Toward Democracy

Beyond Rhetoric

Reflections of a former U.S. history teacher who belatedly learned some history:

Indeed, we are all responsible for defending this country from terrorist attacks, but such easy rhetoric mirrors the administration’s glib and fear-based approach to governance.

First, In the interest of full disclosure, I deplore, denounce and oppose attacking civilians by anyone everywhere, from flying planes into buildings and suicide bombings wherever and by whomever they take place to bombing, raping and shooting civilians in Iraq, a country that was demonstrably not responsible for those who flew planes into buildings. In fact, the U.S. cozied up to Saddam Hussein when it suited  its purposes in the giant board game that is the world’s foreign and military policy.

I also deplore, denounce and oppose sending troops on misbegotten missions where they are brutalized and sometimes brutalize, then are too often discarded when their usefulness is past and their health and financial needs become burdensome.

Second, beyond patriotic rhetoric, what does it mean to be responsible for defending this country?  I’m of the Carl Schurz school of citizenship. Stephen Decatur proposed a toast at a banquet honoring his heroism in the War of 1812, “My country right or wrong!”  Decades later Schurz, the first immigrant cabinet member, added, “My country right or wrong.  When right,  keep it right.  When wrong, put it right.”

The rub is deciding what needs to be put right and how to do it. Of course we citizens often disagree, which is inevitable and even healthy.  However, our divisive and polarized political processes make it difficult to have civil conversations.

Third, my idea of defending the country  includes internal as well as external threats, and accurate information about both. So in the name of “homeland security,” let’s demand that U.S. ports be secured and the Energy Department make their deadlines for hardening and improving security at our nuclear installations, military and civilian  – and devise a coherent plan to stash the enormous amount of nuclear waste.  And how about getting serious about providing health care for all.  

Let’s also oppose bombastic threats to bomb Iran. One can deplore and denounce  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  and also understand the lingering and exploitable Iranian bitterness toward the U.S. orchestration of the popularly elected prime minister Mohammed Mosedegh in 1953, and the subsequent reinstallation on the throne of the repressive Shah – which in turn led to the Revolution in 1979.

Remember the Iranian seizure of U.S. hostages (and the deal that released them at the moment of Reagan’s inauguration)?  Some years ago Chalmers Johnson wrote about “blowback,” the chickens that come home to roost as a result of foreign policy machinations.  Longtime foreign correspondent and part-time Truro resident Stephen Kinzer’s “Overthrow” details 14 instances of the U.S. replacing other countries’ rulers, from Hawaii in 1898 to Iraq in 2003.  

If you think such policies are right, support them.  If not, work to make them right – both required of us and doable if this country is truly a democracy. In the words of George Santayana, Spanish-born U.S. philosopher and writer:  Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it.

Good advice for “fighting terrorism.”

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Tortured Logic

TORTURE REDUX

In addition to further shrinking the U.S. supply of moral capital, torture is ineffective, as Diana pointed out.  

Nearly every client at the Center, when subjected to torture, confessed to a crime they did not commit, gave up extraneous information, or supplied names of innocent friends or colleagues to their torturers...According to The Center for Victims of Torture, “Well-trained interrogators within the military, the FBI, and the police have testified that torture does not work, is unreliable and distracts from the hard work of interrogation.  Nearly every client at the Center, when subjected to torture, confessed to a crime they did not commit, gave up extraneous information, or supplied names of innocent friends or colleagues to their torturers...

"The estimate from the Red Cross was that at least 80 percent of those imprisoned at Abu Ghraib, for example, should never have been arrested, but were there because it was easier to arrest persons than to let them go (people feared letting go a terrorist more than protecting the innocent).”  

The innocent torture victim In the film “Rendition” gave the names of his high school soccer team in Egypt.

I oppose not only torture itself, but my administration’s secret shopping around to find regimes to do its dirty work and thus circumvent U.S. laws in the name of protecting freedom and democracy.

