Revitalizing America: A Declaration Against Our Government

REVITALIZING AMERICA

A DECLARATION AGAINST OUR GOVERNMENT

Donald L. Cleveland

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© 2009 Donald L. Cleveland. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 01/26/2024

ISBN: 978-1-4343-0141-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-2372-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007901671

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DEDICATION

There are several people who inspired and supported the work on this book including Albert L. Cleveland, my father, who died at the age of eighty-six. His life and example were filled with civic leadership and responsibility at the local level. His last public duty was performed after being ordered to go immediately to the hospital for surgery. Serving as a patient ombudsman inspecting nursing homes, he completed his scheduled inspection of a nursing home prior to checking into the hospital. My father died in the hospital after surgery.

Christa Anita Wahl became my wife in 1965 and has supported my endeavors with an unshakable faith. She has brought to this work and my life essential perspectives generated through exposure to the world outside North America, as well as the added gift of multiple languages; both her own multi-lingual skills and my need to keep up with them. These generous additions to my life have proven beyond a doubt that humankind is one race, and the majority strives for the same freedom, equality, and protection throughout the world.

Finally to JKL, for lighting the candle.

INTRODUCTION

This book is a new Declaration of Independence. Just like the original Declaration, it not only incorporates a long list of grievances citing the wrongs committed against the people, but it also incorporates the long-standing principles most Americans believe exist. Just as the colonists had many crimes committed against them by the king, Americans have been victimized over and over again by a system that is frequently deceptive, destructive, and unjust. Our representative democracy has been wrested away from the people; it has become tarnished through misuse and disfigured by large special interests that use the government for their own purposes. Those who are supposed to represent all the people end up being the beneficiaries of fabulous dinners in fancy clubs. They then introduce legislation that favors their hosts that grants billion-dollar tax breaks or imposes restrictions on their business competitors. The vast majority of the population is forgotten and has no practical mechanism other than election of different representatives to intervene or make the process more democratic.

Many U.S. residents believe that the broad statements of freedom and democracy about our system of government are actually written into law. Yet one of the most firmly held beliefs—that we have "a government of, by and for the people—has never been incorporated into a statute and has rarely been cited as a reason for reaching a decision in the courts. When most Americans are asked to recite something from the Constitution, they will recall those famous lines from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

So, the challenge today is to recognize that the Constitution and its drafters are mainly eighteenth-century creatures, and steps must be taken in the dawning of the twenty-first century to accomplish two major tasks. First, the beliefs of the people made through repeated promises found in an American myth must become fundamental law of the land. If these promises don’t become operative law, then people will continue to lose faith in the government and subcultures will continue to develop. These subcultures will mainly subvert organized government and the social fabric. Tax evasion is already rampant. More small businesses deal in cash now than ever before, and the purpose is obvious. Second, the barter system is also designed to avoid easy identification of the transfer of value. Those average Americans who abandon the law do so, because they’ve lost the dreams they had that were supported by the myth made up of the phrases liberty and justice for all, equal creation and inalienable rights.

On another extreme, many law enforcement personnel have become part of the problem rather than the solution, because the criminal justice system can allow the criminal to be on the street again before the victim is released from the hospital, or buried. Second, people must be granted the right to intervene in an organized way to right the wrongs committed against them by the government. We can’t establish something like the Nuremberg Code, and execute foreigners who violate it, if we don’t intend to follow the same code in the United States when our own government secretly poisons us. Further, compensation for victims of illegal acts or crimes committed by the government can’t be left up to the government to resolve. The age-old expression about there being honor among thieves certainly applies in this context. It is demonstrated over and over again when whistle-blowers are put on trial instead of the wrongdoers, when the ex-CIA chief of operations is appointed to be the chief postal inspector at the same time the CIA is secretly opening mail, and when records of secret radiation tests on humans are ordered destroyed by government physicians. The current process not only allows, but requires this incestuous process to exist. So it lets friendly bureaucrats judge the acts of each other. The ultimate loser is the citizen, who has lost his property or family member and must petition Congress for money damages over and over again. Many survivors die of old age before any form of compensation is granted. The process is villainous and only recalls the lord and vassal relationship of the Middle Ages. The right to intervene must also be coupled with the rights to secure enforcement of laws, create new laws, and change the Constitution through direct mechanisms. The new mechanisms must tear down the Washington Wall, just as the East Germans and other Eastern bloc people tore down the Berlin Wall. New democratic guarantees must bury the good old boy and spoils systems. The imprisoned East Europeans had the foresight and strength to cut the rings of barbed wire that formed the Iron Curtain. Do we have the courage to have an Orange Revolution or Cedar Revolution in America? Do we have the courage to put our lives on the line as the Poles, Czechs, East Germans, and Ukrainians put their lives on the line when it counted? Are Americans as brave, as bold, and as daring as they should be?

