 years ago matters. How we treat it matters.

On this continent in that hot July 232 years ago, the members of the continental congress meeting in Philadelphia made an electrifying decision: that they would challenge the power of the British Empire for the right to govern themselves.

It was recklessly audacious to declare independence from a British Crown that was not willing to grant independence. The act of doing so was an act of treason, punishable by death. Under British law, the undertaking to which the signatories of the Declaration voluntarily committed themselves incurred the maximum possible risk to which any subject of the British monarch could be exposed. In signing their names to the Declaration, they signed their own death warrants, and they knew it.

Indeed, words like "reckless" and "audacious" cannot do justice to the step taken by the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. It was an act of raw courage of the highest possible order. It was electrifying, not only to the signers and their families, but to all the population of the 13 British colonies - newly declared to be free and independent states - and to all the world. It was not a genteel act. It was an action that was unimaginably subversive and revolutionary. It was an act that challenged the entire world order.

It was not the mere act of declaring political independence that was so electrifying. The signatories proclaimed much more than political independence from the British Empire. They proclaimed the independence of humanity from millennia of subservience to kings, princes, monarchs, priests, god-kings, and all measures of royalty, nobility, and divinity. They presented to the world a new vision of human social and political relations, one founded on the twin premises that all of us are equally ordained with universal and unalienable human rights and that no government can rightfully exist except by the consent of the governed.

Unique to the known history of the planet up to that day, the signers of the Declaration announced to their American countrymen, to the British King, and to the world that here and now they were establishing a whole new way of doing things, of arranging human society, of human life itself: that they were proclaiming not only a new political entity and government, but a new society based on unshakable commitment to the propositions that human beings have irrefutable universal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that the purpose of government is to secure these rights; and that the only legitimate powers of government are those derived from the consent of the governed.

And they also said: the establishment of our new society is so important to us that we would rather die than live without it, and for the accomplishment of the freedom to realize this vision we pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. In other words, we commit ourselves to giving up everything we have to give, to sacrificing all that we have to sacrifice, to obtain this; and we seal the commitment with our mutual and reciprocal pledges to each other.

In their own lifetimes, the signatories of the Declaration and their generation were terribly flawed in the immediate implementation. They did not apply their vision of universal and equal human rights to slaves, descendants of slaves, people of the indigenous tribes, penniless persons, or women. But it does not excuse them from these terrible flaws to say at the same time that the Declaration they delivered to the world was nevertheless remarkable for the vision it set forth and for the beginning it sparked. The terribleness of the flaws and the remarkableness of the vision are both undeniable and irrefutable.

Every American, whether descended from two centuries or two generations of American forebears, whether a native-born American or an immigrant American, is an heir to the vision declared to the world on July 4, 1776. It is my contention that every generation of Americans is morally duty-bound to advance the progress of human society closer toward the realization of the vision set forth in the Declaration of Independence. It is our birthright and our legacy.

For we who are here to witness the 232nd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I wonder whether any of us could do what they did in deciding to sign the document. In fact, I wonder how many of us realize how short a time 232 years represents in the march of history. In my estimation, 232 years is far too short a lifetime for the legacy of the Declaration of Independence. It is far too soon for it to die.

The Roman Republic had a history of 600 years even before the Caesars replaced the republic with an empire ruled by an emperor. There are cities and towns in Europe, Africa, and Asia that have existed continuously as organized municipalities for more than two thousand years. In the long view of history, 1776 was but an eye-blink ago.

The situation confronting Americans on July 4, 2008 is not a pretty one for the vision of the Declaration. A ruling cabal that does not understand, appreciate, or care about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence has pushed us collectively backward, further away from the realization of the vision, in the opposite direction from living up to our legacy. They have pushed us so far backward that the very fabric of our national vision has been bashed and battered in ways that have frightened us profoundly during the reign of the cabal. It tears at our collective soul. It rips us and sears us.

And in our national legislature, the U.S. Congress, the leadership of the opposition party that attained political power in the Congress in the last general election two years ago continues to react with maddening and frightening lameness to the ruling cabal’s continuing desecration of these national values that constitute our inheritance from not only our revolutionary forebears of 1776, but also from all the other countless heroes, sung and unsung, who have strived and struggled to advance the progress of the vision in all the decades and years from then until now.

To mark the 232nd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in this year of 2008, I hereby solemnly rededicate myself to unswerving faithfulness to its magnificent and revolutionary vision. I will not accept or excuse further backward movement from its goals by those who serve as elected representatives in our self-government or by those who aspire to be elected. I make this pledge with the utmost seriousness and gravity. I challenge you to do the same.

The US Supreme Court Does Its Job This Time

posted by snarko2 on June 15 2008

In the case of Boumediene v. Bush, issued on June 12, 2008, holding that the Guantanamo Bay detainees have a Constitutional right to file habeas corpus petitions in the courts of the United States to question the legality of their detentions, the majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States have done what we expect them to do in times of crisis for our Constitutional rule of law.

This decision will go down as one of those decisive moments in American history when a majority of the Justices realized they have to take stern action to preserve the Constitutional framework of the republic from an aberrant course. The decision is a dramatic repudiation of the whole purported legal edifice of the neocons. Under this ruling, neither George Bush nor any other American president may use threats to national security, either real or imagined, as an excuse to override the Constitution.