More on the attorney general nominee’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which Michael Mukasey claimed not to know enough about waterboarding to classify it as torture and thus unconstitutional. Do we really want yet another attorney general who is not forthcoming, especially on something that is public knowledge?  Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on Judiciary, apparently doesn’t think so, reinforcing the committee’s request for written answers to questions about Mukasey’s views on executive power and the administration’s terrorism policies, including interrogation techniques.

For those who believe anything goes in the “war on terror,” I recommend a guest editorial in the October 28 edition of “The New York Times,” by Francois Furstenberg, an author and professor of history at the University of Montreal.

According to Professor Furstenberg, the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, sparked the French Revolution much as September 11, 2001, shaped  the Bush presidency.  The Jacobins “shared a defining ideological feature.  They divided the world between pro- and ant-Revolutionaries – the defenders of liberty versus its enemies.”

“Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France, the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the ‘Terror.’

“Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism...[They] could not conceive of legitimate dissent.... when the homeland is in danger.”

In describing “the Terreur,” Furstenberg refers to the slogan “No liberty for the enemies of liberty,” comparing it to President Bush’s “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself.”

Beware lest we accomplish that ourselves, with no help from “les terroristes.”

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Rendition

Waterboarding is torture 

This past Tuesday Michael B. Mukasey, nominated to succeed the ethically challenged Alberto Gonzalez as U.S attorney general, was asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to clarify his position on waterboarding.

“Please respond to the following question: Is the use of waterboarding, or inducing the misperception of drowning, as an interrogation technique illegal under U.S. law, including treaty obligations?”

The follow-up letter was sent because in the previous week’s confirmation hearings before the committee, Mr. Mukasey responded to a question about whether waterboarding was torture:  “I don’t know what’s involved in the technique. If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

Mr. Mukasey’s reply to the letter if any, has not been reported as of this writing. However, a prospective attorney general who expresses ignorance about the technique of waterboarding is either as duplicitous as the recently departed head of the Justice Department or too ignorant to merit serious consideration, given the long-standing controversy surrounding this and other forms of torture.

For those not familiar with waterboarding (excusable since you haven’t been nominated to be the top attorney in the U.S. government), it reportedly dates to the Spanish Inquisition and involves restraining people being interrogated and pouring water over their covered heads to simulate drowning.  Senator John McCain, himself tortured as a POW in Vietnam, described waterboarding as “very exquisite torture.”

According to “intelligence officials,”  the CIA used waterboarding on El Qaeda suspects following the September 11 attacks. White House statements have “suggested” that the practice has stopped, given complaints from Mr. McCain and other members of Congress.

No matter, there’s “rendition” to fall back on. My dictionary’s definition of “render” includes “to give, hand over, deliver, present, or submit, as for approval, consideration, payment...”  In the interrogation redefinition business, rendition sends suspects to a country unfettered by legal niceties, delivering, presenting and submitting them to exquisite torture of various kinds.  The practice apparently began in the Clinton Administration and was refined and expanded after September 11, 2001.

For a depiction not only of waterboarding itself, but the machinations involved in rendition, the film “Rendition” is in a number of Cape Cod theaters.  The graphic scenes are harsh, but I found the clinically removed renderers far more disturbing.  I only wish Michael Mukasey felt the same.

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Another World is Possible; Another U.S. Is Necessary

The first part of this slogan echoes that of the  World Social Forum; the second reflects the view of organizers and up to 15,000 participants in the first U.S. Social Forum, held in Atlanta June 28-July 1.

The event began with a diverse and colorful march on historic Peachtree Street, music, chants, and signs and banners drawing onlookers from the surrounding stores and office buildings.  

John Nichols, writer for The Nation magazine and author of The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History, appeared on a panel on “A Democracy Movement for the U.S.A.”  Afterwards he posted the following message on his blog:

“At a point when only one in five Americans think the country is headed in the right direction, isn't it time we changed course?  That's the message of the thousands of Americans [including Latin Americans] who have gathered in Atlanta in recent days for the U.S. Social Forum.”