Can we repeat our Declaration of Independence and call for new constitutional amendments to once again balance our system of government and further the true goals of democracy? Is it enough to undertake a people’s constitutional convention, or must we take to the streets, storm our parliament buildings, and block a column of tanks with our own bodies as the brave did the Tienneman Square in China?

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

AMERICA THE MYTH AND IDEALS

CHAPTER II

OVERVIEW OF A TRAGIC REALITY

CHAPTER III

WRONGS OF THE CROWN

CHAPTER IV

REAL PATRIOTS IN THE RANKS

CHAPTER V

THE POWERFUL ARE STEALING OUR RIGHTS

CHAPTER VI

TO TAX IS TO DESTROY

CHAPTER VII

HANGING THE DAY IN COURT

CHAPTER VIII

DEMOCRACY IN ECONOMICS

CHAPTER IX

IN THE NAME OF WAR OR TERRORISM

CHAPTER X

CHANGING THE CONSTITUTION

CHAPTER XI

CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGES

APPENDIX A

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

APPENDIX B

THE CONSTITUTION OF

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CHAPTER I

AMERICA THE MYTH AND IDEALS

Think about the course of a day, a week, or a month and relate your activities to all of the formal and informal institutions you encounter. A drive or walk to the grocery store, stopping for gas, or buying a newspaper all produce a myriad of social, economic, and government contacts. Using a public road involves elements of condemnation, taxation, maintenance, employment, laws and regulations governing traffic flow, gasoline, oil drilling, shipping, insurance, manufacturing, conservation, and environmental protection to name a few of the contacts. Each one is like a thread in a woven fabric. It can be larger, smaller, coarser, finer, longer, or shorter than other threads, but they still produce the veil that colors or obscures our view and access to successful living. It is the constraint or the gateway to opportunity. The fabric or veil woven by institutional interaction does not exist without an overlay of individual mythology or belief that will further restrict or free all of us. These mythologies are built on faith; they are concepts held blindly based on some form of formal or informal learning, instinct, or intuition. Many myths are self-limiting in terms of personal and social well-being. Some are started and perpetuated by formal educational institutions in the form of technical errors or the injection of narrow philosophical, moral or ethical value concepts.

Tragically, there is usually organized resistance to changing such beliefs or myths regardless of the human suffering involved. Early Christians, who didn’t believe that the earth was the center of the universe, were threatened with death by leaders of Western churches. The concept of the earth being the center of the universe may have originated in a pagan culture in Egypt. So, a Christian opposing a pagan concept was in danger in Medieval Italy. Look at the treatment method of bleeding patients to cure them. It is another example of a technical myth that led to death. Moving from the technical to the philosophical; we all know that only white people are supreme, that Jews and Catholics, Arabs and Puerto Ricans, Buddhists and Islamits are strange. Garlic keeps vampires and cancer away, but smells bad on or around immigrants. The American Indian is either a cruel savage or a drunken welfare recipient. Both generally and specifically, these technical and philosophical myths generate disharmony, mistrust, and discrimination and severely damage the world and national social fabric.

The American mythological veil is constructed of another complicated network of fibers. It spans multi-ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds. All of these components are stretched, beaten, turned, and extruded through the institutional realities described earlier. The new Asian immigrant who just became a citizen looks differently at the meaning of democracy than the fifth-term state legislator, who has just been asked to speak at the annual bankers’ association meeting. Somehow these two views have to be modified or merged into the common good without the use of violence. More properly, however, the practice of democracy must be moved toward the ideal or the objective truth of democracy. In the past, and unfortunately today, violence is employed to break the rigid molds used to form the old myths. It is always the collision of the myth with reality that produces the pain or the friction leading to the change, either through evolution or revolution. A true democratic system may produce more evolution in a peaceful transition than violent revolution, but not always. After all, a democracy that has a majority of people holding beliefs of racial, national, or religious supremacy will continue to succeed in suppressing minority liberals who don’t follow the same myth or belief. Even a court system such as that in the United States is subject to real political control mechanisms that are overt as well as subtle. These mechanisms have been used to destroy beliefs and myths that were born and thrived under the test of fire in the American Revolution and Civil War and hardships of depression and world wars. President Franklin Roosevelt set out to increase the number of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court so he could appoint more judges who would help him maintain the New Deal laws. President Ronald Reagan and his successor George H. W. Bush moved the same Court to the extreme conservative side through successive appointments. Their appointments led to decisions that destroyed many civil rights gains achieved during the prior twenty years. So the minority rights to pursue happiness were again made more unequal and will generate circumstances that will foster violent confrontations on both private and public levels.

