REAL AMERICAN VALUES continued
American Values: “Dark Side” or Beacon of Hope?
The Declaration of Independence says that we are created equal, with an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our values rest on that base.
Anti-colonialism is an American value, since the Declaration was the explanation for why a colony had the right to fight back and become an independent nation. Our “Declaration” also says that we should have “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” – which is not the same as becoming the self-appointed police of our planet.
Our Constitution begins with goals that embody values; a more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty now and in the future.
I believe that our unique, constitutional, American value system made our nation new and precious on this earth, and that each generation must take its turn defending liberty. I believe that our best values unite us, and that only this sense of a united purpose can give us the national will to accomplish the critical tasks we face. These tasks are peace, prosperity, and preservation of the web of life. I believe that our American ideals of freedom, justice, and fairness are not abstractions; it is not possible to build “freedom”, by sacrificing each of the individual constitutional rights that are our birthright. There can be no freedom if we have endless war; there is no fairness without universal health care, there is no justice if we are not allowed to control own bodies. The original American flag said “don’t tread on me”.
In order to gain power over all branches of government, the Republican Party has willfully created division and hatred among Americans, always trying to create heat rather than light. Their game is to use any cultural changes that may upset some traditionally-minded people as “wedge issues” to gain votes. These wedge issues (abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, creationism etc.) often exploit prejudice, and have nothing to do with American morality, diversity, or values. The “neocons” now in charge of our great land would have been called “Tories” in 1776.
The Placement of “War Powers” says a lot about American Values
The President is the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” in time of war. Our founders were smart enough to know that a ship in crisis had to have one captain. That single sentence is all the Constitution says about the president’s war power.
Most war powers rest with Congress, which has now abdicated its duty. Only Congress has the power “to declare war”. Congress must “provide for the common defense”, “raise”, “support” and “maintain” the army and navy, and “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces”. It is only Congress that has the right to determine how prisoners will be treated; very specifically “to make rules concerning captures on land and water”. President Bush has usurped this role, with disastrous results. Our founding fathers knew that it was essential that the President not be allowed to involve the USA in wars.
“War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement…. The strongest
passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition,
avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against
the desire and duty of peace”…. “The means of defense against foreign danger
have been always the instruments of tyranny at home”.
James Madison, “Father of the Constitution”
“The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable…. There is danger from all men.
The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power
to endanger the public liberty”.
John Adams, second president of the USA
During the first half of American history Congress did keep hold of the war power, and used it sparingly.
Powerful "Checks and Balances" are a core American Value
“The Judicial power shall extend to all cases”, the American Constitution states, including “controversies to which the United States may be a party”, (specifically including controversies that are not between nations, like between the USA and al Qaeda.). Our three branches of government are supposed to be separate and equally powerful. Judicial power and independence, as an essential balancing force, is at the center of our constitutional value system. The judiciary is the most vulnerable branch of government to fall victim to tyranny, since it has neither an army nor the “power of the purse”.
Religious Liberty is Necessary for Freedom and Stability
The greatest innovation and a central value of the founding fathers was the freedom of religion, and the freedom from religion. Our Constitution states “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”.
“The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion
of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of church
and state”.
“[Americans] attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly
to the separation of church and state”.
Alexis de Toqueville, 1835
The Bill of Rights are American Values in their Purist Form
The Bills Of Rights are “distilled” American values - our national “Ten Commandments”. They were already damaged by drug war abuses of power and are now hostage to Bush’s war on terror. In his parting speech as president George Washington warned (like Eisenhower) “Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty”.
I remember when it was the Russians, not the Americans, who spied on what citizens read. It was the Soviet Russians and the Red Chinese who ran youth programs which encouraged children to turn their parents over to the police (like the DARE program), or financed a vast network of criminal informants who turned in their enemies, as well as and friends and family members, to face long mandatory prison sentences. If we allow ourselves to be permanently at war, we will always be giving up more of our freedoms; the source of our unique national worth. It seems that if we agree to call the terrorist situation a “war”, it is assumed that we have agreed to a coup by the executive branch.
Court decisions largely related to the “War on Drugs” have twisted the Bill of Rights until the words have lost meaning. It is now legal for you to be punished twice for the same crime (state and federal). It is legal to force you to incriminate yourself, (millions of Americans must submit their bodily fluids for inspection before they can get a job.) Your home may be legally be broken into, searched, and photographed by the government and they don’t have to tell you.
Most Americans aren’t aware that, even prior to the PATRIOT ACT, they have nearly no remaining protection against the most raw police state power. Any American can be accused by a secret informer who is either paid or has his own criminal charges dropped. Before you are accused of any crime all of your property, accounts, and vehicles may be seized. You can be totally innocent and not be able to get your property back before it is sold. Your children may be taken and disappear into foster care. A hospital can involuntarily test the blood of a new mother and have her baby taken away by the sheriff if they find a trace of pot. A jury trial is often unrealistic these days if the prosecutor hangs a huge mandatory minimum prison sentence over your head.
There is nothing theoretical or far away about the attack on our basic rights. Outrageously barbaric treatment of citizens goes on in Michigan right now! In Saginaw County, Michigan, pre trial detainees (convicted of nothing) were routinely stripped naked and held cowering in cells where they were videotaped in a way that other prisoners could watch. Jail trustees enjoyed mopping the floor in front of the video screen to watch the female prisoners.
In Flint, Michigan, police raided a licensed nightclub and arrested 93 patrons for “frequenting a drug house”, even though these customers were drug free. Both sexes were strip searched and cavity searched; women had to lift their bras in front of male officers. Is that the America you want for you or your family?