The first World Social Forum was initiated by social movements of oppressed and exploited peoples in the Global South, held for several years in Porto Allegre, Brazil. From there it moved to Mumbai, India; Caracas, Venezuela; and Nairobi, Kenya. Three years ago, Grassroots Global Justice, an alliance of over 50 organizations representing people of color and low-income communities in the US, formed a National Planning Committee that resulted in the USSF.  Atlanta was chosen for its centuries of struggle for racial, economic and gender justice and equality.

Some 900 gatherings – plenaries, workshops and panels, along with informal discussions at organizational tables in the Civic Center and a dozen and a half massive theme tents – dealt with poverty, environmental threats, democracy, war and genocide, water, health care, and issues involving other countries, cultures and diverse peoples. Native American drummers, hip hop artists, and many other groups enlivened the walkways and plaza around the Civic Center, and the farflung nature of many events meant that we learned how to navigate Atlanta in the bargain.

I spent most of my time handing out information and holding conversations in the Democracy Tent, organized by the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy and allied groups like Liberty Tree and the Green Institute, and housing folks as diverse as the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom, the Black Radical Congress, Students for a Democratic Society, and YES! magazine. Our large banner proclaimed DEMOCRACY:  THE LARGE TENT.  We also distributed thousands of our own schedule of some 60 Democracy Track workshops and panels.

In addition to co-facilitating a workshop on “The Democratic Arts: Tools for Social Change,” I attended a disarmament workshop facilitated by WILPF’s Carol Urner, with organizers against war in space, nuclear proliferation, university research, and more.  I also reconnected with WILPFers with whom I organized WILPF’s Cuba campaign in the 1990s, at their workshop on “Why Women, Why Cuba.”  They showed a film
featuring interviews with women of color my age whose only option was domestic work before the resolution, and are now doctors, administrators, lawyers.

A highlight for me was a HealthCare-Now benefit screening of SICKO.  Seeing it in a packed theater of people from around the country reminded me that another world is indeed possible, and right here on Cape Cod many of us are doing our part.

John Nichols again:  “As the diverse range of peace and social justice groups that have organized the U.S. Social Forum recognize, only when the U.S. becomes a more responsible player will the planet become a more functional and humane place. This is not a matter of blaming the U.S. for everything that ails the world; there is plenty of blame to go around. Rather, the point is a positive one: By making the United States live up its founding promises of democracy, respect for the rule of law and avoidance of entangling alliances, this country can both lead by example and by the practice of respecting the right of others for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

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On Memorial Day

        One of my regular walks is in Pine Grove Cemetery in South Yarmouth, and I thought it appropriate to go there early this morning.  I wound back and forth on the parallel paths, noting many flags but few flowers yet.  It reminded me that this holiday was called Decoration Day during my childhood.

    This afternoon I’ll join my Capewide community’s annual Memorial Day commemoration, mindful of this holiday’s origin in a gathering of freed slaves and abolitionists in Charleston, South Carolina – and its current relevance to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mourn the dead; Heal the Wounded; End the War

    Our memorializing began four years ago, when members of Cape Codders for Peace & Justice and the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom held banners at three bridges across the MidCape Highway, saying “Mourn the dead; Heal the Wounded; End the War.”
 
    Since then, on both Memorial Day and Labor Day we’ve waved to Cape Codders and holiday visitors heading west past a rest area on Route 6.  In recent years our numbers have grown and the changing mood of the country is reflected in the increased thumbs up rather than down, and almost no middle fingers.  

    I commend to those who would call us unpatriotic a speech given on the floor of the House on May 22 by Ron Paul, a Republican member of Congress from Texas and an independent candidate for president .