Let’s look at some of the myths or beliefs held by the majority of the American people that make up our social, political, and economic fabric. It’s important to restate and dissect them before painfully contrasting them to the spoonfuls of reality dished out each day to those who believe in them. Some of the more common myths are grounded in the following:

1. The Declaration of Independence

2. The Gettysburg Address

3. The Preamble to the Constitution

4. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution)

5. The Pledge of Allegiance

Each of these statements of democracy call forth a myth of fairness and equality that usually inspires the common person to believe or hold a myth that the qualities in these messages are in fact a part of the government and laws of their nation, state, county, and city. The bitter reality is, promises made in these grand statements are not fulfilled. They are parts of a greater social contract that has not yet been signed by the government. They are the greatest part of the American democracy mythology, because they are taught in school, sung at the ballparks or on the stages, and repeated over and over again in popular forms of entertainment media. They are an inescapable part of living in the United States. Their accessibility or disbursement may be the single most demonstrable form of equality existing in our society.

A major reinforcement and a second level of mythology can be found in the Hollywood ending. Books, plays, and movies in the main portray the good guy winning the day. One man beats the government fraud, wins over insurmountable odds against the machine, destroys an entire narcotics ring, saves the rebel forces from the evil empire of the universe, and gets the girl in the end. Have there been any films or stories about a woman doing that? It appears women are relegated to solving crimes, not national or international struggles. But wait, we are all created equal with certain unalienable rights aren’t we? Where are those unalienable rights? Where are they guaranteed? Certainly they were not translated into effective law from all the holy documents and words in our mythology. Let’s take things a step at a time. Have you ever read the full text of the Declaration of Independence? If you have, you might think it is boring, or on the other hand, many accusations of mistreatment the revolutionists leveled at the King of England are things many Americans feel are still happening to them today. First, it’s important to realize the Declaration of Independence was not a well thought out document sent as a message to the King prior to the first battle of the Revolutionary War. The Battle of Lexington and Concord was fought in April of 1775, and the Declaration was not adopted for more than a year and three months later, July 4, 1776, as a massive fleet of English ships carrying a large invasion force lay off the coast of New York City. The people needed to be aroused to fight for an ideal, not just for the concepts and needs developed by the intelligentsia, merchants, and landed aristocracy of the time. There are many reasons to believe such a document was a political justification for entering a war, something that could be circulated like a news release. It was a simple one-page document, which local printers could easily reproduce and hand out to the populace and volunteers for the militia. It was appropriate for the technology of the day. It was a politically expedient thing to do. It was contemporary propaganda and marketing. Prior to its adoption and publication, approximately one-third of the colonists were undecided on the issue of supporting the King of England or the Revolution. There can be no question, however, that its opening paragraphs constitute one of the most eloquent statements about the fundamental quest of human rights and dignity. It holds out the type of promises that would sway many undecided individuals to support the revolution. Further, it is full of evidence that its authors understood an unending relationship between man, the earth, and a higher natural law. They also drew upon basic earthly existence and a God of Nature. Their root concepts tied them to Aristotle, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and natural order. Listen to yourself and its writers as you read:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive to 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 has shown, 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.