Check out our Bill of Rights! Its whole purpose was to make this kind of thing impossible. Without the protection of the Bill of Rights, the separate states would not have joined together to create the USA.
Torture is not an American Value - and has Destroyed the Image of our Nation in the World
It is now the USA which kidnaps individuals worldwide and sends them to secret prisons in foreign lands where no criminal charges are ever laid against them; where they can be tortured, incommunicado, evidently forever. Torture has become a trademark of the United States, to the point that the President threatened to use his first veto to kill a bill that would guarantee humane treatment of prisoners. Bush, Cheny, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the gang have so deeply stained our nations honor before the world that it is hard to imagine how it might be restored.
Prisoners of the USA have their heads covered in hoods that stink, they are held in “stress positions” for hours, stripped naked and sexually humiliated, deprived of food and drinking water, blasted with the sound of rap or heavy metal music (or demonic laughing), wrapped in Israeli flags, smeared with fake menstrual blood, sodomized with glow sticks, (Taguba Report,www.agonist.org/annex/taguba.htm.) attacked by dogs, left in freezing cold, “hung up” on walls for days at a time, smothered, beaten, put in simulated death experiences – or neglected or beaten to death. More than 100 prisoners of our country have died in these conditions. This does not reflect my values.
Wars destroy our American values at home and overseas.
Would our prisons at home in America make our founders proud? We’ve built the largest system of prisons ever seen on earth, and most people never think about it. We make sure they are filled, even as crime continues to drop. We keep six or seven times as many people in prison than other developed countries. Are Americans inherently seven times more criminal than people in other countries? I doubt it.
Many prisons have become hellholes of violence and neglect; many are now privatized and make their money by cutting back on health care. Prison labor is sold to private companies by other companies for less than a dollar an hour. Long ago we used to complain about Chinese prison labor. Now we follow their lead.
American Values - Or Corruption and Hypocrisy?
How about the moral level of the Republican response to hurricane Katrina, where TV crews of every network reached desperate and dying people, but not assistance.
Or the “Clear Skies Act” which means more air pollution or the “Healthy Forests Initiative” which means more logging in national forests. Did you know that their effort to kill the Endangered Species Act is called the “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act”!
Important scientific papers are changed or rejected unless they fit with right-wing orthodoxy, including studies on global warming.
Poverty has increased each year during the “Compassionate Conservatism” of George W. Bush, and the middle class is continually chopped away.
We’re reaching new lows. A college professor was kidnapped and “rendered” to another country for torture. His only crime was to give a bad grade to an al Qaeda member (who then turned him in to the CIA). A California minister who criticized the Iraq war got a letter from the Internal Revenue Service threatening to cancel the church’s tax exempt status. Since 2001 the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled; they are now able to write legislation for themselves and have it passed.
Ethics are ignored in Washington, since one party holds all power. Our current congressman in the 7th District of Michigan, Joe Schwartz, took money from Congressman Tom Delay, the biggest crook in the GOP.
Our behavior abroad is worse. American money that is sent to Africa to fight AIDS is spent on lectures about abstinence. Money for condoms is cut and the AIDS rate is headed back up in places like Uganda. American money for the United Nations Population Fund that Bush II has denied each year could have prevented six million unwanted pregnancies, an unknown number of abortions, as well as 14,000 maternal and 230,000 child deaths. Right-wing ideology creates a culture of death, not life.
(data from International Planned Parenthood Federation)
Patriotic Americans do not support this level of hypocrisy. We want honesty and integrity, liberty and justice.
Republicans have gained power through wealth and manipulation of “cultural war”. They frighten or anger people into voting against their own economic best interests, always trying to create a context of “us against them” – never admitting that economic questions are at the root of many problems. The “silent majority” of Americans support the Democratic Party value of “fairness”. Real Americans believe that “all men are created equal” and that our government should “promote the general welfare”.
American Do Care about Fair Treatment of our People, our Environment, and other Nations
•65% say that the government should guarantee universal health insurance
•86% favor raising the minimum wage
•60% favor repealing all of Bush’s tax cuts, or at least the portion going to the rich
•66% would not raise the deficit, but would rather cut Pentagon spending or raise taxes
•77% believe that we should do “whatever it takes” to protect our environment
•80% would support a windfall profits tax on oil companies and spend the money on researching alternative fuels
•69% agree that corporate off shoring of jobs is bad for the US economy
(Data from polls by the Pew Research Group, the Opinion Research Corporation, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News)
On international questions the American people support co-operation
•Most Americans wanted UN approval before the invasion of Iraq. A majority also wants the U.S. to participate in the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change, The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the treaty banning land mines.
•84% think global warming is either “critical” or “important”
•90% think combating world hunger is important (under the “Pax Americana”
about 15,000 of the world’s children die daily from malnutrition related problems)
•81% think we should be strengthening the United Nations
(Polling by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations)
An election based on real morality and “values” issues (such as peace, broad based prosperity, health care, justice, and the environment) would decisively be won by Democrats. Our candidates must speak forcefully and consistently about real moral values and the core principles of the USA. Our indignation and righteous anger must be evident. We must hammer away at the ethical depravity of the Republican right wing, as they mix church and state and posture about “morality” for political gain. We must place the issues that touch people’s daily lives within the framework of American values – and expose the wedge issues for the vicious, bigoted, and self serving delusions that they are.
If we stand up strongly for justice, and for helping people and the environment, we can turn our great nation around. Your grand children may ask you “What did you do to help save America during the ‘dark time’”. I hope you can answer them proudly!
We will see victory and create a healthy nation if we can bring our country together around its best constitutional and traditional values.