     “The accelerated attacks on liberty started quickly after 9/11. Within weeks, the PATRIOT Act was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. Though the final version was unavailable up to a few hours before the vote. No Member had sufficient time to study it. Political fear of not doing something, even something harmful, drove the Members of Congress to not question the contents, and just vote for it. A little less freedom for a little more perceived safety was considered a fair tradeoff, and the majority of Americans applauded....."

    “Unsound policy can never help the troops. Keeping the troops out of harm's way and out of wars unrelated to our national security is the only real way of protecting the troops. With this understanding, just who can claim the title of ‘patriot’'?”

    I hope to live long enough to join a Memorial Day parade that honors the millions and generations of war dead by resolving to oppose war as an acceptable means of resolving conflict.

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Feliz Cumpleanos, Celia Sanchez

Happy Birthday Celia 

    Happy Birthday to Celia Sanchez, born on this day in 1920 and dying sixty years later.  You can be forgiven if her name doesn’t ring your bell.  It simply means that either you're not steeped in Cuban history or you aren’t in possession of this year’s calendar, featuring “Sheroes,” from the Gustavos Center for the Study of Bigotry & Human Rights.  (The photo on right shows Celia with Fidel in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958.)

    I wasn’t familiar with Celia Sanchez until turning the page to May and reading the entry for May 9:  “Warrior in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro’s companion for many years, she was the ‘Eva Peron’ of Cuba.  She created orphanages, organized the Mariana Grajales Women’s platoons, helped to found the Federation of Cuban Women, and responded to all letters for help by the humblest Cubans.”

    I did know about the Federation of Cuban Women, however, since in 1990 I represented the US Section of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom at the Fifth Congress of Cuban Women.  It was held in a huge convention center in Havana, with some 1400 Cuban women on the vast floor, over 100 foreign guests in the balcony, and Fidel Castro sitting on the dais amidst women officials.

    For three days the delegates reported, discussed and debated the issues they wanted included in the next five year social and economic plan for the country.  This was the culmination of a bottom-up process, with issues select by workplaces, barrios, and organizations in all sectors and locations in Cuba. Delegates from each were local meeting elected to confer and consolidate the issues on the next level and on from there to further refinement until in the case of the the women’s sector, the convention floor was filled in March 1990.  

    I couldn’t help noticing that Fidel Castro didn’t miss a session and didn’t utter a word until his one intervention. He raised a question about the hours of day care centers in Havana, a homely illustration of his fabled micromanaging.  I whispered to the U.S. woman seated next to me, can’t you picture Bush (President H.W. that was) sitting for three days listening to women for a change?”

    My second trip was five years later on a WILPF study tour of women’s medical facilities.  We had to get a license to travel, and many friends, assuming it was a Cuban requirement, were surprised to learn it was a permit from the U.S. Treasury Department under the Trading with the Enemy Act.     

    After my brief experience at the Fifth Congress, it was all the more fascinating to meet with women at the workplace and barrio level, both in Havana and the countryside. I knew that literacy and health care were the first priorities of the revolution. Teachers were sent all over the country to teach reading, and clinics were established in every barrio.  In the face of limited resources for sophisticated equipment and pharmaceuticals, the Cubans trained untold numbers of health professionals.

    “Salud!,” a new DVD, depicts “the urgency of ensuring the universal right of health care.”  It looks at what the BBC called “one of the world’s best health systems,” as well as Cuba’s sending almost 30,000 medical workers to some 70 countries around the world.  For more information, visit www.saludthefilm.net.

    Feliz Cumpleanos, Celia Sanchez!

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WRITING FROM THE HEART

A Black Day in the Blue Ridge

By LUCINDA ROY, April 17, 2007, New York Times

A FEW months ago, when I returned from a trip to Sierra Leone, a country I lived in for years and one still reeling from the effects of a brutal civil war, I was filled with relief to be returning to a crime-free place like Blacksburg. As usual, I was welcomed by the Blue Ridge Mountains, and by the friends I’ve grown to love during my 22 years on the faculty at Virginia Tech.