The Declaration’s authors invoked everything that was earthly and holy in order to establish a break with a corrupt and inflexible government. Not only did they do that, but they said if something like that ever happens again, the people have the right to take back the government and start all over. Yet, with all those lofty words and phrases, the representatives to the Continental Congress couldn’t agree on the adoption of the Articles of Confederation to govern the united thirteen colonies. The Articles were approved by the Congress on November 17, 1777, but not ratified or put into effect until March 1, 1781. The social contract set out in the Declaration was a great horn when it sounded the call to freedom, but soon became a tarnished forgotten bugle when it was time to write these greater concepts of mankind into functioning laws. After all, in 1795, if you were someone’s servant or slave, you couldn’t be served in the Bump Tavern in Windham, New York, unless your master first gave permission, not unlike the colored drinking fountains that continued to spew their mental contamination into the 1960s. Maybe that’s also akin to some of the schools in Queens, New York, that didn’t have any books for the students in 1990. Yes, Thomas Jefferson, how much thought did you give to the phrase quoted above about equal creation and unalienable rights?

The Declaration goes on to list at least twenty-seven additional complaints against the royalty and government of England. Maybe its authors had so many complaints against the King in the Declaration they just forgot to start writing laws guaranteeing the rights that were so boldly brushed onto the canvas of the American Revolution. Why were the words of this myth never drafted directly into the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution? Why aren’t they the law of the land? Certainly, if anyone believes they were incorporated into law and the practice of law, look at the definition of unalienable. Well, if you look at one of the largest unabridged dictionaries, you won’t find it defined. There is no listing for unalienable, but inalienable seems to be the modern term used. It is defined as, not alienable; incapable of being transferred to another: inalienable rights. If this definition is applied to the system of American government, it’s impossible to find many rights that have not been transferred to the government. Life, its beginning and end; property, its boundaries, transfer, and ultimate ownership if taxes are not paid; education, its standards and failures; marriage and health are just some examples. Try to work without a Social Security number, birth certificate, passport or green card.

It isn’t possible to say that every right has been transferred to the government, but even those rights that have been preserved through the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, have been subject to limitation after limitation.

So, how do the other myths add to the split personality of what governments in America do and what most people believe they should do? Look at one of the most beautiful and graceful eulogies in the world. To honor the 45,000 dead at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address in November of 1863. What could he say that would try to overlook the weaknesses of our Founding Fathers? None of Lincoln’s biographers indicate that he lacked intelligence. His slyness, shrewdness, and ability to come to grips with continual multifaceted problems have all been praised. Earlier in the same year, he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves our very own Constitution had kept in bondage for eighty-seven years. He even used the Constitution as an authority to aid in the invocation of the proclamation. It is impossible not to reach the conclusion that this sage leader knew where the Constitution had fallen short as he viewed the graves. As a lawyer he also knew the difference between law and puffery and between an inalienable rights and the slaves he had freed in January. He chose his words carefully to help salve the wounds of the relatives of the dead; those who had to die because the Constitution hadn’t abolished slavery in 1789.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought fourth on this continent, a nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. . . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Doesn’t that line come from the Declaration of Independence? Sure enough, it seems to stand out like a sore thumb. Why like a sore thumb? Simple, the laws still don’t say that. Certainly, if we did get to the point that all men could vote, where were the women? What about the blacks who were just emancipated and the American Indians on the plains? That must certainly mean the schoolchildren in East St. Louis, Illinois have a school system that is equal to the children in Orange County, California! What about the ending? Those famous words that most Americans believe: we have a government of the people, by the people, for the people … . That will be discussed in more detail later. Suffice it to say, there are people, and then there are PEOPLE! Where the taxi driver, construction worker, social services caseworker, insurance agent, homeless, and unemployed fit in really depends on whether they are upper- or lower-case quality.

So, how is the gap bridged? How does society move on to all the things promised by the visionaries, the poets, the songwriters, and the revolutionaries? How do we bring the comparative dramatic change generated by the Magna Carta to something equally as dramatic in contemporary times? Well, it’s either by rapid evolution or through a literal continuation of the revolution. It is very important to understand some additional controlling elements related to the mass social process in the United States.

There is a need to continue the American Revolution. There is a need to establish a level playing field for all through constitutional revision. The constitutions of the United States and the states that make up its union are the fundamental laws against which all other civil, including all business and the pursuit of individual happiness, and criminal matters are measured. They are the documents that give us only the basic elements of protection against all forms of wrongdoing by one another and the officials elected and appointed to rule over us. The American democracy was the first modern form of government to emerge in its original drafting as something close to a true democracy. Certainly, England had a good start on the evolution of its democracy through the Magna Carta and the establishment of the House of Lords, but as we know, it was still under the control of a monarch at the time of the revolution. Since then, numerous other forms of democracies have appeared on the world scene, some borne through violent revolutions and others the product of evolution and peaceful reform. Several things can be said about our Founding Fathers, including the fact that they were human beings. They were not soothsayers who were able to see the future. They didn’t get it right the first time; they had to try more than once. Looking back, it is necessary to see the world through their eyes and realize the limitations they lived with in their time. These mechanical and intellectual limitations were passed on in all of their undertakings, including their private and public writings and other expressions. Things they dealt with involved taking a day to travel twenty miles or less or six weeks to cross the ocean to England.