Under this ruling, neither George Bush nor any other American president may decide for himself or herself what the president's powers are without the constraint of our Constitutional checks and balances. Under this decision, the Magna Charta is rescued from the Bushite/neocon jackboot.

This decision dispels clouds of gloom. To all of us who have experienced so many discouraging moments during the awful neocon nightmare of recent years, this action of our nation's highest court is the kind of thing that tells us our system may still be capable of protecting us from tyranny. It is the kind of thing that says perhaps the neocon thugs will indeed all get their come-uppance before it's all said and done. It is the kind of transcendental event that restores hope and renders great cheer for all who love the promise of democracy and freedom that our national forebears proclaimed to a waiting world on July 4, 1776.

For a moment, we can allow ourselves to feel genuinely optimistic about how it is all going to finally turn out in the matter of the people vs. the neocons and Bushites. For just a moment, though.

The Constitution survived a very close call by a very close margin, a 5-4 vote of the Justices. John Bush III McCain has already today expressed disagreement with the decision. Senator Barack Obama agrees with the decision. Senator Obama is already on public record opposing the neocons' bankrupt theories of Constitutional law as expressed by the four dissenters, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.

For the sake of my country and all it stands for, for the sake of all that its patriot sons and daughters have sacrificed down through the centuries and decades and years, I want Barack Obama, not Bush III McCain, filling the next vacancies on the United States Supreme Court. I am going to put every possible effort I can into making that happen. I hope you all do the same.

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$4 Gasoline and the Corporate-Government Complex

posted by snarko2 on May 28 2008

This very moment, millions of Texans are struggling to find ways to stretch their paychecks and retirement checks to cover $3.80 per gallon gasoline. This very moment, local governments are struggling to balance budgets in the face of ever-rising fuel costs. This very moment, independent business owners are struggling to keep their businesses afloat in light of the ever-increasing cost of fuel. This very moment, independent farmers and ranchers are struggling to stay alive in the face of fuel costs that keep going up. This very moment, food prices are spiraling out of control due to the shock waves of high fuel costs. This very moment, truckers find it more and more difficult to meet the expenses of keeping the geographical and economic fabrics stitched together.

But some people are making out just fine.

Exxon-Mobil's net profit for 2007 was 40 billion dollars and the profits have continued to rise in 2008. The other Big Oil giants are not far behind. Surprise, surprise -- 3 billion dollars a month wasn't enough profit. But the price at the gasoline pump keeps going up on the path to $4 per gallon and beyond at the same time that profits keep rising to these ever more unimaginable levels. This equation doesn't balance.

It is a fact of history and economics that the consolidation of great economic power into too few sets of hands inevitably results in the exercise of monopoly power and control. The continuing mergers of giant oil companies that began in the late 1990s have resulted in such consolidation to staggering degrees. We the people are witnessing the proof coming out in the pudding.

The oil company executives and their political lackeys want us to think that magical, mysterious market forces are in charge and nobody has any control over the situation. Yeah, right -- Exxon-Mobil is a mere bystander to both its $3.5 billion-per-month profits and $3.80-per-gallon gasoline, and cries all the way to the bank. Don't we all know that the corporate executives wish they could rebate some of the profits back to the consumers, but that they are forced by "the market" to gouge us against their wishes?

Here in Texas, our cultural roots stand solidly against monopoly power. The Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution declares in Article 1, Section 26 that monopolies are contrary to the genius of free government and shall never be allowed. Texas was the second political jurisdiction in the world to enact an anti-trust statute -- in the 1880s, a decade before the U.S. Congress passed federal anti-trust legislation. That first Texas anti-trust law was drafted by then-attorney general James Stephen Hogg, one of the great people's lawyers to occupy that office, who needed it and used it to challenge and beat the railroad barons on behalf of the people of Texas.

The creation of monopoly power does not create jobs. The last 25 years' worth of corporate consolidations throughout all sectors of industry have resulted in continuing losses of good jobs as the newly merged entities proceed to downsize their workforces in order to pay for the mergers and acquisitions. For example, over 9,000 jobs were lost when Exxon and Mobil merged to create Exxon-Mobil in 1999.

Monopolization smothers free enterprise by eliminating competition. Free enterprise, both for workers and for independent business owners, requires competition in order to survive and prosper. Confronting the robber barons over their monopolization of markets and industries by taking action to revive competition would take us a long way toward the revival of lost jobs and resuscitation of the gasping middle class.

But where is the political will? Too many of today's politicians accept the robber barons' excuses and double-talk without question, because too many of today's politicians have been purchased by bucketfuls of protection money in the form of campaign contributions.

As he was leaving office in January 1961, former President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the military-industrial complex. If Eisenhower were alive today, he would probably be appalled to see that what he called the military-industrial complex has morphed beyond what even he feared, to become the corporate-government complex of today that pollutes our Founding Fathers' vision of democracy at virtually every level.

Next edition: Save Democracy, Break the Corporate-Government Complex and Rein in Big Oil

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