It’s a quiet place. The town is full of turkeys — statues of our mascot, the Hokie Bird, painted in garish colors — as if being a Hokie were not a sports metaphor but a way of life. There’s a 5-foot-tall turkey just outside the bank; one near the police station; another in the parking lot of a Cleaner World, where I take my clothes. We have a sense of humor in Blacksburg — it’s part of our charm.  Blacksburg is a misnomer, of course. It’s the whitest town I’ve ever lived in...  Read the rest of this NY Times Op Ed here.

------------------------

Lucinda Roy, a co-director of the creative writing program at Virginia Tech, is the author, most recently, of  "The Hotel Alleluia."

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Secession anyone?

The Once and Future Republic of Vermont, by Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan
BURLINGTON, VT, Sunday, April 1, 2007, The Washington Post

The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans' fundamental freedoms.

Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire. Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.

A decade before the War of Independence, Vermont became New England's first frontier, settled by pioneers escaping colonial bondage who hewed settlements across a lush region whose spine is the Green Mountains. These independent folk brought with them what Henry David Thoreau called the "true American Congress" -- the New England town meeting, which is still the legislature for nearly all of Vermont's 237 towns. Here every citizen is a legislator who helps fashion the rules that govern the locality.

Today, however, Vermont no longer controls even its own National Guard, a domestic emergency force that is now employed in an imperial war 6,000 miles away. The 9/11 commission report says that "the American homeland is the planet." To defend this "homeland," the United States spends six times as much on its military as China, the next highest-spending nation, funding more than 730 military bases in more than 130 countries, abetted by more than 100 military space satellites and more than 100,000 seaborne battle-ready forces. This is the greatest military colossus ever forged.

Few heed George Washington's Farewell Address, which warned against the danger of a permanent large standing army that "can be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." Or that of a later general-become-president: "We must never let the weight of [the military-industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Dwight D. Eisenhower pointedly included the word "congressional" after "military-industrial" but allowed his advisers to excise it. That word completes a true description of the hidden threat to democracy in the United States.

The two of us are typical of the diversity of Vermont's secessionist movement: one descended from old Vermonter stock, the other a more recent arrival -- a "flatlander" from down country. Our Vermont homeland remains economically conservative and socially liberal. And the love of freedom runs deep in its psyche.

Vermont seceded from the British Empire in 1777 and stood free for 14 years, until 1791. Its constitution -- which preceded the U.S. Constitution by more than a decade -- was the first to prohibit slavery in the New World and to guarantee universal manhood suffrage. Vermont issued its own currency, ran its own postal service, developed its own foreign relations, grew its own food, made its own roads and paid for its own militia. No other state, not even Texas, governed itself more thoroughly or longer before giving up its nationhood and joining the Union.

But the seeds of disunion have been growing since the beginning. Vermont more or less sat out the War of 1812, and its governor ordered troops fighting the British to disengage and come home. Vermont fought the Civil War primarily to end slavery; Abraham Lincoln did so primarily to save the Union. Vermont's record on the slavery issue was so strong that Georgia's legislature resolved that a ditch be dug around the "pestiferous" state and it be floated out to sea.

After the Great Flood of 1927, the worst natural disaster in the state's history, President Calvin Coolidge (a Vermonter) offered help. Vermont's governor replied, "Vermont will take care of its own." In 1936, town meetings rejected a huge federal highway referendum that would have blacktopped the Green Mountain crest line from Massachusetts to Canada.