What didn’t they have? Just look at a few things:

1. There were no other functional democracies in the world with which to make a comparison.

2. Women, blacks, and non-landowners could not vote in the new government they had established.

3. There were no military systems dropping airborne toxic chemicals on its citizens to test distribution patterns for biological warfare.

4. There was no theory of relativity, hydrogen bomb, Chernobyl, or secret human radiation experiments.

5. There were no shredding machines to hide dishonest or illegal acts of government or military functionaries.

6. There were no income taxes.

How could they envision traveling across the Atlantic Ocean in three hours at 2.5 times the speed of sound, or having private companies with more wealth than many nations? The colonies that became states under the Constitution had all of the straw and oats they needed for their horses and oxen. How could the framers of the Constitution know the industrialized countries of the world would become dependent on oil resources from what was then a part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire?

Without spending too much time on these issues, it’s clear to say that no one in the eighteenth century was able to foresee our problems of today. They certainly did their best to give the world a new government that probably was the fairest at the time. Unfortunately, many of the basic elements of fairness were lost with the maturity of the Industrial Revolution. Certainly, documenting the acceptance of slavery of black people and counting them as three fifths of a person demonstrates a major lack of vision. This lack of foresight cast the seeds of the most destructive war the United States has ever had visited on its own people.

The most that can be said about Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, and all of the others is that they probably did the best that any group of men could do in the environment of their time. They also set in place a process. It is that process that has continued in some minute areas, but has generally been overwhelmed by technology and unimaginable accumulations of wealth and power. Ideals fostered through the development of other democracies in the world and the implementation of basic truths in the messages relating to human rights and dignity in the Declaration, Preamble to the Constitution, Gettysburg Address, Pledge of Allegiance and God Bless America have all but withered.

The mythical spirit of the revolution continues to live on in the hearts of the people, but the rights guaranteed to the people are constantly subject to the new incursions of the government. These incursions are allowed to continue and are in fact given an upper hand by the shear weight of the established bureaucracy, the technical and economic facilities available and employed by them, and the stagnation of the Constitution. If the Minuteman won the revolution, modern man has lost it!

There will be those who claim that the present institutions, that is, the legislative, executive, and the judicial branches, are able to address inequities and injustices, and that the system in the United States is better than any other government on earth. The problem in maintaining such beliefs is that the access to the processes necessary to make an impact is closed to the average person. Organized special interest groups, including political action committees, (PACs) dominate the executive and legislative processes. Far too many elected and appointed officials subvert the system by taking bribes, stealing, and conducting secret activities against the American population. The courts also fail to produce one nation or justice for all. Economics and a horrifying maze of local and regional rules of procedure destroy the reality of a uniform national court system. Further, the courts are the last place where issues of fundamental rights should be resolved. Hundreds or thousands of people must suffer before one among them can or will gain access to the court system. Common law (a body of law determined by court decisions) development shows that there are numerous failures before new legal principles are established. During these periods of rejection by tradition-oriented judges, natural unalienable human rights continue to be violated. If it’s hard to identify with this concept, look at how long it took to reach the basic rights spelled out in Brown v. Board of Education on the integration of schools and Roe v. Wade on abortion rights of women. How many women died, and how many blacks lost their chance to contribute to our culture and their life development, while the courts tried to move from a conservative posture to basic justice?

This book invites everyone to rekindle the spirit and actions necessary to continue the revolutionary process. It is very much like the Declaration of Independence. It is a statement of principles of ethical governmental and social conduct based on universal ideals, and then list out the grievances against the king or our government. To no ones surprise, the violations of both human and civil rights drastically exceed the twenty-seven listed in the Declaration against the King.

Hopefully, the reader will realize that all of the components of our social myth actually constituted a social contract. It is a contract made with the people of America in good faith to convince them to turn over governing powers to a selected few in our nation if they fulfill their part of the contract. If they—the government—break their part of the contract, then the government and the laws used to break the contract may be rescinded by the people through whatever means are necessary.

