The military suppression of Shays' Rebellion in 1786-87 marked the end of popular
sovereignty for the newly liberated people of the original Federated States of America. Private
armies paid by private speculators attacked ordinary
Americans seeking relief
Are we not now confronted with a "representative" government that is
made up nearly entirely of representatives the super-rich and
responsive only to their needs and contemptuous of the needs of the
people?
Is not our revolution forfeit?
Have not countless true
patriots given their lives in vain?
Have we not been robbed of our
dignity?
from dispossession by the courts in favor of
the wealthy elite. A blood price was paid by murdered patriots shot
and hanged for asserting their rights as citizens, but it was not
enough to redeem liberty. The balance due has been gaining interest
ever since and now we face an astronomical cost.
Now we face
individual and collective bankruptcy and virtual serfdom at the hands
of the our current elite that inherited the power to enforce economic
tyranny on the people from the original perpetrators of tyranny that
suppressed Shays' Rebellion.
A farmer, speaking for the resistance, had this to say about the
sentiments that sparked Shays' Rebellion,
"I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my
part in the war; been loaded with class rates, town rates, province
rates, Continental rates and all rates...been pulled and hauled by
sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less
than they were worth...The great men are going to get all we have and
I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no
more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers."
Is it now clear that essentially the same words could be
spoken now, by countless Americans across the country.
Some of the leaders of the Revolution spoke in defense of the
people. Thomas Jefferson said,
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. ... It is a
medicine necessary for the sound health of government. ... God forbid
we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people
cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong
will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it
is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty ...
and what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned, from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to
the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a
century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to
time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Are not these words just as relevant today, as we confront:
• mounting confiscation of the peoples wealth to enrich a speculative
elite;
•
the manipulation and stealing of elections and wholesale
disenfranchisement of large portions of the population;
•
the dispossession of many ordinary people through dishonest lending
and securities fraud;
•
the looting of the Treasury directly through bailouts of speculative
financial interests and indirectly through the cost of ruinous
foreign wars that only aid war profiteers;
•
the dismantling of our national productive capacity so that dishonest
corporations can export capital that is the hard-earned birthright of
American workers of countless generations;
•
the establishment of a new class of slaves in the persons of illegal
immigrants, forced here to work because our government, with our tax
dollars, have conspired to ruin their domestic economies, and who are
used and abused so as to displace and cheapen the labor of legal
citizens;
•
the systematic restriction of access to higher education to the
general public, while the young of elite families monopolize
attendance at publicly-funded schools so as to cement and secure
elite class status and the creation of a perpetual underclass;
•
the imposition on families and local governments of the burden of
caring for the wounded survivors of senseless wars;
•
the establishment of an immense prison population that does little to
ensure our security in our homes and a great deal to enrich the
speculative, government insider elite;
•
the destruction of our health care system, so that care for a large
and increasing segment of the population is unavailable or even
dangerous;
•
the abandonment of the responsibility of government to protect the
health of the population by ensuring the safety of food, medicine
and pollution of the environment;
•
the active enablement by government of an immense and highly
profitable market in illegal drugs;
•
the wholesale abandonment by government of the founding principles of
liberty, justice and the rule of law, by the continuing enactment of
discriminatory and corrupt laws and tax policies;
•
the pursuit of foreign policies that contradict long-held
principles of international law and the rules of war, and reduce the
nation to the status of a pariah state, hated and feared around the
world and thus making us targets of terrorist attack;
•
the transfer of effective control of our laws, economy and government
policies into the hands of multinational corporations, acting as
persons and gifted with the rights and privileges meant by the
Constitution to be the sole rights of actual citizens, that amounts
to a treasonous transfer of national sovereignty into foreign hands;
•
the empowerment of private interests through nearly complete control
of public media to consistently lie to and mislead the people in the
interests of a narrow class of private wealth;
•
and nearly countless other abuses of liberty and freedom of the
people that have accumulated to date and are sure to expand in the
absence of a return to power to the people of the United States of
America.
The attitude of the exploitive elite of our country that took hold of
power in the earliest days of the Republic is nicely summarized by
the words of the then future First Lady Abigail Adams:
"Ignorant, restless desperados, without conscience or principles have
led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of
grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations...There
is the necessity of the wisest and most vigorous measures to quell
and suppress it. Instead of that laudable spirit which you approve,
which makes a people watchful over their liberties and alert in the
defense of them, these mobbish insurgents are for sapping the
foundation, and destroying the whole fabric at once."
Are these not the sorts of sentiments that guided the imposition of
the current, disingenuously named US PATRIOT Act?
Abigail's sentiments were seconded by that great scoundrel of our
subjugation to the monied elite, Alexander Hamilton, as he sought a
foothold for the eventual take over of the nation by his patron class:
"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The
first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people.
The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and
however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not
true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom
judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a
distinct permanent share in the government."
Are we not now confronted with a "representative" government that is
made up nearly entirely of representatives the super-rich and
responsive only to their needs and contemptuous of the needs of the
people? Is not our revolution forfeit? Have not countless true
patriots given their lives in vain? Have we not been robbed of our
dignity?
I do not call for the people to rise up in armed rebellion as did the
folks who rose up in Shays' Rebellion. That would be to counsel mass
suicide. Rather I call on my fellow citizens to strive to become
aware of their grievances and voice protest, so that effective
collective resistance can be mounted to the sorts of abuses
enumerated above by an out-of-control, exploitive and completely un-American elite. We must seek out ways, in our neighborhoods, our
churches and our workplaces to unite in solidarity and mutual aid to
reassert our inalienable rights as citizens and dignified persons.
There can be no uniform or systematic way to accomplish this. All
attempts to organize at a national level, as amply demonstrated
in our recent presidential campaign, will be subverted and turned
against the interests of the people. Our salvation will come only
from individuals and small groups exercising creative thought and
pursuing original plans and actions. We will not be saved by
celebrities. We will save ourselves or not be saved at all. May the
force be with us in this struggle.
As our typing instructors relentlessly encouraged us to write, "Now
is the time for all good men [and women] to come to the aid of the
country."
As we tally our losses let's not despair. Let's instead consider
them tuition in the school of hard knocks. After so many years and
so much invested in our education as citizens, don't you think it is
time to finally graduate? Remember, resistance is not sedition.
Comment: (12/3/2008) It should be different. The American economy is roughly 75% based on discretionary consumer spending. That's dinners out, retail, food at the grocery store, and yes, things like beer for Joe sixpack.
I think it's been proven that money does not trickle down from the rich to the poor. If someone rich gets a tax cut, it is highly unlikely that he will use that money to raise his workers' wages if he doesn't have to. Those cases where that does happen are exceptional.
A government that is not so short-sighted will understand that a strong base who has a little extra at the end of the month will be more likely to buy something, and in it's aggregate, this will bolster the economy.
Lately we've lived in a recession masked by credit card debt that will only postpone the inevitable, which is a realization that the solution to our economic problems is to ultimately return to a society that can live off money earned, not money borrowed, and our government must do whatever possible to enable its people to live in that manner.
PlasmonPERMANENT LINK
Comment: (12/3/2008) That's what depressions are for. People get mad and everything changes.
FTRPERMANENT LINK