Nor did Vermont sign on when imperial Washington demanded that the state raise its drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1985. The federal government thereupon resorted to its favored tactic, blackmail. Raise your drinking age, said Ronald Reagan, or we'll take away the money you need to keep the interstates paved. Vermont took its case for state control to the Supreme Court -- and lost.
It's quite simple. The United States has destroyed the 10th Amendment, which says that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The present movement for secession has been gathering steam for a decade and a half. In preparation for Vermont's bicentennial in 1991, public debates -- moderated by then-Lt. Gov. Howard Dean -- were held in seven towns before crowds that averaged 230 citizens. At the end of each, Dean asked all those in favor of Vermont's seceding from the Union to stand and be counted. In town after town, solid majorities stood. The final count: 999 (62 percent) for secession and 608 opposed.

In early 2003, transplanted Southerner and retired Duke University economics professor Thomas Naylor gave a speech at Johnson State College opposing the Iraq war. When he pitched the idea of secession to the crowd, he saw many eyes "light up," he said. Later that year, he and several others started a loosely organized movement (now a think tank) called the Second Vermont Republic, which has an independent quarterly journal, Vermont Commons, and a Web site.

In October 2005, about 300 Vermonters attended a statewide convention on the question of secession. Six months later, the annual Vermont Poll of the University of Vermont's Center for Rural Studies found that about 8 percent of respondents replied "yes" to peaceful secession, arguably making Vermont foremost among the many states with secessionist movements (including Alaska, California, Hawaii, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Texas).

We secessionists believe that the 350-year swing of history's pendulum toward large, centralized imperial states is once again reversing itself.

Why? First, the cost of oil and gas. According to urban planner James Howard Kunstler, "Anything organized on a gigantic scale . . . will probably falter in the energy-scarce future." Second, third-wave technology is as inherently democratic and decentralist as second-wave technology was authoritarian and centralist. Gov. Jim Douglas wants Vermont to be the first "e-state," making broadband Internet access available to every household and business in the state by 2010. Vermont will soon be fully wired into the global social commons.

Against this backdrop, secessionists from all over the state will gather in June to plan a grass-roots campaign to get at least 200 towns to vote by 2012 on independence. We believe that one outcome of this meeting will be dialogues among different communities of Vermonters committed to achieving local economic vitality, be they farmers, entrepreneurs, bankers, merchants, lawyers, independent media providers, construction workers, manufacturers, artists, entertainers or anyone else with a stake in Vermont's future -- anyone for whom freedom is not just a slogan.

If Vermonters succeed in once again inventing vibrant local economies, these in turn may reinvigorate the small-scale democratic town meeting tradition, the true American Congress, and re-create the rudiments of a republic once again able to make its own way in the world. The once and future republic of Vermont.

ianb@sover.net. frank.bryan@uvm.edu
Ian Baldwin is publisher of Vermont Commons. Frank Bryan, a political science professor at the University of Vermont, is author of "Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works."

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May we live in interesting times!

I had the following exchange in the hardware store yesterday, with a clerk who is about my age.  Noticing a "Proud to be American" sign on the front of the counter, I politely asked what made him proud.  He responded enthusiastically that his family goes back generations, his dad fought in WW II, and this is the greatest country in the world.  Just as I was figuring out how to respond, he went on to allow as how the country is becoming fascist ("Do you know what that is?" and I assured him I do). 

I recently saw a bumper sticker, quoting Voltaire:  Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Here is a program on Sunday, March 11, at the CCCC’s Tilden Auditorium at 2 p.m. 

Towards a Progressive Agenda
...a public forum to plot the course

ADMISSION FREE - Sunday, March 11th 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Tilden Auditorium, Cape Cod Community College

Our purpose is to conduct a public meeting to identify Progressive objectives and to clarify which are most important to us.

Following a brief introduction, a panel of 6 speakers will each address briefly (5 minutes each) an area of possible concern. An open microphone is provided for public input & discussion. Speakers can contribute ideas or argue for the importance of ideas already expressed.

Finally, on their way out, participants will pass by a series of large posters on which 6 possible Party objectives will have been written. They'll be asked to paste a sticker next to two subject areas listed on the posters that are most important to them. At the conclusion of the program, we'll count stickers after each item to see which ones seemed most vital to the participants.