It’s time to take stock of the risks and courage demonstrated by the Eastern Europeans, Soviet people, and Chinese freedom demonstrators. Ask yourself how Thomas Paine would view our government and social environment today if he were one of us. How would he have dealt with Iran Gate, Watergate, and the Love Canal, secret experiments on its own people, and so much national debt that the central banks of foreign governments literally own America?

How would he or how should we deal with a president who lied to the nation about the attacks in the Bay of Tonkin to justify sending 500,000 of us to Vietnam, and then just a few months later privately spoke about the same alleged naval engagement with his friends by stating, For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there? See 30-Year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War, Jeff Cohen and Norman Soloman, July 27, 1994. Again, what about a president who conspires with the British prime minister to precipitate a war with Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, even if they couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction? Taking it one step further; a memorandum leaked from the English prime minister’s office in 2005 clearly spells out that the President of the United States wanted to take U.S. spy planes, painting them in the United Nations colors, and when Saddam [Hussain] shoots on them he’ll be in material breach, and that will justify the use of force. These actions were discussed at least three months before the war began and were conspiracies to drag a nation into war (David Sands, Interview with National Public Radio, March 27, 2006, Day to Day Program. Also see the New York Times stories on the same subject).

CHAPTER II

OVERVIEW OF A TRAGIC REALITY

Many people make New Year’s resolutions or establish goals for their future conduct. Sometimes they even commit them to writing so they can be evaluated later. The evaluation helps to determine if the goals or objectives were met or achieved. After making the resolutions or setting the goals, we don’t run out to alarm the neighborhood. Nor are the neighbors asked to take up their guns and either die or be wounded to defend our resolutions. The revolutionary leaders, the Continental Congress and the Congress of the United States have asked Americans repeatedly to make the ultimate sacrifice for the resolutions adopted by them. Each time, the propaganda machine cranks out the original and old goals, objectives, and resolutions. Well, after 230 years, it’s perhaps time that the resolutions were measured against what was done to implement them.

Stones thrown into ponds cause lots of ripples. It’s probably time to throw the stones into the pools created by the glimmering necklace of promises draping the neck of America. Using thirty years of travel through numerous industrialized countries as a background, it is more than obvious and painful that the United States is comparatively and actually falling behind our one-time nonthreatening competitors and peer nations; not only economically, but in how we treat our people. Most people with a grain of common sense can reach the same conclusion without having to spend the money to travel. The signs of economic, social, and governmental problems in America are similar to acute appendicitis attacks. The citizens feel the pain, suffer, and court disaster or near death, but the patient is never taken to the hospital. Should an ambulance arrive, it has a new driver who can’t find a hospital or it has two drivers who argue over the best route, and never start the rescue trip.

Speaking of trips, the United States once had the fastest trains and locomotives in the world. Now, a two-hour American passenger train trip frequently degenerates into a five-and-one-half or six-hour endurance test, because the train breaks down, the tracks are unfit for faster speeds, or the crew walks off the job leaving the train and passengers stranded. If we were filling in the blanks, we would expect that type of story to come from some country that has a name most Americans can’t pronounce let alone want to inhabit. Yet if we want to talk about flying, Americans fly through skies where complete regional radar systems fail because a defective safety device on an AT&T switching station has not been repaired, leaving all the aircraft in the Northeast in danger of mid-air collision. Ancient traffic control computers repeatedly fail at Chicago’s O’Hare and the Miami airports. Air traffic controllers become so overburdened or distraught that they make mistakes. A Los Angeles controller cleared a large passenger jet for landing. It crushed a smaller commuter plane that had just landed on the same runway. As late as 2006, the radar system at the Los Angeles Airport went out, and the emergency backup system failed. Hundreds of jets were left scrambling for airspace and frantically seeking different altitudes so they could be controlled by towers in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Seattle.