Moderated by Lawrence Brown, Cape Cod Times Columnist. Our speakers will frame the issues in six main areas:

• SERVING PUBLIC, NOT CORPORATE, INTERESTS-Mary Zepernick, National
coordinator of POCLAD, corporate watchdog organization
• MAINTAINING A HEALTHY SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE-Don Wick,
retired Presbyterian minister
• REFORMING AMERICA'S ELECTORAL SYSTEM-Matt Patrick, MA State Representative
Falmouth, Mashpee
• PROTECTING AMERICA'S CIVIL LIBERTIES-Mary Kay Cordill, Professor of Sociology
Cape Cod Community College
• PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT-Richard Houghton, Deputy Director, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution
• RETHINKING AMERICA'S RELATIONS WITH THE OTHER NATIONS - FRIEND
AND FOE ALIKE-Ernest Duquet, founder of Cape Cod Sustainability Center

Participants will indicate how they prioritize these concerns at the end of the program.

The public will be invited to a follow-up event to be held soon.
In the follow-up, participants will join one of six groups (their choice) to
a) Develop a careful statement of objectives in their subject area and...
b) Develop strategies on how to frame their goals to best convince other voters of their merit.

CONTACT: WAKEUP chairman Ernest Duquet 508-394-2863 or Lawrence Brown 508-771-5096

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Happy Birthday, Susan!

Happy Susan B. Anthony’s birthday!  She was a key figure in the 72-year struggle for women’s suffrage, though she didn’t live long enough to vote “legally.”  She was arrested in upstate New York when she tried to vote for president in 1872.

A central and enduring theme throughout U.S. history has been:  Who is a person with rights under the law?  When the Constitution was written, for example, fewer than 20% of the population were persons with full rights. Women, indentured servants and Indians had no rights, and three-fifths of slaves were counted toward the total number of people for the purpose of representation; in other words, slaves had no rights but were used to enhance the power of their masters, politically as well as well as economically.

The three post-Civil War Amendments abolished slavery (13th); gave African-American males the rights of persons to due process and equal protection of the laws (14th);  and gave black men the right to vote.

Understanding the power of the 14th, corporate lawyers and officials sought to have the corporate form declared a “person” for purposes of the Amendment’s due process and equal protection clause.  In 1886 they succeeded in gaining Supreme Court approval in a minor tax case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.

In 1896 the Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson the “separate but equal” (in public accommodations) doctrine, ushering in half a century of legalized segregation, otherwise known as Jim Crow laws.  So just ten years after property organized in the corporate form gained constitutional rights, African-Americans effectively lost theirs.  It took half a century of organizing and movement building to change the culture, coupled with a legal strategy developed in the 1930s by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, to achieve the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring school segregation illegal.

Meanwhile, the corporate form had accumulated more and more rights, including the 1st, 4th and 5th Amendments.  Finally, in 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment indeed applied to women. Whew!  However, in that same year the Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that political money is equivalent to speech, thus expanding the 1st Amendment’s protections to include financial contributions to candidates or parties.  Six years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (the Massachusetts attorney general), the Court overturned a law unanimously approved by the state’s Superior Court, restricting corporate spending on citizen referenda – thus reversing the Court’s longstanding policy of denying such rights to non-media business corporations.

From the growth of private contracting of formerly public functions (including military) and the close relationship between many corporations and the federal regulatory system to the deep pockets that facilitate corporate lobbying and campaign financing, the founding promises of sovereignty to “We the People” remain more rhetoric than reality.

However, over the past decade, a growing number of  researchers, writers, educators and speakers, along with citizens' organizations and individuals, have focused on the constitutional rights that have enabled the few to continue governing the many, behind the shield of the corporate form.  Taking a leaf from the African-American civil rights movement, there is a budding organizing movement abroad in the land – not anti-corporate, but toward realizing the promise of self-governance.

And then the fun begins!

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