EQUALITY

Seeing the South Bronx and Harlem is more horrifying than reading about it. The area has undergone some change since the early 1970s, but still begs for equal treatment. The best use for the rusted abandoned cars, refrigerators, sofas, bottles, cans, and bags of junk that cluttered the porches, streets, alleys and sidewalks is a barricade. The barricade of junk should be built across 46th and Park Avenue or to build a dam around New York City Hall to make the politicians crawl in it, over it, and through it until they regain their sense of community. There is no question that if the trash were dumped on 46th and Park or at City Hall that it would be gone in a few hours. The mayor would see to that. So, why the disparity in service levels? Why are the streets in the poor section of town given less care than those in the wealthy part? How does this discrimination work? Where is the equality? Perhaps the pun on equality is that everyone is asked to vote! How many times have pictures of presidential candidates been taken while standing in the rubble of the South Bronx? Crumbling multistory apartments and other abandoned buildings make it look like a war zone. Junk in the form of cans, bottles, appliances, tires, cars, and everything humanly imaginable is strewn across the landscape. Candidates for president, governor, mayor, and state legislature scramble up the crumbling and overgrown piles of brick and rubble to have their pictures taken and lead the cheer, These conditions must end; elect me, and I will bring and end to these terrible things! Yet when the Metro North Commuter train passes through the Bronx twenty five years later, there has been no substantial change and politicians are still trying to make hay on the problems of the people enslaved by their debasing environment. Another part of this tragedy is that the South Bronx is truly just a few blocks north of New York’s Central Park and the multimillion-dollar condominiums that look down onto the jewel of the city. It’s like a curtain; a curtain of disdain drops at 110th street and spills its hideous shadow of willful neglect over the Harlem River.

It was as plain then as it is today, and it exists in Missouri Valley, Iowa, just as it does in New York City. There is an element of both passive and conscious discrimination that transcends color, religion, or sex. It is a discrimination that is enforced by the vast majority of American governments at all levels. If you are poor and live in a poor part of town, the street is swept once a year, if it is ever swept. Abandoned cars accumulate, minimum standards dealing with uninhabitable housing are not enforced, and basic infrastructure is allowed to deteriorate. Streetlights are not replaced when broken, water mains and clogged sewers take longer to be repaired, and potholes just get bigger and bigger. Again, after generations of exposure to these conditions, combined with the overwhelming economic difficulties, depression, and health problems, the poor have no other image of real existence. Life is the garbage that greets them every morning. It’s the burned-out car, the rats and cockroaches that run in the hallways. The contrast and escape is sex, drugs, and joining gangs for dominance over the rubble heaps. They provide the only rare moments of gratification to remind the poor that they are subject to some emotions of basic joy and success, not just emotions of pain and anguish. Yet the governments do draw a curtain. That curtain is a testimony to the most incestuous form of discrimination, because it originates with the state and is state supported. Oh yes, the state is supposed to derive its powers from people. This willful policy makes poor neighborhoods look poor and the poor to develop an attitude that is frequently attributed to them. When a town, city, county, state, and nation collects taxes to provide services, those services must be applied equally and uniformly across all sectors of the neighborhood. Schoolbooks for children in one Brooklyn school and none in another is no different than electron microscopes for Edina, Minnesota, and manual microscopes with broken lenses for northeast Minneapolis. If the poor can’t see protozoa, how can they describe its reproductive process; if they can’t read the words differential calculus, how can they hope to do it. If the city fathers don’t pick up the garbage, remove burned-out cars, and condemn uninhabitable houses, then these things must be acceptable, and the poor have the right to think that way. It is the training and conditioning provided by the state that gives them that right.

What about something with equal in its name? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) should be the part of government that fulfills the promise of equality. The legislation is generally broad and powerful, but its opponents have found the best way to defeat it. There is an expression that most Americans understand, No mon, no fun, your son. The EEOC is so badly under funded that it cannot perform its mandate. The lack of budget and staff has resulted in a backlog of complaints and management capability. Cases often take years to get to court, and if your case isn’t considered a major one, it may be left at the end of the list. The EEOC is so understaffed and undermanaged, it could not respond to a request on its own backlog in a six-month period. In case you are interested, the same is true of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is supposed to help consumers who have been defrauded in national fraud or bad business schemes. They are also supposed to enforce the antitrust acts to make sure that big corporations don’t unfairly compete with or ruin small businesses. Don’t bother to call or write; they are too busy working on major cases! Yet it’s difficult to name a major case recently brought to the courts or driven to settlement by the FTC. If it wasn’t for one energetic state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, many of the big business and stock manipulation scams would have been ignored by both the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Spitzer forced the largest settlement in insurance industry history by pressing his claims against American International Group (AIG). The settlement was over $1.5 billion dollars, and Hank Greenberg, its